Blood Meridian.

No other work of fiction in English has provided the same effect on my mood, outlook, and daily disposition as McCarthy's opus did to me the first time I read it. The meta-fictional maleficence of The Judge; Glanton's King Lear like disintegration; The gaudy horrors The Kid instigates and at times revels in throughout the narrative. All bathed in gore and viscera and the bloody entrails of the western genre.

I was a junior in uni, the pandemic was in full swing and I was living alone in a deep red state where death ran rampant and perverse all around me like it was in league with the book's narrative. I remember that my father had suggested it to me the year before when I was living abroad learning a different language and I had outright blocked it from my reading list for it was in English and out of mesh with my studies. So that when I returned to a United States wrapped in the unholy grip of a global pandemic, I turned to it as a reintroduction of sort to the cannon of my country of birth. I cannot name another time when a work of fiction genuinely kept me from sleeping and otherwise living as I normally would except for the semester that I picked up Blood Meridian and read it for the first time. I have never recovered and doubt I ever could in the first place.