For me, the violence is made palatable - even interesting - by the sheer beauty of McCarthy's language. It's earthy and archaic, and yet strangely phantasmagori

For me, the violence is made palatable - even interesting - by the sheer beauty of McCarthy's language. It's earthy and archaic, and yet strangely phantasmagoric. It's a bit trite to say, but McCarthy talks a bit like William Faulkner on acid, exploring a hardscrabble alien planet. > . . . and he saw men lanced and caught up by the hair and scalped standing and he saw the horses of war trample down the fallen and a little whitefaced pony with one clouded eye leaned out of the murk and snapped at him like a dog and was gone. . . And now the horses of the dead came pounding out of the smoke and dust and circled with flapping leather and wild manes and eyes whited with fear like the eyes of the blind and some were feathered with arrows and some lanced through and stumbling and vomiting blood as they wheeled across the killing ground and clattered from sight again. Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming.