Alright I guess I'll start. This is my second round with BM but I'll try to limit it to the first two chapters.
What's truly amazing to me with this book and what makes it so absorbing to me is how McCarthy manages to create the impression that what happens is both completely arbitrary and utterly inevitable. Fate and chance become one. The kid appears to be a totally random character who stumbles from one arbitrary fight into another like he's barely even there, drifting through the hellscape of McCarthy's Southeast as insubstantial as dust, meeting other nameless and largely faceless men who spontaneously become either his friends or his mortal enemies for no particularly good reason. This is reminiscent of ancient Greek and Roman epic in a way, but the Gods who direct stuff there remain completely invisible here, creating this sense of random inevitability. It's like watching a play unfold for which there's no script, but everything that happens is predetermined anyway.
I love how McCarthy then uses the inscrutable nature of this world he's created to make Judge Holden stand out against it like some sort of demigod. Against the kid's face-and aimless drifting, Holden has a name and a purpose from the start and comes into view pursuing a clear course of action - spreading chaos by slandering a preacher and getting him killed, and thereby mocking the idea of God's existence in a world such as this as absurd. Yet the ability to pull this off positions Holden himself as a potentially supernatural (if demonic) force. So once again there's this sense of existentialist contradiction built into the story that chimes with the combination of fate and chance: God does not exist, but the devil well might.
Looking forward to hearing what you guys thought of it, let's get this ball rolling!