6. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

In a word this book is gruesome, for example:

Two thick ropes of blood and two slender rose like snakes from the stump of his neck and arched hissing into the fire.  The head rolled to the left and came to rest at the expriest's feet where it lay with eyes aghast.

They found the lost scouts hanging head downward from the limbs of a fireblacked paloverde tree.  They were skewered through the cords of their heels with the sharpened shuttles of green wood and they hung gray and naked above the dead ashes of the coals where they'd been roasted until their heads had charred and their brains bubbled in the skulls and steam sang from their noseholes.  Their tongues were drawn out and held with sharpened sticks thrust through them and they had been docked of their ears and their torsos were sliced open with flints until the entrails hung down on their chests.

...those right pilgrims nameless among the stones with their terrible wounds, the viscera spilled from their sides and the naked torsos bristling with arrowshafts.  Some by their beards were men but yet wore strange menstrual wounds between their legs and no man's parts for these had been cut away and hung dark and strange from out their grinning mouths.

Blood Meridian is the story of the wild west in the 1870s as told through the eyes of a 24 year old always referred to as the kid.  The kid joins up with a division of the army who doesn't want to give up fighting the Apaches even though the American-Mexican war is officially over.  The division wanders down into a valley and is promptly slaughtered by the Apaches.  The kid gets away and joins a band of protection for hire thugs who provide protection to, at this time, Mexican villages and towns and are paid by the number of scalps that they bring in.  The band does reasonably well, if you can call it that, indiscriminately killing whomever crosses their path - Apaches or otherwise - however, it meets its end when one day it is attacked by the Yumas.

As with his other books the writing is so light and fluid that one does not ever feel absorbed by the book.  Nevertheless, it is a great story that is well put together and nicely told.