Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
“An epic and biblical tale of fucking, fighting, and fleeing”
Overview: In a loosely historical context the narrative follows a fictional teenager referred to as "the kid," with the bulk of the text devoted to his experiences with the Glanton gang, a historical group of scalp hunters who massacred aboriginal Americans and others in the United States-Mexico borderlands from 1849-1850 for bounty, pleasure, and eventually out of nihilistic habit.
This book was wild. It has everything a classic Western could want, and then some. The writing style took a while to get used to since there are no quotation marks, no semicolons, and the speaking style is that from uneducated men in the 1800s. But after you get used to it, this is a wild tale. McCarthy's primitive writing style emphasizes this primal, bloody landscape that the characters traverse throughout the story.
Blood Meridian is unquestionably the most violent novel I’ve ever read. It’s also one of the best. I shudder to think that the horrors visited upon the Indians and Mexicans and homesteaders were all based on fact. Babies are smashed against trees, scalps are taken, and young girls are raped. It’s definitely not for the faint of heart.
Although it seems like a contradiction, this book is both brutal and poetic, but somehow it works. The story is bleak, dark, bloody but also filled with beautiful descriptions of the countryside, the desert, and the characters the gang meets along their travels.
There were a lot of times during my read of Blood Meridian where I had to stop and digest what I just read. It had a dreamlike, or nightmarish, quality a lot of the time.
From the first page you feel like you've entered someone's nightmare. There's no place to hide from the viciousness, barrenness, and moral vacuousness. 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.
