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Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

Cormac McCarthy

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Dec 08, 2013 Sam rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 1-contemp-literary, reviewed, read-2013

After raving about how much I loved Philipp Meyer's recent book, The Son , and how it so effectively upended some of the myths associated with settling the West, I figured I was practically duty-bound to follow that up by going back to *the* gold standard in this enterprise of subverting the traditional Western novel: McCarthy's 1985 masterpiece, Blood Meridian. I'm glad I did, though it wasn't easy--the language is dense, the violence unflinching, the characters pretty much ciphers, the paci After raving about how much I loved Philipp Meyer's recent book, The Son , and how it so effectively upended some of the myths associated with settling the West, I figured I was practically duty-bound to follow that up by going back to *the* gold standard in this enterprise of subverting the traditional Western novel: McCarthy's 1985 masterpiece, Blood Meridian. I'm glad I did, though it wasn't easy--the language is dense, the violence unflinching, the characters pretty much ciphers, the pacing of the action brutally slow. This was no rollicking-good-time of a book that I could dip into and out of at will, or pay marginal attention to while on the train, without totally losing the rhythm and flow of the story. And many times even when I was giving it all the attention it demanded, it simply bored the hell out of me.

But then other times I was too busy being in awe of the way McCarthy bends the language to his will to be bored, like when he paints a majestic picture of nature:

"They passed through a highland meadow carpeted with wildflowers, acres of golden groundsel and zinnia...and a vast plain of varied small blooms reaching onward like a gingham print to the farthest serried rimlands blue with haze and the adamantine ranges rising out of nothing like the backs of seabeasts in a devonian dawn."(197)

or like when he's showing us the disturbing scene of another cold-blooded massacre, another vicious scalping:

"...spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts...and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off the limbs, heads...And now the horses of the dead came pounding out of the smoke and dust and circled with flapping leather and wild manes and eyes whited with fear like the eyes of the blind and some were feathered with arrows and some lanced through and stumbling and vomiting blood as they wheeled across the killing ground and clattered out of sight again. Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming." (57)

...more

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Apr 03, 2012 Sezin Koehler rated it really liked it

Shelves: culture, book-ii-crime-rave-2015, book-iv-pine-ridge-research, horror

This is a really hard book to read. For some reason, McCarthy's prose gets a bit convoluted and I had a hard time keeping track of who was who and who he was talking about. That said, it's a brilliant portrait of America during the indigenous genocide of the late 1800s. I have no idea how anyone at all managed to survive those days.

The brutality was intense -- I've never read so many scalpings in my life. This book should be a part of school curriculum for its ability to portray how wild the we ...more

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Sep 15, 2007 Sean rated it really liked it

Exhausting. I made it through this book chapter by chapter. Usually one a day. It's difficult. There is really noone to follow and root for. That's okay, however, it's quite a shift from a standard story where you're presented with at least one person with whom you sympathize and hope to see change in some way. All of the principal characters actions are equally repugnant. The violence and the description of it is unrelenting. The prose is extraordinary, like a majestic, shambling, shamanistic f ...more

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Jun 15, 2021 Michael rated it it was amazing

Shelves: read_2021

Majestic.
Beautifully disquisitional landscapes interspersed with the carnage wrought by men.

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Jan 29, 2010 Jeremiah John rated it it was amazing

Shelves: great-fiction-not-speculative

Morning redness in the west...

You may think, mid-book, that all the killing is senseless. In the end, you understand that the senselessness of the killing is the ultimate judge of mankind. That is, power is the ultimate judge, through murder.

Of course, Christ disputes this through raising from the dead and creating a logic beyond death.

Fascinating book, I love godless philosophies because they strengthen my faith. Brilliant, poetic, and Nietzschean.

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