Cormac McCarthy · 1985 · overland

Cormac McCarthy's blood-soaked anti-Western, drawn from the real Glanton gang of scalp-hunters along the Mexican border in 1849-50. A runaway known only as the kid drifts from Tennessee down the Mississippi and on into Texas, rides out of Bexar with Captain White's doomed filibusters, and falls in with a company that scalps its way back and forth across Chihuahua and Sonora for bounty, presided over by the monstrous, erudite Judge Holden. From the pictographs at Hueco Tanks to the ferry at Yuma, the gallows at Los Angeles, the burning of San Francisco and a last reckoning at Fort Griffin, the violence never stops - and over all of it towers the pale, unkillable figure of the Judge.

1. 1
   Tennessee

   Born in Tennessee under the great meteor storm of 1833, the kid runs off at fourteen with a taste for mindless violence already in him.

2. 2
   St. Louis

   Wandering west by way of Memphis, the boy fetches up in Saint Louis a year later and is taken on for New Orleans aboard a flatboat, forty-two days downriver among the night steamboats.

3. 3
   New Orleans

   In the port city he lives in a room above a tavern and comes down at night to fight the sailors of all nations, until a Maltese boatswain shoots him twice; the tavernkeeper's wife nurses him back to life, and he slips away for Texas, unable to pay her.

4. 4
   Galveston

   The Texas port where his ship puts in; from here the boy drifts inland for years through sawmills and pesthouses, past a hanged man at a crossroads, and rides at last into Nacogdoches on an old mule in 1849.

5. 5
   Nacogdoches, Texas

   In a revival tent in east Texas he first sees Judge Holden, who destroys a preacher with a lie and then admits, smiling, that he made it up.

6. 6
   Bexar

   Riding west from a hermit's hut and a spell with cattle drovers, the kid reaches Bexar - present-day San Antonio - kills a barman who will not stand him a drink, sleeps in a ruined church, and is signed into Captain White's filibusters by Sergeant Trammel.

7. 7
   The Chihuahuan Desert

   Riding with Captain White's ragtag filibusters toward Mexico, the company is overwhelmed and slaughtered by a Comanche war party.

8. 8
   Chihuahua City

   Jailed as a filibuster, the kid is freed into the Glanton gang, hired by the governor to bring in Apache scalps for gold.

9. 9
   Janos

   By way of a hacienda and Corralitos to the decaying presidio town of Janos, where Glanton shoots an old woman in the square and has her scalped - the company's first scalp, and the start of a trade that will soon stop distinguishing Apache from anyone at all.

10. 10
    Chihuahua City

    The gang rides back in from the slaughter of the Gilenos with heads on poles, is feted as heroes and paid in gold by Governor Trias, and then drinks the city into terror until it is glad to see the back of them.

11. 11
    Hueco Tanks

    By way of Coyame to the rock basins east of El Paso, one of the great galleries of ancient pictographs in North America, where the judge copies the figures into his ledger and then effaces one from the stone; three days south the company slaughters a band of peaceful Tiguas on the river.

12. 12
    Nacori

    The Sonoran village where the riders doff their hats to people they will murder within the month, and a muttered insult in a cantina becomes another massacre.

13. 13
    Chihuahua City

    Paid a third time, the gang finds a bounty posted on Glanton's own head and rides west out of Chihuahua for good - by way of Jesus Maria and a butchered conducta of quicksilver muleteers.

14. 14
    Ures

    The capital of Sonora, where the judge holds that whatever exists without his knowledge exists without his consent; beyond it the Sonoran cavalry breaks the company, and the wounded are left behind by lottery.

15. 15
    Santa Cruz

    Where the kid, alone in the mountains after the rout, finds what is left of Glanton's company and rejoins it for the ride north.

16. 16
    Tucson

    Having scalped its way across Sonora and turned at last on anyone at all, the gang rides into Tucson, hunted now itself.

17. 17
    The Yuma Crossing

    At the ferry on the Colorado the gang seizes the crossing and betrays the Yuma, who rise and cut them down. Glanton dies; the kid escapes.

18. 18
    San Diego

    The kid crosses into California with the last of the gang broken and scattered behind him - and the country changes but the violence does not, because McCarthy's argument is that it never has and never will.

19. 19
    Los Angeles

    Where the kid watches two men hang in the public square and finds they are Toadvine and Davy Brown; he buys Brown's scapular of dried ears from a soldier and wears it, and gives up asking after Tobin.

20. 20
    San Francisco

    The gold-rush city on the bay - the card tables where a hatful of gold went on the turn of a card, the pits where bears and lions were loosed on wild bulls. The kid came here twice and twice watched the place burn, then took the southward road and never came back: behind him all night the shape of the fire stood in the sky and stood again in the black water, with dolphins moving through it.

21. 21
    Fort Griffin, Texas

    Decades later, a weathered man, the kid meets the Judge a final time in a Texas saloon, and does not walk back out.