John Hawkes, The Cannibal, A Microcosm of war-torn Germany

"All Germany Revolved around Balamir. His feet were in the boots of an Emperor's son, he felt the silver sword of time and tide and strength against his hip. Growing weak and cold, he was the result of commands coming down out of the years. From the farm where he was born to the institution to the munition works, he felt that people bowed as they passed. How he sought to be that image, how the Kaiser's ghost needed him, how he would be honor in the land he had become. But how well he knew it was a reign of terror and felt like pulling his beard like his father would have done. Potentate of the north, he scowled on his subjects, the trees, the chips of broken glass, brass casings and beaten fuse ends, but alone he smiled on his castle walls. He was the true and unknown prince of Spitzen-on-the-Dein, followed by the castrated and the disillusioned, guided by an unknown hand around the signs of the skull and cross-bones planted above the mines. He had crept about the door of the Duke's apartment, watched the tall man come and go. He used to walk in the institutions garden, and now, in the last days of the decline of his kingdom, he was befriended in the home of twittering birds.
     The vapors of the canal grew stronger, the Duke gained a hundred feet and eased his pace, cracks and holes in the earth filled with night dew.
     I unstrapped my pistol and put it on the floor."

                                                                                -John Hawkes, The Cannibal


Another author hard to place and compare. His writing and his books could often be more easily compared to impressionistic paintings than the novels of more conventional and less experimental writers. He once said "I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained." This is not to say that his novels are completely bereft of these things, but they kind of pop up second hand to what he is focusing on. The story is told in meticulously described scenes, a kind of verbal mise-en-scene that can show to us things transcendentally beautiful or nightmarish and bleak and everywhere in between. He can be tough to follow at first, but once your brain stops trying to fit his books within more traditional conventions, he'll eventually absorb and entrance you.

Cormac McCarthy, Master Of The Sublime; Blood Meridian, The Neo Western to End All Westerns

"In two days they began to come upon bones and cast off apparel. They saw half buried skeletons of mules with the bones so white and polished they seemed incandescent even in the blazing heat and they saw panniers and pack saddles and the bones of men and they saw a mule entire, the dried and blackened carcass hard as iron. They rode on. The white noon saw them through the waste like a ghost army, so pale they were with dust, like shades of figures erased upon a board. The wolves loped paler yet and grouped and skittered and lifted their lean snouts on the air. At night the horses were fed by hand from sacks of meal and watered from buckets. There was no more sickness. The survivors lay quietly in that cratered void and watched the white-hot stars go rifling down the dark. Or slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims exhausted upon the face of the planet Anareta, clutched to a nameless wheeling in the night. They moved on and the iron of the wagontires grew polished bright as chrome in the pumice. To the south the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler image on the sand like reflections in a lake and there were no wolves now."


                                                                 -Excerpt from Blood Meridian By Cormac McCarthy




Cormac McCarthy is one of those writers unlike any other, singular and separate from anything else within the literary tradition. Hemingway, Kafka, and David Foster Wallace also come to mind in this category, and surely there are others. In other words this man is a genius, and like the other writers I've mentioned, his style may be imitated but it would only come off as parody, as no one else could possibly possess such a voice as his. His is the voice of a prophet. I'd say it is biblical if those who wrote the bible had any taste for style or prose. Page after page of Blood Meridian sustains this twisted, near perverse enlightenment of perception that tears down any notion of the grandeur and glory of the old west so that we see it for what it really was: quite the opposite, and yet we are left even more in awe of it. Not a chapter passes without multiple passages that give me the chills. It is one of those books that not only changes the way you think about literature but the way you see the entire world. A must read indeed, and hopefully you're not squeamish lest you miss out on one of the greatest novels of all time. More passages to come from this masterpiece.