Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
Cormac McCarthy | 1992-05-05 00:00:00 | Vintage | 368 | Historical
An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridianbrilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west." Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.
"The men as they rode turned black in the sun from the blood on their clothes and their faces and then paled slowly in the rising dust until they assumed once more the color of the land through which they passed." If what we call "horror" can be seen as including any literature that has dark, horrific subject matter, then Blood Meridian is, in this reviewer's estimation, the best horror novel ever written. It's a perverse, picaresque Western about bounty hunters for Indian scalps near the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s--a ragged caravan of indiscriminate killers led by an unforgettable human monster called "The Judge." Imagine the imagery of Sam Peckinpah and Heironymus Bosch as written by William Faulkner, and you'll have just an inkling of this novel's power. From the opening scenes about a 14-year-old Tennessee boy who joins the band of hunters to the extraordinary, mythic ending, this is an American classic about extreme violence.
Reviews
I have enjoyed other books by this author, but I felt abused by Blood Meridian. It consists of a series of almost unconnected scenes of unspeakable violence. There, now you know the book. There is very little story. It reminds me of an awful book by Clancy, I don't recall the name if it, but he based it on some submarine video game he had played with a friend one night. He then just wrote it up and sold it to me as a book. "Open the outer doors." "Outer doors open, sir." On and on. Submarine battle after battle. The complete opposite of his great Hunt for Red October. In that same way, I thought this book the inverse of All The Pretty Horses, which I found to be a wonderful book. There was extreme violence in that book too, but there was much more to the story than violence. In Blood Meridian, you are forced to travel with a continually shrinking band of men who ride and walk from violent scene to scene...and that's it. After a while you see that the only energy the author has put into the book is trying to come up with ever more imaginative ways for his characters to mutilate human beings. The author covers up the lack of a real story with flowery language that reminds me of Bob Dylan's 120 decibel backup musicians on his current tour, trying to drown out the sad fact that Bob plainly can't sing anymore. I'm sorry, but everyone saying how this is a great book is just the Emperor' Clothes. This is a great writer being lazy and skating.
Reviews
This is certainly a very disturbing book. I enjoyed it as I do most of his books. I am only writing this review to warn all those who buy the book not to read the Introduction until after reading the book. I was absolutely furious that Harold Bloom would give away the ending of the story in his Intro. I can't tell you how much it ruined the story. One last thing:
DON'T READ THE INTRODUCTION!!!
Reviews
A warning to readers: this is a violent book! I felt like the violence was always in my face but my brother claims he felt like the violence snuck up on him in places - one minute he was reading about scenery and the next he was reading about raids. Regardless, just know that there is a lot of killing and violence, though I wouldn't call it gratuitous, McCarthy does use it as part of his story.
The story itself follows "The Kid" (we never get a real name) as he leaves home and ultimately joins a group of bounty hunters hired to rid the area of Indians. Eventually their thirst for violence takes over and they become out of control. It's as if a monster is created. This book is the story of that monster.
I enjoy McCarthy's prose and I don't feel my time was wasted reading this book but I definitely enjoyed some other of his books better. I feel that either Blood Meridian was overrated or my standards were too high after other McCarthy books. However I did enjoy the epilogue.
Reviews
Blood Meridian has been called one of the best books of the twentieth century. Critics of no less stature than James Wood and Harold Bloom have lavish exceptional praise upon it - HB in his typical fashion compares the judge to the terrible Iago (for him literary characters are only footnotes to those of the Bard: no villain is not an Iago, no madman not a Richard III, no clown not a Falstaff, no savage not a Caliban, no contemplative not a Hamlet). I certainly admire and respect these two critics, which is why I found their enthusiasm for BM exceptionally puzzling. For I have never suffered so much as a reader than when I had it in my hands.
Let's begin with Cormac McCarthy's control of the English language. It is abominable: for there are times when it even seems as though English were not McCarthy's first language ("It had narrowly missed the carotid artery yet he could not make the blood to stop." "The hanged men at their rope-ends looked like effigies for to frighten birds." "Nor did the judge lose the opportunity to ventilate himself upon the ferric nature of heavenly bodies and their powers and claims.") and others when CM not only staggers but positively crashes into his own hyper-inflamed eloquence ("The earth fell away on every side equally in its arcature and by these limits were they circumscribed and of them were they locus.""[The horsemen were] like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondawanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all.") . And I hardly have to remind the reader of CM's almost perverse affection for the word "and" (J.M. Myers has rightly entitled these long, snaking sentences made up of short declaratives repetitively chained together by the word "and" the "andelope"). The most famous of this sort of sentence in BM is the extended monstrosity that occurs at the end of chapter four, where the Comanches attack the kid and his posse. What utterly astounds me is that the admirers of BM list its incredibly vivid descriptions of violence as among the novel's exceptional qualities ("A classic American novel of regeneration through violence," says Micheal Herr) and cite the above passage as one of the greatest achievements of this sort. But I cannot fathom how a writer of any talent could have failed to perceive that this unimaginably gory description of gunfire, disembowelment, scalping and sodomy had already spun out of his control before it was even underway, that spraying such dense clouds of horrors so unrelentingly at the reader would not only fail to produce shock but cause everything to degenerate into unintentional farce. And that is always the way it is throughout BM: every page, every paragraph, every sentence strives for such intensity, the sum effect of which is to cause the prose collapse on itself and become insipid and unbearably tedious. With CM everything is driven to the highest possible pitch: a man dancing wildly is a "wild thaumaturge out of an atavistic drama"; and one does not listen to a heartbeat but to the "systole of the rubymeated hearts that hung within them." If CM is indeed the disciple of Faulkner then he surely inherits Alfred Kazin's criticism of that same author: that "no writer ever seemed so ambitious and so purposeless; so overwhelming in imagination and so thwarted in his application of it." He is the worst embodiment of the stylistic excesses which are all-too ubiquitous in contemporary American fiction.
The judge, however, is undoubtedly an achievement. Without him BM couldn't stand on its own. He is a thrilling character: one of those who forever elude us but who nonetheless still produces a terrifying resonance. He is much bigger and deeper than Blicero: Blicero is a mere depravity, a perversion of advanced civilization, but the judge straddles the entire span between high culture and animal bestiality. We see him one moment in the man of the world's professional attire and the next in a hat of mud and a suit of flesh. Yet he is no mere lunatic or murderer, he is beyond simple savagery: he is pure annihilation, pure Night. This is how he talks: "That man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate." "Only that man who has offered himself up entirely to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance." Here CM seems to transform: he is not trying to dazzle or overwhelm; he knows exactly what he wants to say and how to say it and he lets the meaning reveal itself through the language. There are several other passages of such calm, striking beauty scattered throughout which so stand out from the panting descriptions of violence and desolate landscapes that it seems as though the hands of two different authors can be recognized. I wish the man who created the judge had also written the rest of the book.
Reviews
This book is insane. Wtf is up with the ending?
Its a heavy read. Not too much dialogue, which makes it
crawl at times. The descriptions of the landscape
seem inspired by an almost spiritual malevolence.
On the whole the feel of the novel is of horror,
and hopelessness. Empathy is at last destroyed,
by the final horrific act, which goes unspoken.
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