[brenainn]

>This is my biggest issue with all McCarthy's works. They feel like pointless exercises in sadism and cruelty, where the forces of evil are literally superhumanly powerful (like the judge) and nihilistic misanthropy is the only sensible philosophy.

I think Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men are like this, and The Road to a lesser extent (the evil is mortal men, it's just there's a lot of them). As others have mentioned, not all his books are like that. Suttree is downright funny at times.

I've always thought Cormac McCarthy has a great fear of evil and war and those bleak stories are his expression of it. Humans are in a downward spiraling race of shedding their humanity to be capable of greater acts violence so that no violence could be done against them. And those that don't engage in that are eventually overcome, like Llewellyn Moss in No Country For Old Men - someone capable of handling themselves, but was never able or willing to be so ruthless. It's why ironically The Road, grim and miserable, is one of his most hopeful books - the boy lives and they remain "the good guys". Blood Meridian certainly the most hopeless, and possibly a reflection how he was feeling about these fears at the time.

I'm not a literature person but that's my take on those.

Consider the Border Trilogy if you ever want to give him another chance. Blood Meridian is an anti-western, but the Border Trilogy looks at the frontier lifestyle from a more humanist perspective and deeply mourns the loss of it.