In a way, like "Fanny Hill" in which the author finds a thousand ways to describe the most basic act of love.
Only, with Cormac McCarthy, the act is not love but Violence, on a Biblical, Apocalyptic scale, Ostensibly about a kid from Tennessee who joins the "Glanton Gang" and does the grand tour of the Old West, hunting down Apaches, Indians, Niggers, who-have-you, it's an over the top ode to violence, rape, murder, torture, sadism, the cruelty of man, an obscene diatribe on mankind's theology, of blackened ears and scalps worn as trophies around the neck, of mans relations to animals and men and the universe in general.
It's bleak, but written with a rhythm and prose that carries you along like soldiers themselves, silhouetted on the blood-red horizon at the ends of the world, being carried forward always to a bloodier future where neither and never law nor order applies...
Brilliant, after it's fashion, and I will have to track down some of his other novels. It's always a pleasure to discover a new (to me) author, and he's a few I can follow up with. The themes, vile, visceral, but the prose becomes poetry and bears you along...