Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West
"They climbed through rolling grasslands where small birds shied away chittering down the wind and a buzzard labored up from among bones with wings that went whoop whoop whoop like a child's toy swung on a string and in the long red sunset the sheets of water on the plain below them lay like tidepools of primal blood." This kind of unbelievable combination of words and ability to engage and describe is endless in this book. Maybe sometimes it almost seems to rich ... almost, but not quite, sappy. Here is another line just in the next paragraph: "It was raining again and they rode slouched under slickers hacked from greasy half cured hides and so cowled in these primitive skins before the gray and driving rain they looked like wardens of some dim sect sent forth to proselytize among the very beasts of the land." The great literary critic Harold Bloom says this is the greatest american novel by a living novelist, but he also admits that it took him three tr