BLOOD MERIDIAN: OR THE EVENING REDNESS IN THE WEST Cormac McCarthy (1985)

The film rights have been bought and traded and forgot.  They, probably rightly, call it unfilmmable.  It really helped to read this post-Westworld, because so many of the visuals for the dark, Mexican-Apache hinterland of the park seem to have drawn inspiration from this horror novel masquerading as a Western.  Based on the true story of a despicable gang of scalp-hunting American mercenaries, it reads like an Irish epic poem as inspired by the gospel of Judas. The language is gorgeously peaty, like Seamus Heaney narrating The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  It is an unpleasant, gut-wrenching experience, like Crime and Punishment but tortuously longer and more graphic in the agony of living without civilization, at the mercy of the unmerciful. The rewarding part is meta-textual--having been raised on the simple morality of the Westerns of the 40's through 80's, whether Silverado, Tombstone, Gunsmoke, or any number of John Wayne films, to fully explore the logical conclusions of an unlawful world, where the white-hats aren't coming...it is oddly satisfying to contemplate the worst case scenario, and this is it.