In this episode, I’m reflecting on one of the darkest sections of All the Pretty Horses, where John Grady, Rawlins, and Blevins are taken to Saltillo and the romantic dream of Mexico collapses into violence, corruption, and prison.

I spend time with Pérez’s chilling claim that evil is not merely something inside a person, but “a true thing” that goes about on its own legs. From there, I explore McCarthy’s dark philosophy of evil: evil as visitation, as atmosphere, as something personal and impersonal at the same time.

This is an episode about innocence, violence, adulthood, and what it means to keep carrying some wounded form of goodness through a world where evil is real.