Ex Libris: 100+ Books to Read and Reread

by Michiko Kakutani

Blood Meridian will give you nightmares. The story is almost unrelievedly violent and blood soaked and represents the grimmest, most primal distillation of the author’s Hobbesian view of the world. With Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy also created a potent retelling of America’s myth of the western frontier, leaving us with an ineradicable understanding of the costs in lives and suffering caused by the wars of extermination waged against Native Americans, and the policies of expulsion that enabled the theft of their ancestral lands. In fact, the novel exposes the dark imperialism at the heart of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, which would be used to justify both America’s westward territorial expansion and later adventures abroad. Based in part on historical events in the Southwest circa 1849–1850, Blood Meridian recounts the story of a notorious group of scalp hunters who collect bounties for the Apaches and Mexicans they massacre. They are driven by cruelty, racism, greed, and bloodlust. Among these killers is a teenage boy whom McCarthy refers to, generically, as “the kid,” who seems to hold on to a “corner of clemency for the heathen” in the midst of all this horror. And presiding over the horror is Judge Holden, a huge, pale monster of a man, given to making nihilistic speeches and dancing naked—an incarnation of Satan who claims he never sleeps and will never die. The only man who has truly lived, the judge says, is the “man who has offered up himself entire to the...