Another comment mentioned Grossman, I put Life and Fate down after a particularly brutal, yet humanising scene. I do want to get back to it, it was just all to

Another comment mentioned Grossman, I put Life and Fate down after a particularly brutal, yet humanising scene. I do want to get back to it, it was just all too much. I don’t have the appropriate callouses to tolerate war in the same way. Conrad McCarthy I feel has staked his claim in what I’d reductively call dark westerns. The Road, for example, is a simple story about a man and his child, but in hell only demons. I’ll have to add the listed one to my growing collection, it reminds me of it. Communicating the meaning of life through the brutality of it has the distinct advantage about being able to explore the death, pain, suffering, and, the descent into an evil in intricate detail. It is a proof by contraction in some respects that certain personal philosophies derived from existentialism need, but also much more than that.