Episode
For Your Consideration: John Williams' Butcher's Crossing (and why I don't think we should compare it to Blood Meridian)
- Podcast
- The Slavic Literature Pod
- Published
- Jun 12, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 5002
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://slaviclitpod.com
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Summary
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 Jacob Boehme : https://jacobboehmeonline.com/assets/docs/AURORA.18693240.pdf The music used in this episode was “Старое Кино / Staroye Kino,” by Перемотка / Peremotka. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube . Our links: Website | Discord Socials: Instagram | BlueSky | Twitter | Facebook Questions, comments, want to hear your voice on a bonus episode? Send us an email at [email protected] . Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands