Will I love Blood Meridian?

This remains one of the most haunting novels I have ever read. I cannot shake the character of Judge Holden, a formidable man both physically and intellectually, who deploys his insidious intellect to justify acts of abject violence seemingly only for the sake of violence itself. I was mesmerized by a world where “all covenants were brittle.” This was no straight-up Western as I had expected. It was something more.

McCarthy pushed the boundaries of the classic Western by challenging the notion that good will ultimately overcome evil and the hero will save the day. There was no hero here… show more.

The events in this book take place, for the most part, in the Sonora and Chihuahua Deserts. A character-rich indictment of the violence with which the American “West was won,” it is riveting for its relentless pace, its linguistic richness, and its sensual evocation of landscape.

McCarthy can seamlessly shift sentence styles from Shakespearean syntactical grandeur to slivered fragments of the sort that characterize the best of Ernest Hemingway. I was an early fan, but by now, this book has been acknowledged by virtually every major critic as a signal literary masterpiece.

In terms of style, I see Cormac McCarthy as a writer who fully takes on Hemingway’s dictum of simplicity in the service of conveying complex emotion, and takes it even further by eschewing what he sees as unneeded punctuation: One would be hard-pressed to find a comma anywhere in this book, and the dialogue has no quotation marks (and then there is McCarthy’s famous disdain for the semicolon). I found this style distracting for the first page, but I immediately got used to it, and it made the story become a smooth flow of scenes and events at once vivid… show more.

Speaking of nihilism, Cormac McCarthy’s book is a miasma of sin without redemption. The characters—a band of psychopaths who scalp, murder, and torture their way across the American Southwest during the mid-19th century—are manifestations of pure evil motivated by nothing but animal desire. As much as I dig Larry McMurtry, his Old West novels can play on a need for moral certainty, thus raising doubt as to their verisimilitude.

In contrast, McCarthy‘s characters behave the way you’d expect desperate men far removed from the inhibiting influence of civilization would act in that time and place. I was often repulsed by… show more.

I often ask what the nature of laws and authority is. In the "Old West," when there was no overarching central authority, the survival of the fittest was the law. I’m curious how the clash of the old world with the new becomes a never-ending cycle and where it may lead.

I loved how none of the characters were all good or all bad, they were just survivors. This book is not meant to be liked or disliked. It’s meant to be experienced and "danced with."

I reread this book every year and find something new in it each time. How can three sentences fully describe the desperation of five years? How many times can one give a description of the setting sun, and each time, is it more brutal than the last?

His work, for me, is the pinnacle of writing. He inspired me to write because it didn’t matter if I sucked. Perfection had been achieved; I might as well throw some demons at a blank page.

I once tried to listen to all of his books back to back and put myself in… show more.

When I first read Cormac McCarthy, I was awestruck by the brutal beauty of the way he used language. His way with words is almost enough to make you look past the truly horrendous things he describes in this book . . . all while telling what appears to be a simple “tale of the Old West.”

I have never read a singularly more elegantly written book, yet I’ve never read anything as mind-numbingly horrific. This book is so intense and complex that it is considered the only Cormac McCarthy book that can never be made into a movie. (He… show more.

Although this was not my first reading, I was happy that I decided to re-read Blood Meridian as the intensely graphic violence of the novel ruined my first read. Fortunately, I enjoy McCarthy’s prose and mythic writing so much that I decided to give Blood Meridian a second chance. 

This second time around, McCarthy’s artistry and wisdom overshadowed the violence and redeemed the novel for me.

While more manageable in size, this novel hits on every cylinder.

Spectacular insights into the Old West and the New are told with language that somehow manages to be both elegant and gritty at the same time. 

Sometimes the scene descriptions are rendered sparely, other times with a nearly poetic hand, but at all times create a durable and memorable backdrop for the drama.

If you are a writer, this is a book you’ll want to read more than once or twice, just as you will likely find yourself re-reading entire paragraphs just to experience the language for a second… show more.

In my opinion, the best novel written in the last fifty years. The violence would be too much in the hands of a lesser writer and there is no greater living writer in English than McCarthy. McCarthy perfectly captures the nihilism of war, and how that nihilism later comes back to haunt war’s survivors.