Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

Hamish

Rating: really liked it
The man finished the book. He closed the pages tightly together then put one foot on the floor then the other then used his hands to push himself up out of the chair and then put one foot in front of the other until he had walked all the way to the book shelf and then put the book on the book shelf. The deer walked in. The man whirled around and fired once with his pistol and the brains of the deer went flying out the back of its head and painted the wall a color dark red like blood. The man sat down again like a man sitting down.

I didn't really like the book, said the dead deer.

I reckon I was pretty conflicted, replied the man grimly.

His writing style is pretty problematic.

I reckon his style is perty silly, he just strings a bunch of them declarative statements together, like 'the man did this then the man did that etc", but they don't paint no picture, they're done totally unevocative of anything. I reckon it don't take no skill to just state in excessive detail what someone is doing. It takes artistic skill to say it in a way that done bring it to life for the reader, and he don't done really do that. I reckon it's some sub-Hemingway shit he's doing.

It's not all bad though.

I reckon some some of the images t'were pretty powerful.

And the judge is a memorable character.

I reckon he's the only one though. All the rest of them there charac'ers ain't real memorable, like he done put no effort into 'em 'cause he spent all his time on the judge. And that there whole novel was all...whatdjacallit, structureless and stuff. And real repetitiv' too.

I read that he doesn't see why people like Proust and James because he thinks all novels should be about life and death things.

I reckon that's 'cause he's too obsessed with subject matter and not enough with style and art.

The dead deer nodded and walked out. The man slowly got up again by putting one foot then the other on the floor and then used his hands to push himself up out of the chair. He fixed himself a drink and resolved not to take anymore book recommendations from Harold Bloom.

Josh

Rating: really liked it
Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is unquestionably the most violent novel I’ve ever read. It’s also one of the best.

For those who would consider that a turn-off, I offer this caveat:
For the overwhelming majority of fiction that involves a lot of violence, the violence itself is an act of masturbation representing either the author’s dark impulse or, perhaps worse, pandering to the reader’s similar revenge fantasies (this might explain why the majority of Blood Meridian fans I know personally are men, where as the majority of those who’ve told me they were unable to finish it are women).

Don’t get me wrong, the violence in Blood Meridian is gratuitous. It’s both mentally and emotionally exhausting, even in a day and age where television and movies have numbed us to such things. But unlike, say, the movie 300, the violence serves a purpose – in fact the gratuitousness itself serves a purpose. Like how the long, drawn out bulk of Moby Dick exists to make the reader feel the numbingly eventless life of a whaling vessel before it reaches its climactic destination (McCarthy is frequently compared to Melville, btw), Blood Meridian exists to break the reader’s spirit. Like the mercenaries the narrative follows, the nonstop onslaught of cruelty after cruelty makes us jaded. The story brings us to what we think is a peak of inhumanity that seems impossible to exceed, and just as we stop to lick our wounds, an even more perverse cruelty emerges. The bile that reaches the tip of our tongue at reading of a tree strewn with dead infants hung by their jaws at the beginning of the book (a scene often sited to me as the point many readers stop) becomes almost a casual passiveness when a character is beheaded later on. We become one of these dead-eyed cowboys riding into town covered head-to-toe in dried blood and gristle.

The story is based on My Confession, the questionably authentic autobiography of Civil War Commander Samuel Chamberlain, which recounts his youth with the notorious Glanton Gang – a group of American mercenaries hired by the Mexican government to slaughter Native Americans. Whether or not Chamberlain’s tale is true only adds to the mythic quality – exemplified by the character of Judge Holden.

Blood Meridian is really The Judge’s story. He is larger than life. Over seven feet tall, corpulent, hairless, albino, described as having an infant-like face and preternaturally intelligent. He is a murderer, child killer, pedophile and genocidal sociopath. But the question that plagues anyone who reads the book is – who is he really?

The easiest conclusion is that he is the devil, or some other demon. His joyous evil and fiddle-playing are enough clues to come to that, but more controversial (and less popular) is the idea that he is actually the wrathful God of an uncaring universe. He’s called THE Judge, after all.

He spends a great deal of time illustrating new discoveries – be it an Indian vase or petroglyph – only to destroy it when finished. It’s commented that he seems intent on “cataloging all creation”. When a fellow mercenary asks why he does it, he smiles and cryptically replies “That which exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.”

The fact that the book is rife with biblical imagery implies that he is more than a mere symbol of man’s inhumanity to man (which is not to say that the devil isn’t), but when the book ends ( SPOILER ALERT ) and our protagonist’s body is found shoved into a commode, the townsfolk stand staring into the darkened doorway of the latrine, eerily mirroring the apostles staring into empty crypt after the resurrection. But here, there is no ascension; no salvation offered. Only the Judge, who dances to the closing lines, “He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die."

Stephen

Rating: really liked it


Spilled...emptied...wrung out…soul-ripped...that pretty accurately sums up my emotional composition after finishing this singular work of art. Ironically, I’m sure I only absorbed about 10% of the “message” McCarthy was conveying in this epic exposition on war, violence and man’s affinity for both. Still, even with my imperfect comprehension, I was shaken enough by the experience that, though I finished the book days ago, I’m just now at the point where I can revisit the jumble in my head enough to sort through how I feel.

One feeling I have is that Cormac McCarthy is word-smithing sorcerer and a genius of devious subversion. He's taken the most romanticized genre in American literature, the Western, and savagely torn off its leathery, sun-weathered skin in aid of showing an unflinching, unparalleled depiction of man at his most brutal and most violent.

This is man as “world-devourer.”

Oddly enough, in subverting the Western motif, McCarthy may have written its ultimate example. I tend to agree with Harold Bloom’s assessment when he says, “It culminates all the aesthetic potential that Western fiction can have. I don’t think that anyone can hope to improve on it… it essentially closes out the tradition.” Well said, Mr. Bloom.

PLOT SUMMARY/CHARACTERS:

Based, at least partially, on real life events, the story is set around 1850, immediately after the end of the Mexican-American War, and takes place in the “borderlands” between the two countries that stretches from Texas to California. The narrative follows a young teenager, known only as “the kid,” who runs away from his father in Tennessee after his mother dies.

See the child… He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.

After engaging in a number of notably violent occupations (including bison hunter/skinner and as a soldier in an “irregular” army borderland goon squad), the kid eventually hooks up with a group of scalphunters led by John Glanton (historically known as the Glanton Gang). The rest of the story follows the kid and his exploits with the Glanton Gang as they cut a swatch of violence across the borderlands that is unlike anything you are likely to have read about before.

However, the narrative of the kid and the Glanton Gang are simply there to give McCarthy’s story a framework to work through, a context. This is not a novel about the history of the borderlands or the atrocities that were committed there. That is incidental to its purpose. McCarthy uses the lawlessness and extreme carnage of the period and the horrific events that transpire as a microcosm to explore the nature of war, violence and man’s unrivaled capacity for unmitigated depravity.

Not a beautiful subject…but soooooooo beautifully done.

This brings me to Judge Holden (aka “the Judge”), one of the most memorable literary figures I have ever come across. He's also among the most amoral, depraved, sadistic, and remorselessly cruel individuals I have encountered in my reading. In the character of the Judge, McCarthy has distilled and personified the ultimate expression of war and violence. He is a manifestation of pure evil, a spokesman for the belief that war is man’s calling and his purest state is to be an instrument for violence. Fun guy huh?

The Judge's philosophy is that "War is god," man’s purpose is to be its ultimate practitioner and any attempts to civilize or reform this aspect of man are doomed to failure. “Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn.” He preaches that only by embracing and celebrating man’s capacity for violence can man attain his true potential.

If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? … This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons.

The Judge is described as huge, completely hairless and very pale. He speaks multiple languages, is well-versed in classic literature and has extensive knowledge of many of the natural sciences. Throughout the story, the Judge is shown as almost “otherworldly.” He is depicted accomplishing seemingly miraculous deeds and having “special” insight into events. He appears not to age despite being seen over a span of 30+ years. In addition, everyone who rides with him recalls “seeing the Judge” earlier in their life (and always at a time of great violence).

I came to see him as the “Muse of War and Violence.” Here is a great description from the end of the book where the kid muses on where the Judge came from:

A great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents, he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing.

Whatever the Judge’s true nature, he is singularly compelling.

THE WRITING:

One quality of McCarthy’s writing that amazes me is that it is both fire and ice for the soul. His unique style combines both (i) sparse, but deeply layered prose similar to Hemingway (i.e., short, seemingly straight-forward sentences that upon further inspection can mulch up your insides) with (ii) flowery “image heavy” descriptions that are almost Shakespearean in their melodrama. The combination can be devastating and it's why I am so sure I only absorbed a fraction of what McCarthy was saying on the first read.

Almost every sentence, if you go back and re-read it can be chewed more slowly to increase the amount the amount meaning and flavor released. This is the kind of book I think you should read once and then subsequently re-read a chapter at a time over a much longer period. At least that was my impression.

Much of Blood Meridian is written from a dream-like yet “hyper alert” state of consciousness. No, not dream-like, more like nightmarish as McCarthy constantly transforms the settings into aspects that call to mind classical visions of hell. Here are a just a few quick examples I picked out:

They rode through a region where iron will not rust nor tin varnish. The ribbed frames of dead cattle under their patches of dried hide lay like the ruins of primitive boats upturned upon that shoreless void and they passed lurid and austere the black and desiccated shapes of horses and mules that travelers had stood afoot. These parched beasts had died with their necks stretched in agony in the sand and now upright and blind and lurching askew with scraps of blackened leather from the fretwork of their ribs they leaned with their long mouths howling after the endless tandem suns that passed above them. The riders rode on.

I love that last sentence, “The riders road on.” It’s just so Hemingway. Here’s another:

On the day following they crossed the malpais afoot, leading the horses upon a lakebed of lava all cracked and reddish black like a pan of dried blood, threading those badlands of dark amber glass like the remnants of some dim legion scrabbling up out of a land accursed, shouldering the little cart over the rifts and ledges, the idiot clinging to the bars and calling hoarsely after the sun like some queer unruly god abducted from a race of degenerates.

CONCLUSION:

In sum, a truly sublime experience. After reading No Country for Old Men, I was not sure that McCarthy would ever be able to floor me like he did in that book. I was mistaken. Round two with McCarthy has found me once again knocked to the canvas with my brain reeling. I'd be hard-pressed to choose a winner between the two, but this one definitely has become the newest addition to my list of all time favorites.

6.0 stars. HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION!!!

Michael Finocchiaro

Rating: really liked it
Breathless. Unique. Brutal. There are many words that could be used to describe Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. For me, this was my second time through and I liked it far better than my first reading. Judge Holden, John Job Glanton, Toadvine, and the "kid" are all fantastic characters. I shudder to think that the horrors visited upon the Indians and Mexicans and homesteaders were all based on fact. The apocalypse described in The Road is not too far a cry from the hellish country on the US-Mexico border (which has not really changed if we exchange the scalper mercenaries for the drug cartels) and yet the descriptions and language of Blood Meridian is more beautiful to me. The symbolism here is quite strong and one wonders whether the author is a nihilist like his characters or if there is really some redeeming quality buried deep inside man...a true American masterpiece.
I would read The Border Trilogy after finishing Blood Meridien. I have not tried Suttree or Child of God, but they would have a hard time to top this one!

Lyn

Rating: really liked it
After reading Blood Meridian, I may never view a western film the same way again.

To be certain, it is a masterpiece, a rare and unique work of literature that rises above classification and genre. And to be certain, McCarthy must be viewed as a great American writer, one of the greatest in our time.

That having been said, this book is not for everyone; it is painfully brutal, violent at it's heart. McCarthy's primitive writing style emphasizes this primal, bloody landscape like a Jonathon Edwards sermon. Glanton and Judge Holden, based upon actual persons, have been written as archetypal villains. The Judge may be a composite of Mephistopheles and Conrad's Mr. Kurtz, and perhaps even Richard III.

Strong, powerful book.

·Karen·

Rating: really liked it
This is Jane Austen antimatter.

Trying to convey how this was so different to anything I've ever read, it occurred to me that it was like a huge black vortex that would suck early nineteenth century marriage plot novels into the void. It's the complete obverse of sweet girlie stuff: no lurve, no irony (I wonder if Cormac McCarthy has a humour mode? If he does, he certainly wasn't in it writing this), no insightful self-discovery or examination of the human heart. No, this is bleak and bloody, gory and grisly, there are bludgeonings and beheadings, shootings and stabbings and skewerings and scalpings, and piles and piles and piles of corpses - as a film, I wouldn't have been able to stand it. How could I stand it here? Well, it was usually over pretty quickly. He doesn't dwell long and lovingly on every detail: radical and dramatic images burn on the mind's eye, but no prurient poking and puddling. Nasty, brutish and short. Stomach churning, but not for too long.
Then there is little in the way of plot. Characters? Bad, worse, or imbecile. So what pleasures does it afford, pleasures that can compensate for the horror? Or is it the horror that becomes pleasurable? Yes, that is the worrying thing - obviously the language is a wonder and can make up for much, but there is a very troubling phenomenon. The reader begins to take on the reasoning of the charismatic, satanic Judge Holden: this is a game in which the stake is life itself. There is only life or death, nothing else. And the Glanton gang is so evil that we can take joy in their annihilation, and the kid is the only one who has shown the slightest faint scruple when it came to slaughtering, so we hope for his survival and follow keenly his fight for life. And did I mention the language? Majestic, portentous, weighty, reminiscent of Milton and Blake and the Bible. Sparse, terse dialogue. Sumptuous description. A fearless novel that shocks and troubles, especially when you realise that this is based on real events on the Texas borderlands in 1848-51. "... and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay."

Eric

Rating: really liked it
There are two ways to evaluate a book, as far as my unlearned mind can concoct at the moment. Stylish literary flourishes sometimes cloud our judgment when it comes to evaluating the plot itself, which is, after all, the reason why the book exists.

This book is well written. If I'm a 11th grader, and I need to do a book report, I'm drooling over the blatant symbolism dripping from each page. The scene is set admirably, though the repetitive nature of our brave hero's wanderings (at least it's with symbolic reason) lead to a paucity in novel adjectives by the 13th desert crossing. There are only so many ways one can say that it's hot, dry and empty. And dry. Boy, that sun sure is strong. I'm there, I'm with you, all right, it sucks around here, phew, the sun's really beating down today. And there are a lot of bones. Dead things abound, OK, I get it.

Then there's the story line. Explain to me again why I'm interested in the wanton marauding of a band of depraved demons? So, we enjoy the dashing of infants into rocks because of the supposed literary merits of the work? We can bash/splatter/expose brains of whatever, happen upon crucified corpses, and ignore any modicum of human decency because the book is about something deeper? But, you say (and without quotes you say it), that's what it was like. Oh yeah? It was like that? Says who? Why do you want to believe that it was like that? As bad as humankind is, our reality is not that despicable, though our souls may be. Why do we have to play follow the leader behind our impish pied piper, pretending an enlightened understanding of some grandiose truth, while all we really do is sate our own personal blood lusts? I wonder.

By the way, if neglecting quotation marks somehow makes the book classier, why not just go all out and remove spaces between words. You better believe I won't be speed reading the repetitive descriptions of how tired everyone is if there aren't any spaces. Why stop there, periods are for two bit hacks too. You're not a real author until you slaughter a few hundred non-innocents (nay, no one is innocent) while neglecting a basic courtesy to the reader.

Who knows, I don't speak Spanish, maybe I'm just missing the point entirely. How do you say "flayed skin" in Spanish?

Fabian

Rating: really liked it
Cormac McCarthy's west of absolutes is a wonder to behold. Villainous attacks on people devoid a home, desecration of the westland, listings of all things in the majestic, transitory landscape like observations by Darwin at the Galapagos in lush (sometimes horrific) detail, murky human psyches, no dialogue, and especially that campfire philosophy by which anyone can find some sort of meaning in their modern lives (especially if you're fortunate enough to inhabit the places which Mr. McCarthy describes!)... are all the ingredients of a McCarthy book & the way this one is polished, symbolic & graphic makes it my favorite McCarthy book by far.

The apocalyptic landscape of "The Road" is here, but it's thankfully not as literal as that novel about human annihilation after cataclysm. If you were shocked by the cannibals eating babies in that one... well, you ain't seen nothin'. This ultraviolent account is well researched, well versed, poetic. The "Blood Meridian" and the act of scalping are one: you simply lose most of your head as you look at the very promise the west has (had) to offer. My favorite line: "A lamb lost in the mountains cries. Sometimes comes the mother. Sometimes comes the wolf..."

Lawlessness and betrayal reigns supreme. Apache attacks & famine are omnipresent; & it is this blood-thirst that shocks the reader and at once impels him to continue reading to see what befalls the group of barbarians & sinners next.

Annet

Rating: really liked it
Brutal and Poetic at the same time...Just changed it to a five star, what the h...... This book is monumental.
Seems like a contradiction, brutal and poetic, but somehow it works.
The story is bleak, dark, bloody but also filled with beautiful descriptions of the countryside, the desert, the people in the book. The colorful Judge is some character.
Tough book, not sure I took it all in and had to take some breaks during the read.... but hey, it's Cormac McCarthy...a grand writer he is.

It was evening of the following day when they entered San Diego. The expriest turned off to find them a doctor but the kid wandered on through the raw mud streets and out pas the houses of hide in their rows and across the gravel strand to the beach... Loose strands of ambercolored kelp lay in a rubbery wrack at the tideline. A dead seal. Beyond the inner bay part of a reef in a thin line like something foundered there on which the sea was teething. He squatted in the sand and watched the sun on the hammered face of the water. Out there island clouds emplaned upon a salmon colored othersea. Seafowl in silhouette. Downshore the dull surf boomed. There was a horse standing there staring out upon the darkening waters and a young colt that cavorted and trotted off and came back....

Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, we follow and witness the grim and bloody coming of age of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennessean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are murdered and the market for scalps is thriving...

They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great read phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them. The shadows of the smallest stones lay like pencil lines across the sand and the shapes of the men and their mounts advanced elongate before them like strands of the night from which they'd ridden, like tentacles to bind them to the darkness yet to come. They rode with their heads down, faceless under their hats, like an army asleep on the march. By midmorning another man had died and they lifted him from the wagon where he'd stained the sacks he'd lain among and buried him also and road on....

Samadrita

Rating: really liked it
The wiki page for 'manifest destiny' has a picture of a painting by John Gast depicting an angelic figure (personification of America) purposefully drifting towards the west, her pristine white robes and blonde curls billowing in the breeze, a book nestled in the crook of her arm. Airborne, she awakens stretches of barren, craggy terrain to the magical touch of modernization. The landscapes she leaves behind are dotted by shipyards and railways and telegraph wires strung on poles but to her left the canvas shows a murky abyss - skies darkened by smoke from volcanic eruptions and fleeing native Americans gazing up at the floating angel in alarm.

Whenever I think of 'Blood Meridian' from now on, I hope my mind conjures up this same image not because both painting and novel provide perspectives, albeit contrary, on America's ambitious mid 19th century pursuit of extending its frontiers. But because Cormac McCarthy destroys this neat little piece of Imperialist propaganda so completely and irredeemably in his masterpiece, that all viewings of the image henceforth will merely serve to magnify the irony of this representation.



If John Gast's visualized panorama seeks to establish the legitimacy of the American Dream, vindicates the Godgiven right of determining the foundations of civilization, then McCarthy's vision of 'American Progress' brutally mocks the same and depicts the wild west as a lawless hunting ground submerged in a moral vaccuum. Here, there is no line of distinction between predator and prey. Heads are scalped, entrails ripped out, limbs dismembered, ears chopped off as trophies of war. Apaches, Mexicans, Caucasian men, women and children are skewered, bludgeoned, crucified and raped alike and so routinely and relentlessly that after a while the identities of victim and perpetrator blur into each other and only a dim awareness of any moral consideration remains at the periphery of our consciousness. The barrel of the gun and the sharpness of the blade speak in the universal language of might over right and all humanly attributes are silenced into submission.

The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman's making onto a foreign land. Ye'll wake more than the dogs.

There are no protagonists here. Only creatures of instinct shambling along sun-scorched sand dunes, mesas and buttes, pueblos and haciendas, gravel reefs and dusty chaparrals, oblivious of the passage of time or the context of their grotesque exploits, unhesitatingly leaving a trail of mutilated corpses, carcasses and torched Indian villages in their wake. Jaded as one becomes from all the savagery, one does occasionally feel some measure of empathy for 'the kid' but then he vanishes often among the featureless, faceless individuals of Glanton's gang of scalp-hunters as they embark on a destination-less journey across the cruel, hostile terrain of the US-Mexican borderlands. In course of their blood-soaked, gory quest which McCarthy chronicles in exquisite turns of phrase, the identities of all the members of the band fuse together to symbolize something much more profound and terrible to comprehend all at once - the primeval human affinity for bloodshed which devours all distinctness of personality. Only the ageless Judge Holden towers over the other characters as the Devil's advocate with his lofty oratory on the primacy of war and his unabashed exhibitionism and seeming invincibility.

...war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.

In the last few pages when the Kid and the Judge parley in a sort of face off, I finally came to realize the real reason why the former is deprived of his centrality in the plot and relegated to the status of a mute presence in the background. As the eternal representative of the debilitating voice of morality which is always drowned out by fiercer cries for carnage, the Kid's internal sense of right and wrong, too, fails to resist the evil within. The Devil's cogent arguments, no matter how preposterous at times, negate all sporadic pricks of conscience.

If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of the night.

Needless to say, this is the grim rationale that underpins all the interminable slaughter. And such a solemn message leaves one with a lingering suspicion that if we peeled away the glossy veneer of democracy, modernity and the daily grind of mechanistic endeavours and reduced any society of humans to its bare bones, McCarthy's apocalyptic vision of an amoral world is the only thing that might remain - a perpetual heart of darkness. A conjecture as staggering in its enormity as it is bone-chilling. Perhaps, a conjecture with a modicum of truth to it.

Jessaka

Rating: really liked it
My review of this book has been accidentally deleted. I recall writing that Sometimes the power of a book is how horrible it makes you feel. I had put this book down twice. I just could not make friends with it, yet, it was a McCarthy book and the lyrical writing in it was far better than his other books, except to say for, The Road, which I have read twice. I will read this one again someday.

McCarthy can be very hard to read, at least for me. The violence in some of his books is over the top. It isn't that he takes you step by step into it, he doesn't describe much. It is the characters, their cruelty, their sociopathic behavior. There are no emotions in this book, except for those that you wish to give it. I would not be reading him if it were not for his poetry, his lyricla way of writing. No one can write as well.

The third time I picked up this book I told myself to just read it. I finished it.

Someone wrote that there is a Yale professor that put the book down twice and finally finished it. He now teaches it in his classroom. Perhaps he was the person that said that this was the most evil book written. I don't believe so. I know of a book that is much more evil.

NOTE Harold Bloom is that professor. He is on GR because he has placed introductions to this book and to others that he teaches in his classes.

J. Kent Messum

Rating: really liked it
Quite possibly the most chilling and horrifying book ever written, 'Blood Meridian' is a unnerving glimpse of humanity at its worst during one of the most savage periods in American history. McCarthy pulls back the curtain to reveal the unforgivable evils and trespasses our species made all too often and all too easily in a new world, a novel that shows us the true price we paid in bodies and blood for the expansion of the 'Wild West'.

Unlike some of Cormac's other work, 'Blood Meridian' is not a particularly easy read for either style or subject matter. If your want to experience the work of this true literary master, I certainly wouldn't start with this book (Try 'The Road', or 'No Country For Old Men' to get your feet wet). Generally, I only advocate that people read well-written work that is fluid, pacey, and has total command of the language. But there are a handful of exceptions where I honestly believe that a good deal of effort is also required from the reader. 'Blood Meridian' is one such book, written on its own terms by an author who plays by his own rules. Sometimes you will have to work to get through the pages, but it is rewarding in ways you might not anticipate.

The brutality in this book is harrowing, and also true of the time. There have been countless analyses of it, so I won't get into the many themes, messages, and interpretations it offers. I will say that it does fall under the category of 'required reading' for everyone. However, it must be said that this book was not written for anyone's enjoyment. It wasn't written for entertainment. It was written to open your eyes to a hell on earth that humans willingly created, to open your ears to the beating of black hearts.

If this book doesn't shake your faith in the human race, then nothing will.

*This book was one of my '10 Books That Stuck With Me' piece. Check out my other selections: http://www.jkentmessum.com/10-books-s...

Paromjit

Rating: really liked it
“War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”

Cormac McCarthy shockingly debunks the myths of the American western in this novel, a raw relentless immersion into the worst of humanity and the evil it perpetrates. It is not for the faint hearted as I discovered, a little way in I felt the strong urge to give up, but I just could not, partly because of the poetic prose that is so mesmerising and captivating. Based on the horrors of Texas and Mexico in the 1850s, we have the unnamed kid, the murdering Glanton gang scalping Native American Indians, but claiming centre stage is the vivid, larger than life, oft naked, absolutist dancing judge, bald, hairless, the child killer, deranged, the personification of evil, the destroyer. There are atmospheric descriptions of the landscapes in this unvarnished depiction of the human race's darkest side, a side I frankly did not really want to know about, but I cannot deny its existence throughout our history. Its presence here makes this a brutal, blood soaked, challenging read that is not for everyone, and which I can only recommend to those with the strongest of stomachs. Many thanks to the publisher.

Paul Bryant

Rating: really liked it
Tried twice, failed twice. Cormac has a good track record with me – Child of God is a 5 star classic, No Country for Old Men is a 4 star classic, and All the Pretty Horses is a solid 3 star.

I knew Blood Meridian was the Big One. The Masterpiece. The one that fuses together The Bible and Clint Eastwood. The Kid with No Name and the Book of Deuteronomy. Years ago I got to the Tree of Dead Babies and jacked it in, I got a lot further this time, but yes, I jacked it in again. I tried reading it as an extended metaphor – The Judge and his band of murdering renegades is like….Corona Virus! Of course! But it got a little tiresome : Judge/Corona comes to town, slaughters people, leaves. Repeat. Repeat without any end in sight.

GOOD AUTHORS CAN WRITE ONE BAD BOOK

Here’s a little list – I haven’t read these but I’m told they’re all dreadful

The Breast : Philip Roth
The Body Artist : Don Delillo
I Am Charlotte Simmons : Tom Wolfe
The Silmarillion : Tolkien
Dhalgren : Samuel Delaney
Jazz : Toni Morrison
The Name Of The World : Denis Johnson

But the point about Blood Meridian is that most people think it’s not bad, it’s great. I need to think about that.

CORMAC MCCARTHY’S LANGUAGE

On the level of plot, this book leaves something to be desired. But not all books have to have an interesting story. Some novels are essential for the brilliance of their language alone. Ain’t no story in Ulysses worth a bent farthing. And the whale is nowhere to be seen for most of Moby Dick. This type of book is on a whole other level, where vocabulary, clauses, gerunds, rhetoric works a magic to draw aside the clouds in our minds and present us with something grand we could not have suspected was there. Blood Meridian’s fans say that’s what this book does.

The horror of the American frontier, as McCarthy unflinchingly renders it, can prove rather wearying, not least for the book’s stubborn refusal to indulge in such niceties as comic relief or variations of setting and tone. What makes Blood Meridian endurable — what makes it so compelling once you adapt to its rhythms — is McCarthy’s prose. The man makes even the most repulsive images seem ineffably beautiful. He makes hell sound sublime.

And there are sentences here that will make you gasp in a good way .

They rode through regions of particoloured stone upthrust in ragged kerfs and shelves of traprock reared in faults and anticlines curved back upon themselves and broken off like stumps of great stone treeboles and stones the lightning had clove open, seeps exploding in steam in some old storm.

I love that, I have no problem with the and…and…and. But then you get other wanna-be-great sentences like this :

The ground where he’d lain was soaked with blood and with urine from the voided bladders of the animals and he went forth stained and stinking like some reeking issue of the incarnate dam of war herself.

It’s okay until “some reeking issue of the incarnate dam of war herself.” Then it’s just portentous empty gesturing. You could read that phrase in an early Marvel comic.

It seems I look at this stuff differently to some readers. One reviewer singled out this passage for great praise.

The flames sawed in the wind and the embers paled and deepened and paled and deepened like the bloodbeat of some living thing eviscerate upon the ground before them and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, and the first fire and the last ever to be.

But I get to the end of that and I think come on Cormac, stop trying so hard. Each fire is all fires. Horse is the horseness of all horse. Yeah yeah.

A TALE OF SOUND AND FURY SIGNIFYING NOTHING

A guy called Joseph Hirsch put his head above the parapet

I find the novel to be a pretentious, nearly-unreadable pastiche hybrid of every writer from Ernest Hemingway, to H.P. Lovecraft, to Norman Mailer.

….a blend of Hieronymus Bosch and Sam Peckinpah; of Salvador Dali, Shakespeare, and the Bible; of Faulkner and Fellini; of Gustave Dore, Louis L ‘Amour, Dante, and Goya; of cowboys and nothingness; of Texas and Vietnam.

Over the course of a novel of epic length, however, attempting to decipher the meaning of McCarthy’s words merely becomes a psychic endurance test. Along with Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, I read Blood Meridian cover to cover, not because I enjoyed it, but because I hated it, and felt that by finishing the book I was somehow defeating an unseen, unfathomably alien intelligence that had lured me into a masochistic test of wills, from which I could only emerge victorious after reading my way through the gauntlet of senseless words laid across the page.

SIMILES, SIMILES, I’M GIVING THEM AWAY TODAY, ONLY FIVE DOLLARS FOR A PACK OF TWELVE, ROLL UP, ROLL UP

In this novel, not in the others I have read, Cormac was gripped with a sporadic Tourette’s syndrome of similes. He just can’t help himself. For three or four pages at a time, out come the similes, they pepper the reader like… er…. Like…. Cormac, help me out here…

From pages 45-47

Like pencil lines
Like strands of the night
Like tentacles
Like an army asleep on the march
Like dogs
Like loom-shafts
Like sidewinder tracks
Like a ghost army
Like shades of figures erased upon a board
Like pilgrims exhausted
Like reflections in a lake
Like a great electric kite
Like slender astrolabes
Like a myriad of eyes
Like the palest stain
Like a land of some other order
Like some demon kingdom

So that began to wear me down too.

VIOLENCE

The endless chopping up of women in 2666 and American Psycho were too much for me, although I don’t have a problem with A Clockwork Orange and Titus Andronicus . I don’t claim to be Mr Consistent. But I hated the endless massacres in this one. And pretty much that's all there is. Maybe I just had my fill of violence. Blame the movies.

NO CONCLUSIONS FOR OLD MEN

Is this an existential cry of despair from the American past, followed by The Road, a cry of despair from the American future? Gotta say, that’s what it looked like to me.
Blood Meridian has now beat me to the ground and disembowelled me twice, there won’t be a third time. I quit. Stop kicking me, Cormac.

Acknowledgements : the nasty comments about BM are from an article called Why I don’t bow before Blood Meridian By Joseph Hirsch and the respectful comments are from James Dorson in his article Demystifying the Judge: Law and Mythical Violence in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

Robin

Rating: really liked it
Some people say that this is Cormac McCarthy's best work. I don't agree with that, even though I have to say that this is nothing less than an astonishing work of art.

This novel deals with the unrelenting brutality of the Glanton gang, an actual historical group of men who scalped and savaged Indians and Mexicans across the American Southwest in the mid 1800s. From the first page you feel like you've entered someone's nightmare. There's no place to hide here from the viciousness, the barrenness, the moral vacuousness. The violence is over the top. The book is saturated in blood, in murder, one after the next. And it sports a villain that chills you to the bone - The Judge - who, more often than not, is naked, and doing something insanely grotesque, despite his intelligence and ability to wax eloquent.

It feels like one long massacre, with no rhyme or reason. At first you think that these men killed out of some kind of political stance on the American-Indian war. Or perhaps they are economically motivated, through looting. But their impetus shows itself to be more arbitrary. It's not the Americans vs. the Indians. One side isn't much better than another. It's the Glanton gang against whoever, whenever. They are a dangerous, twisted bunch with no loyalty or compass.

And the reader is also without a compass, in a way. The reader is adrift, along with this band of criminals. The plot is formless. There isn't a protagonist to follow, unless you count "The Kid" who isn't any better or different from the rest of them. There isn't a story, per se, or a destination, or a problem to resolve. The reader serves as witness to this gloom of a world, this river of gore.

McCarthy’s world echoes of Old Testament life, in which each person serves as a cog in a brutal story. Only this novel is bereft of a god, or anything to believe in.

Some say this epic story is an anti-western. A horror. A scathing indictment of imperialism, of the American "manifest destiny". I'd agree on all those counts, and add that the writing of this book is unlike anything I've read before - completely extraordinary, genius, devastating.

But I don't know that it's the best book McCarthy has written. Although I can stand back and say, wow, what a brilliantly written book - and I'm so glad I read it - did I enjoy reading it? Not nearly as much as No Country for Old Men, which was so tightly plotted I got whiplash by how fast I turned the pages. Not nearly as invested and heartbroken as I was reading The Road. Not as beguiled as I was by All the Pretty Horses.

I witnessed the nightmare. I lived to tell the tale. And now, like the riders, after seeing the unseeable, I'll move on.