McCarthy's 1985 novel follows a fourteen-year-old called the Kid through the southwestern borderlands of the 1850s, joining a gang of scalp hunters led by Judge Holden, a massive, hairless figure who may be something more than human. The violence is unrelenting; the prose is biblical and hallucinatory. Harold Bloom called it the greatest American novel since Faulkner. The Judge's philosophy, that war is God, is never refuted. The novel offers no redemption, no exit, only the testimony of witness.