For Your Consideration: John Williams' Butcher's Crossing (and why I don't think we should compare it to Blood Meridian)

For Your Consideration: John Williams' Butcher's Crossing (and why I don't think we should compare it to Blood Meridian)

From The Slavic Literature Pod by The Slavic Literature Pod

June 12, 2026 · 1h 23m

About this episode

Cameron discusses John Williams' novel Butcher's Crossing and critiques the common comparisons to Blood Meridian.

Show Notes : This week, on For Your Consideration, Cameron dives into John Williams' 1960 novel, Butcher's Crossing , a cautionary tale about how reading Ralph Waldo Emerson can drive you into buffalo-murdering madness. It's not uncommon to see the novel compared to Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West , but after reading both...he's skeptical. It seems that they don't share much more than a genre. This episode has a two-fold purpose: 1) To cover Butcher's Crossing 's adept take on the Western and 2) Why we should all be more skeptical about the act of comparing things, especially these two novels. Butcher's Crossing: The Husks and Shells of Exploitation by Jack Brenner : https://www.jstor.org/stable/43017669 Pragmatist Individuals and the Nineteenth-Century American West in Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose and John Williams's Butcher's Crossing by Gregory Alan Phipps : https://www.jstor.org/stable/27117925 The Influence of Jacob Boehme's Aurora on Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian by Lydia R. Cooper : https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2025.2608966 Aurora the Day Spring Or Dawning of the Day in the East Or Morning-Redness in the Rising of the SUN by…

People in this episode

Host: Cameron

Topics covered

  • John Williams
  • Butcher's Crossing
  • Blood Meridian
  • Western genre
  • literary comparison
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • cautionary tales

Keywords

  • Butcher's Crossing
  • Blood Meridian
  • John Williams
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Western literature
  • literary analysis
  • cautionary tales

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Bandcamp, Youtube

Books & works: Butcher's Crossing, Blood Meridian, Aurora

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