At 75, with ten published novels, an Oscar-winning movie, and a slew of the country’s most prestigious literary awards, Cormac McCarthy is easily America’s most relevant author. Last year, the Coen brothers’ adaptation of his 2005 novel, No Country for Old Men, garnered four Oscars, widespread critical success, and an enormous box office gross. His 2006 novel, The Road, won the Pulitzer for fiction. Its screen adaptation starring Vigo Mortenson, Charlize Theron and the world’s only “non-terrible” child actor, Kodi Smit-McPhee, is due for release November 21st.

In his 2007 interview with Oprah Winfrey, McCarthy, who has given only two print interviews in his career, denied having any concern for his vast, newfound readership. But—and this is an important but—his legacy is still being forged; we have yet to see whether the word “living” will be dropped from his most common epithet: “Cromac McCarthy, one of America’s greatest living writers.” Our best guess gains perspective from what most critics consider to be his masterpiece, Blood Meridian.

At 327 pages, Blood Meridian is an epic. Lean and terse, the prose is as merciless as the setting—the American Southwest and the vast Mexican desert—a spartan landscape without pause. To achieve this condensed epic, McCarthy employs one the most economic styles in recent literature. Quotation marks, non-possessive apostrophes, and most commas are simply dropped. The bucked convention comes to justify itself, and even in scenes where several characters talk at once, it’s seldom difficult to attribute words to their correct speaker. For this, McCarthy is often compared to Faulkner (a distinction which may be as much geographical as stylistic) but we can see the linkage in fragments like the following:

“Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all.”

Note how this subjectless sentence defends its sovereignty as a complete thought by the brute force of its idea: before names, there was no nominative case, and since “each was all” there is no need to specify any actor or actors.

I hate to be so academic, but the book both demands and relinquishes such attention. Its first three paragraphs move beautifully into and through an allusion to Wordsworth’s “My Heart Leaps Up.” But where do they go? Towards brutal and unforgiving violence. As McCarthy puts it with the opening sketch of his distant, silent protagonist, “the kid,” “He can neither read nor write and in him breeds already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.”

By page three we’re told that the date is “eighteen and forty-nine,” but the whole novel, despite its historical references and accuracies, seems to be set post-apocalypse. The setting articulates in bursts and vivid flashes. This happens most notably in the fourth chapter when the kid, hitherto an aimless, loan wanderer, joins a military party that is promptly massacred by Comanche Indians. The Comanche, “gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning,” only spare the kids life through negligence. Once they’ve slain their victims, they sodomize their dead bodies.

It is unapologetic. Women are objects, and men are tools with little purpose beyond killing. This kind of “mindless violence” and bigotry effectively drive the reader back into a realm of pure intuition and can result in a heavy, physical depression.

Blood Meridian is not for the faint of heart. If you can’t stomach a description of babies being crushed on rocks, then don’t eat at McCarthy’s table. In fact, Blood Meridian is so graphic, that some controversy has been raised about its alleged development as a movie. And still this review barely skims its surface. The antagonist, Judge Holden or “the judge”—a seven foot, hairless colossus that seems to exist without physical or intellectual limitations— has been heralded as one of the most intriguing characters in contemporary literature.

The novel’s final 40 pages are unbearably gripping. They build relentlessly to a final confrontation between the judge and the kid in an outhouse. After page upon page of gruesome violence, the final showdown is off-camera. Its result, like  McCarthy’s future influence, is left to the reader’s best guess.

Think Blood Meridian good enough for the list? Tell us.