I couldn't really do justice to the storyline so here's the summary from the back cover:

"An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly 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."

"For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies."

McCarthy's writing is filled with shakespearean and biblical language and he seems to have as much love for punctuation as James Joyce. Until page 100 or so, all I could follow was that the protagonist, "the kid," seamingly wandered around aimlessly encountering some form of extreme violence. There is no inner dialog, no sense of purpose or character development - just random acts of animalistic violence told through the language of poetic murkiness. In hindsight, I think this was a very effect way of setting up the mental, emotional and historical context of the story.

I almost gave up reading, but really wanted to get through it. So I had a discussion with Chris to garner some encouragement. The discussion centered around the idea of pure survival and what it must have been like to be a pioneer of the vast western landscape. Recently, we took a trip out to Vegas and went for a hike in Red Rock Canyon. As we walked around, we contemplated what it must have been like to be a lone traveller walking such unforgiving terrains without food or water - frightening. And then to imagine encountering a complete stranger not knowing if friend or foe, most likley foe - horrifying.

Survival. Do I know what's it's like for that to be my sole purpose day and night? Sitting in my comfortable office with a full belly, electricity, and the only signs of moral decay being a corporate memo discouraging beach wear, it takes some digging to imagine the raw truth of the brutal western expansion. It's only by chance that I was not the kid of that time, driven to do anything by the sheer will to survive.

And this is what happened to those who tried to survive in peaceful peace rather than ruthlessness: "In the days to come the frail black rebuses of blood in those sands would crack and break and drift away so that in the circuit of few suns all trace of the destruction of these people would be erased. The desert wind would salt their ruins and there would be nothing, nor ghost nor scribe, to tell to any pilgrim in his passing how it was that people had lived in this place and in this place died."

Such a gut-wrenching contemplation of the land we currently inhabit and what became of its original owners. Every time I picked up the book I felt extremely heavy-hearted. Perhaps this is truly how we should feel when reading about our country's history? Truly eye-opening, I think this book will stay with me for a long time to come.