In the 1840s and 1850s, a nameless teenage boy known only as the Kid leaves Tennessee and drifts into the violence of the Texas-Mexico borderlands. He falls in with the Glanton Gang, a historical band of scalp hunters contracted by the Mexican government to kill Apache raiders. What follows is a relentless chronicle of slaughter across the desert landscape, presided over by Judge Holden - a vast, hairless, seemingly ageless figure of terrifying intelligence who functions as a kind of embodiment of war itself. Loosely based on documented historical events, the novel uses them to build something that reads more like myth or apocalyptic scripture than historical fiction.
