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First things first, I think it’s important to recognize that this book may not be for everyone.
I was recommended and read Blood Meridian a while ago without having any prior knowledge of it, and I now rank it as one of the best book I’ve read that I’ll almost never recommend to anyone blindly.
If you decide to read it, and I actually hope you do, please be aware that it is —- as the article describes —- heartlessly and brutally violent.
That being said, I think the author justifies their use of it, as does the linked article. In my memory it stands more as a work of poetry than a novel, in as much as it provoked emotions more than tell a specific “story”.
Blood Meridian is absolutely not for everyone, but it's one of the best narrative books on the period that I've ever come across. I periodically recommend it on Askhistorians because it communicates the sheer chaos of the period that (many) people on the ground experienced far better than any academic work I can cite.
It's an interesting point that historical chaos can never be truly communicated or appreciated, except through creative art.
The very fact that it's history, and we're looking back with knowledge of how things turned out and a fuller picture of the different parties and their intentions, leaves elusive that contemporaneous confusion that often describes "why" for participants much better.
It's rare that I wish I had multiple upvotes to give, but this is one of those times. I'm just commenting to raise the visibility of a comment that reads so simply that I feel it could be easily overlooked, and yet says something so profound.
I love the book, but it is like the apogee of McCarthy idiosyncrasy. Obsessive about guns and death and has a complete absence of women. But it is beautiful for what it is.
>it communicates the sheer chaos of the period
For me, it's the sheer chaos of being alive. There's no sympathy in McCarthy's universe, no room for sentimentality. It's bleak as hell. If there's loving, human contact, it's fleeting, and erodes, usually quickly, like the unforgiving landscape of all his books. There's slight redemptive quality just enduring life, enduring existence if you have the strength. He's one of the best American existentialists. "I'm still alive", is both banal and heroic in McCarthy's world.
I am one of those who had to put it down; after losing interest in TV and movies for a decade and becoming resensitized to violence (finally growing up and developing some empathy during adulthood also contributed), I just couldn't take it. Nor can I typically take extremely violent movies unless I watched them a lot in high school.
I'm quite interested in the history of the era and might give it another go; I think I've got it on a bookshelf somewhere.
I mentioned this in a reply above, but I'd recommend The Crossing for a similar level of poetic descriptive beauty with a lesser (but still significant) degree of violence.
Yep it's a great book and McCarthy is a fantastic author but it is a bit disturbing.
“War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”
Absolutely. It's poetic and bleak and colorful and sometimes just a bit nonsensical, but always vivid.
For me, it's like a literary version of all those renaissance pictures of the events of the book of Revelation or paintings of the apocalypse. The characters and events sometimes just feel like allegories or gods somehow.
I have similar feelings, when I recommend it I include a big disclaimer about the violence. Some of those scenes lingered in my mind for months afterwards, and I don't think I'll ever fully lose the impact of the novel's ending.
I also really enjoy his novel The Crossing, and feel that it has similarly beautiful, poetic descriptions while being a much more introspective and character-focused novel. Still plenty of violence, but nothing close to the brutality of Blood Meridian.
It was on sale on Audible and I got it and listened to it knowing nothing about it other than it looked interesting.
Wow! What a great book!
I had to take breaks because of the violence and it took several weeks to finish because I wasn’t always in the mood. But I’m definitely going to read it again.
I'm not sure this is exactly what you mean, but McCarthy's descriptive language in particular is very poetic.
I had a writing workshop with Pam Houston back in 2009. She is a very incisive reader, so I was a little surprised when she reacted to Blood Meridian coming up in discussion with something to the effect of how bleak and devoid of beauty it was (I'm synthesizing a little from ~feeling; my memory isn't this good). Part of our ongoing assignment each week was to share a passage we liked, so I brought it the next week and read this one (it is about 2 pages into chapter 11--but there's a lot of this throughout):
> Their way led now through dwarf oak and ilex and over a stony ground where black trees stood footed in the seams on the slopes. They rode through sunlight and high grass and in the late afternoon they came out upon an escarpment that seemed to rim the known world. Below them in the paling light smoldered the plains of San Agustin stretching away to the northeast, the earth floating off in a long curve silent under looms of smoke from the underground coal deposits burning there a thousand years. The horses picked their way along the rim with care and the riders cast varied glances out upon that ancient and naked land.
> In the days to come they would ride up through a country where the rocks would cook the flesh from your hand and where other than rock nothing was. They rode in a narrow enfilade along a trail strewn with the dry round turds of goats and they rode with their faces averted from the rock wall and the bake-oven air which it rebated, the slant black shapes of the mounted men stenciled across the stone with a definition austere and implacable like shapes capable of violating their covenant with the flesh that authored them and continuing autonomous across the naked rock without reference to sun or man or god.
> They rode down from this country through a deep gorge, clattering over the stones, rifts of cool blue shade. In the dry sand of the arroyo floor old bones and broken shapes of painted pottery and graven on the rocks above them pictographs of horse and cougar and turtle and the mounted Spaniards helmeted and bucklered and contemptuous of stone and silence and time itself. Lodged in faults and crevices a hundred feet above them were nests of straw and jetsam from old high waters and the riders could hear the mutter of thunder in some nameless distance and they kept watch on the narrow shape of sky overhead for any darkness of impending rain, threading the canyon's close pressed flanks, the dry white rocks of the dead river floor round and smooth as arcane eggs.
> That night they camped in the ruins of an older culture deep in the stone mountains, a small valley with a clear run of water and good grass. Dwellings of mud and stone were walled up beneath an overhanging cliff and the valley was traced with the work of old acequias. The loose sand in the valley floor was strewn everywhere with pieces of pottery and blackened bits of wood and it was crossed and recrossed with the tracks of deer and other animals.
She listened with something like awe in her eyes. I wasn't smart enough to pry, then, but I interpreted it as a bit of delight at re-discovering the care McCarthy is paying every little detail here even though he must know, on some level, that we'll all be blinded by baby-trees.
I read it for the first time a few years ago, and due to purely coincidental timing I finished it over the course of a weeklong trip to Big Bend National Park in West Texas. McCarthy lived not far away in El Paso when he wrote it, and the scenery in Big Bend is the embodiment of the way he describes the desert in the book. Haunting and inimical, yet simultaneously beautiful and magical. Being in that setting and hiking and backpacking through the heat really underscored to me how such a stark environment could have driven humans crossing it to unspeakable violence.
I don't specifically remember any of the passages you quoted, which I think means that I'm due for a reread. A few descriptive scenes stick out in my memory, particularly the burning tree and the cattle graveyard.
> She listened with something like awe in her eyes.
The issue is that you'll read a few pages like that then a paragraph using the same language to describe a tree hung with dead babies. The effect is of course quite unlike much else.
One of the books cited in the article, The Comanche Empire [1], absolutely changed my reading of Blood Meridian. It gives a lot of insight into the political and economic state of Texas/Mexico/New Mexico in the 1800s, and highlights how well McCarthy understood the history of he was writing about. Highly recommended to any fans of history + Blood Meridian.
[1] https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300151176/comanche-empir...
Thanks for the recommendation, I'm going to track down a copy. I read Lakota America last year (funnily enough also a recommendation from HN) and really enjoyed it.
I read Blood Meridian a decade ago and still have some mental images burned in with perfect clarity. My favourite (not to say I'm fond of the violence, rather I'm fond of how a novel created such vivid images in my mind) is when one of the gang's horses gets gored. The rider extracts himself from the fallen horse and walks away in a daze, but then stops and returns to unceremoniously shoot the horse. It's analogous to someone being in a car accident and in shock, then realising the engine is still running. I picture it in my head like a Sidney Nolan painting.
Great book. One of the biggest hurdles, besides the violence, is the lack of punctuation, but I encourage anyone put off by that to stick with it. Once you adjust it flows very well.
And with that said, I like the Border Trilogy more and find those novels better westerns, but that's because it's more romance and less apocalypse.
The "legion of horribles" sequence is also incredibly sticky, just some of the phrases like 'death hilarious" stick around for years...
"A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools."
Rather like a cross between Stephenson and Faulkner.
If you need a cleans with humor while also getting that Cormac style, I might recommend Yelping with Cormac. https://yelpingwithcormac.tumblr.com/
Agreed.
One of my favorite books ever, and I personally love the writing style.
The last paragraph when certain character is dancing and laughing, saying he will never was imprinted in me since I read it. I still get chills when I think of it.
The Reading McCarthy podcast[0] is excellent for McCarthy fans. They haven't done an episode yet on Blood Meridian but I'm sure they will eventually.
Recent and related (but no comments):
Harold Bloom on Cormac McCarthy, True Heir to Melville and Faulkner - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30184362 - Feb 2022
Hello Dang,
Sorry for offtopic. I dont know how to reach you otherwise.
I was flagged at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30374970
Just curious what rule I broke this time?
You can email hn@ycombinator.com
Users do the bulk of the flagging, your comment was almost certainly flagged by other users for, among other things, the obvious use of one of the oldest categorized bits of messageboard flame-baiting:
I wonder lately whether CmmC really means his violence dramatically, or like Frank Miller just likes it. No Country for Old Men ends with what seems like sympathy with the murderous bastard, with his victim not calling him on his transparent lie.
My first real job interview (biodiesel QA/QC lab tech) devolved into a discussion of Blood Meridian wherein my future boss asserted that The Judge was a mass psychogenic hallucinatory manifestation of the Glanton Gang's deflecting their collective guilt for the atrocities they committed throughout the novel.
> my future boss asserted that The Judge was a mass psychogenic hallucinatory manifestation of the Glanton Gang's deflecting their collective guilt
I recently finished _Blood Meridian_ and then read some analyses of the ending, particularly how the Judge waxes lyrical about "The Dance" of violence as a higher human activity, while the kid dismisses it as base: "even a dumb animal can dance" just as he is sucked back into it.
I do not think that McCarthy intends there to be a single correct reading of what The Judge is; he is inexplicable, uncanny and ambiguous like something from a David Lynch film; however this "manifestation of guilt" reading has to be among the main contenders latent in the book's meanings.
Alternately, the Judge is just a man, the Judge is Satan incarnate, the Judge is chaos and lust for violence, the Judge is a metaphor, the Judge is some other natural force, the Judge is some other supernatural force, the Judge has a deal with Satan, the Judge has tapped into some other supernatural force.
The priest’s story of the gang first coming upon him sitting on a rock in the middle of the desert like he had been waiting for them somewhat supports that.
“There he set on a rock in the middle of the greatest desert you’d ever want to see. Just perched on this rock like a man waitin for a coach.”
I re-read the novel after my interview with that idea in mind and got a Sixth Sense vibe surrounding judge Holden in the way the character interacts with the others.
I always assumed the Judge was a an avatar of the White Man in the west. The giveaway is how he uses legalism to dazzle people. Plus he knows how to make gunpowder and gets sunburned easily.
That is such an excellent interpretation, I’m sort of convinced that’s the author’s intent now.
I’d always gone for a more magical realism approach because of how often his supernatural demeanor is focused on, and because it dovetails neatly with Anton Chigurh being a similar thing in No Country for Old Men.
> I’m sort of convinced that’s the author’s intent now.
The author is capable of writing with precise clarity about even the darkest subjects. IMHO, if Mr McCarthy intended there to be an unambiguous meaning, then he would have put it in the novel. he did not, therefor, it is intentionally ambiguous, for us to ponder - above I compared this to David Lynch who is known for avoiding precise explanation his films.
But that is an excellent interpretation.
That's a great theory but it doesn't explain the Judge's appearance in the revival tent early in the story.
I never quite put together what was going on in that last scene. Perhaps my vocabulary isn't quite there.
Stephen King in On Writing :
The Grapes of Wrath is, of course, a fine novel. I believe that Blood Meridian is another, although there are great whacks of it that I don't fully understand. What of that? I can't decipher the words to many of the popular songs I love, either.
I think that's an important part of reading it. There are parts that are really difficult to understand, and that lack of understanding only gets you a glimpse of the maddening confusion the characters are experiencing. Only the Judge has any idea what's going on, and he's a nightmare's nightmare.
Yale have a good lecture on this book. I finished the novel this year but it took me a very long time to get through it. Lots of stopping and starting due to the dense prose and violence. It's one of the best books I ever read, the language is otherworldly, some of the scenes I'll never forget, and the ending! I'm taking a break and plan to read again.
Blood Meridian changed my opinion on gun control. The plot makes you realize how absolutely helpless you were out west without a gun. While the wild times out west ended some number of years ago, it’s unsurprising that the trauma of the time left lasting cultural imprints. Guns literally equate to survival for some.
I feel like Dark Tower is a good entry into Blood Meridian. It's similarly bleak, but a bit less poetic, so easier to digest.
Blood Meridian is just a level above in terms of imagery.
I highly recommend the audiobook edition read by Richard Poe. He captures the surrealism and beauty and insanity of the book, especially The Judge.
Blood Meridian is my favorite novel of all time. It's one of those books that changes the way you think in a profound way.
I'm quite curious to hear how it changed the way you think, can you elaborate on this?
I thought this was going to be something about the discovery of the blood brain barrier. Great story though!