"The blurb on the cover compares this to Silence of the Lambs, but I see it more as a Japanese Blood Meridian— strange, gruesome, and going back and forth between eerie calm and explosions of (very realistic) gore. Frank and Cormac McCarthy’s The Judge might as well be the same character, both these hulking, inhuman, potentially supernatural manifestations of the evil and violence at the heart of the American identity. I have much more love for Cormac’s spare writing style because a lot of this is kind of overly descriptive in a “yes we got it you don’t have to reiterate the plot to me” way, but I can’t deny I kind of loved it and loved how unexpectedly subtle the ending was. "