Ten. This is my ceiling now.

I've had my scale for about ten years and this book broke it. Everything I'd been calling a ten was a nine, and now there's a thing sitting at the top that nothing else gets near, and I've had to redo about forty scores in my head.

It's the Judge. Obviously it's the Judge. I've read plenty of villains and most of them want something you can name. A throne, a woman, revenge, the world. Holden wants the world to have no witnesses. He collects things in a ledger and then destroys them so they only exist in the ledger. He's enormous and hairless and he cannot stop talking and he never once loses an argument, and McCarthy hands him all the best lines on purpose, which takes some nerve.

The violence isn't like other violence. In Abercrombie you get a fight, it's brutal, somebody you like loses a piece of themselves in it. Here you get four pages of a massacre described the way you'd describe a landscape. No music, no reaction shot, and then a sunset gets more attention than the dead did. First time it happens you think he's being cold. About the fifth time you work out that the cold IS the horror, because the book refuses to grade any of it.

No quotation marks anywhere in it, which sounds like a gimmick and isn't. It means the talking and the desert arrive in the same register. You genuinely can't always tell who's speaking and after a while you stop needing to.

The Kid. Never gets a name, never gets a proper motive, is barely a protagonist. He's a thing that survives. And the one occasion he does something decent, the one, and it's tiny, it costs him everything in the last chapter. Bleakest structural decision I've come across in a novel and I loved it.

Hard bits, because I'm not going to pretend. There's a stretch in the middle, the Yuma crossing and after, where it turns into a list of rocks and I lost my grip on who was where. Read a chapter twice and still don't know what happened in it. Some of the vocabulary I just let wash over me. Looked up about six words and then gave up.

And the ending. I've read three explanations of the jakes and I've settled on the vaguest one. Whatever happens in there, he made it so you have to picture it yourself, which is worse.

Ten. Not a fun ten. I couldn't read another one straight after and I put a Cook on next just to get some soldiers moaning about their feet. But it's the top of my scale and everything I rate from here gets measured against it, which is a bit unfair on everything else and I'm doing it anyway.