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

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-slavic-literature-pod-2534403/for-your-consideration-john-williams-butcher-s-crossing-and-why-i-don-t-think-we-should-compare-it-to-blood-meridian
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-slavic-literature-pod-2534403/for-your-consideration-john-williams-butcher-s-crossing-and-why-i-don-t-think-we-should-compare-it-to-blood-meridian.md
Podcast: [The Slavic Literature Pod](https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-slavic-literature-pod-2534403)
Published: 2026-06-12T06:34:52+00:00
Episode link: https://slaviclitpod.com
Audio file: https://audio3.redcircle.com/episodes/d9c9d694-61dc-44c4-ae58-13deabc53f31/stream.mp3
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Duration seconds: 5002

## Resource

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 slaviclitpod@gmail.com . Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

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