Cormac McCarthy

Set in the anarchic world opened up by America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy is an epic and potent account of the barbarous violence that man visits upon man.

Through the hostile landscape of the Texas-Mexico border wanders the Kid, a fourteen year-old Tennessean who is quickly swept-up in the relentless tide of blood. But the apparent chaos is not without its order: while Americans hunt Indians - collecting scalps as their bloody trophies - they too are stalked as prey.

Since its first publication in 1985, Blood Meridian has been read as both a brilliant subversion of the Western novel and a blazing example of that form. Powerful and savagely beautiful, it has emerged as one of the most important works in American fiction of the last century. A truly mesmerizing classic.

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

Or the Evening Redness in the West

Blood Meridian

Alyssa C Smith

The trailing of the argonauts terminated in ashes and…the expriest asked if some might not see the hand of a cynical god conducting with what austerity and what mock surprise so lethal a congruence. The posting of witnesses by a third and other path altogether might also be called in evidence as appearing to beggar chance, yet the judge…said that in this was expressed the very nature of the witness and that his proximity was no third thing but rather the prime, for what could be said to occur unobserved?

If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night… This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons.

Dust starched 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 bloodstained dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibberish and horses lay screaming. 

Thomas Ross

“The wrath of god lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have the power to wake it. Hell ain’t half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman’s making onto a foreign land. Ye’ll wake more than the dogs.”

"The fulfilled renown of Moby-Dick and of As I Lay Dying is augmented by Blood Meridian, since Cormac McCarthy is the worthy disciple both of Melville and Faulkner," writes esteemed literary scholar Harold Bloom in his Introduction to the Modern Library edition. "I venture that no other living American novelist, not even Pynchon, has given us a book as strong and memorable." Cormac McCarthy's masterwork, Blood Meridian, chronicles the brutal world of the Texas-Mexico borderlands in the mid-nineteenth century. Its wounded hero, the teenage Kid, must confront the extraordinary violence of the Glanton gang, a murderous cadre on an official mission to scalp Indians and sell those scalps. Loosely based on fact, the novel represents a genius vision of the historical West, one so fiercely realized that since its initial publication in 1985 the canon of American literature has welcomed Blood Meridian to its shelf. "A classic American novel of regeneration through violence," declares Michael Herr. "McCarthy can only be compared to our greatest writers." From the Hardcover edition.

Noah Syrkis

Much preferred this to No Country. Worth it for the irregular vocabulary and beautiful nature writing alone. Reads like an Old Testament for America. 

Luke Pearce

Jim Hagan

I toyed with giving this a 4 as I don't feel it is consistently excellent. However the really great parts are close to the best I've experienced in literature and it deserves 5 stars to reflect that.

Tobias V. Langhoff

The plot is loosely based on a true story. We follow an unnamed boy as he tags along with a real, historical gang of mercenaries led by John Joel Glanton as they roam the Mexican/American border in the 1850s, first hunting an equally dreadful band of Apache Indians who terrorizes Mexico, but later not distinguishing between the enemy and friendly Indians or even Mexicans to retrieve scalps and earn rewards.

Among Glanton’s men is Judge Holden, also supposedly a real person, but for some reason McCarthy must have been intrigued by this man in the only written record that exists of him, because he has elevated him to mythical status. Holden is the true main character of this book, the anonymous boy existing only as our grounded window to the Judge’s world. Judge Holden is a monstrosity, both physically and mentally. A hairless giant, he is a man who’s both an excellent artist and a ruthless killer, a philosopher and pedophile. He knows much there is to know about the world, and the nature of men, and he wants to destroy both. Insofar as he has any morals, he’s a nihilist.

Not unlike in McCarthy’s THE ROAD, the world here seems almost apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic. This book has a haunting, biblical prose, and Judge Holden is one of the horsemen of the apocalypse, if not the Devil himself. There are so many scenes of gruesome slaughter. The gang stalk through the desert of carnage, at one point encountering a tree clustered with dead babies. Darkness.

Like the barren desert it's set in, this story is incredibly bleak. But weirdly enough, there is beauty too. That said, I found Blood Meridian hard to read. Not because it’s so dark; I mean, I survived The Road. But because it's literally hard to read. McCarthy has a unique style, one that further adds to the pointless nature of the gang's endeavors. But struggling through the sentences kept me from enjoying this book even more. 

Frederik De Bosschere

mic shulman

Sean Goodwin

Enigmatic style amidst brutal themes. Genius

J. L. Askew

A stunning novel, written by a great American writer at the peak of his powers. The story follows a young runaway in the pre-Civil War 1800s on an odyssey from Tennessee to northern Mexico, and eventually through the bloodlands of the Southwest to the coast. 
In a town where people pack a revival tent to escape the rain he sees the “judge” for the first time, an enormous man of nearly seven feet who walks to the front, declaiming to the crowd that the preacher is a fraud and wanted for lewd conduct with a minor. While the preacher cries, “lies, lies”, the judge says the reverend also had had “congress with a goat.” As the crowd becomes riotous, the reverend cries, sobbing, “This is him. The devil. Here he stands.” The preacher escapes with his life as the tent collapses and the judge goes to a bar where he admits, “I never laid eyes on the man [reverend] before today. Never heard of him.” The kid observes from nearby, seeing the judge looking at him and smiling.
Later, after nearly killing a barman in a fight, the kid flees town but is sought by a recruiter and induced to join a band of soldiers under a Captain White who intends “to kill Mexicans.” Soon White’s company is on the plains where they are set upon by a large band of Indians who wipe out most of the Americans in a sanguinary orgy of killing and mutilation.
The kid and three other survivors are picked up by Mexicans, and placed in a Chihuahua jail where they observe through the bars “a procession of degenerates, like cannibals”, the judge riding at front with a man called Glanton, hired to wipe out Apaches. The kid and a cohort are sprung from jail by Glanton to join his band of scalp hunters.
Now that the kid and judge are together, the older man shows the youngster ostensible kindness, but the kid is wary, finding the judge strange and mysterious. While never trusting the judge, the kid comes under his sway. 
The company rides forth, indiscriminately killing men, women, and children. At an evening camp, the judge “stepped through the [camp] fire and the flames delivered him up as if he were in some way native to their element.” This is one of many signs the judge may have preternatural abilities.
The judge shows an affinity for young children. Of the many towns they pass through, he picks up both boys and girls, and many are later found dead.
The author is unsurpassed at setting scenes, depicting place, and creating atmosphere. The land is described as “purgatorial waste” where the scalp hunters go forth “like a patrol condemned to ride out some ancient curse”, passing “looms of smoke from the underground coal deposits burning there a thousand years”. The mercenaries are forever on the move, always hying to the west where the sky at dusk “was the color of blood.”
At length the marauders cash in their scalps and are paid in gold by the territorial governor, but after clashing with Mexican soldiers and killing them, the Americans are branded outlaws. Following a scorched earth offensive across the plains, the mercenaries are either shot or hung till only the kid remains and for years he wanders from California through the Rockies, drifting back to the Texas town of Griffin for the novel’s finale.
Here the author excels, capturing the mood perfectly, showing a barroom dancing bear, an old Bavarian showman, a little girl organ-grinder, revelers, drunks, and painted “ladies of the evening”.
Sitting at the bar, the kid suddenly sees the judge standing over him, starting to speak enigmatically of their joint destinies, that they were ordained to be there, but the kid resists his words and finally extricates himself from the man’s company. With that the story closes with an unexpected and shocking ending.
The intensity of McCarthy’s prose is gripping and powerful, striking hard at the reader’s senses. But the mayhem and violence are unrelenting, and the narrative is often profane and marred with blasphemy.
Noted author John Gardner writes that true art “seeks to improve life, not debase it.” But McCarthy’s work is a paean to darkness.

Pretty cool book, other than the lack of punctuation. Favourite part was when the Judge said “I’ll be the judge of that” and judged all over the place.

Jean-Paul Massaquoi

A wild ride of a western, unflinching in its content and cosmic in its scale.

Stephen Wardle

Thrilling, violent, intense, and vivid. Truly one of the greatest books I’ve ever read.

Blood Meridian is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting 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 14-year-old Tennessean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.

Blood Meridian, Or, The Evening Redness in the West

Michael Springer

*Updated, now with an additional McCarthyized section of the Bible, moved up from the comment section.*

Here's what I'm thinkin.

THE CORMAC MCCARTHY PROJECT

Ever since reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I've been considering the possibilities of revisiting the classics and, um, reinterpreting them. Butchering? Yes, you're probably right. Butchering them. That's the right word. 

Anyway, since Cormac McCarthy has the most distinctive and powerful voice of any modern writer (that I've read recently)(in my opinion), I pose the question: what if Cormac McCarthy were to revisit the classics of the English canon? What if McCarthy had been the author of The Great Gatsby? How would it have ended up? I think this is an important enough question to begin a new writing project, or, at the least, write a Goodreads review pretending I'm going to. 

First, we have to establish these new versions of the classics will be stylized after McCarthy's Western Novels, starting with Blood Meridian and ending with Cities of the Plain. Characteristics include:

1) No punctuation other than periods and question marks.
2) No indication of who is talking during dialogue, although you can always tell. 
3) Poetic descriptions of barren landscapes which often reflect the callous indifference of nature to the plights of humanity. 
4) Untranslated Spanish dialogue.
5) No hint of the characters' internal dialogue; all characters are revealed only through action and conversation.
6) Gratuitous and unexpected acts of horrendous violence.
7) During casual conversation, characters frequently say incredibly profound shit. 

Although there's more to his style than this, we can take this as the most bare-essential aspects of what is necessary to properly "translate" a novel into its McCarthy version. 

As an example, let's take a certain scene from Pride and Prejudice. How about the one where Lady Catherine is quizzing Elisabeth about whether D'arcy has indeed proposed to her? They're alone, walking in the garden (although in the McCarthy version, they would be walking upon a windswept moor). Here we go:

+++++++

Dust clung to their boots and the tall grass shuddered on the frigid wind. A raven perched upon the fallen branch of an elm and watched them with one jet eye. Lady Catherines hands grasped nervously at nothing as she looked across the moor.

Young women of unfortunate birth shouldnt attempt to reach beyond their station.

What?

Don't pretend you don't know of what I speak.

Eliza spat and turned away. She walked into the doorway of a church. Inside dozens of bodies lay heaped upon the floor. Blood hard and dried like clay caked upon the stone of the floor. Flies traversed upon the eyelids of a child that stared blankly at Eliza who turned away.

Los Muchachos estan muerto.

Muerto?

Muerto.

Si.

Eliza brushed her hair back. All of the constrictions you place upon mans actions are nothing to the ineffable stretch of the world which knows that all is war. No system of morality is anything but pretense which the least of gods vile beasts can shatter simply through the act of killing for its survival. Morality holds no water when it stands eye to eye with stark reality.

Lady Catherine spat and wiped her mouth on her sleeve.

Its damn cold.

Wait which of us said that?

I did. 

Oh. Alright.

I wont promise I would never accept a proposal if I dont think its ever to be given. Nor can I swear as to what I would do in a situation that Ive never known myself to be in.

Well arent you a contrary little whore. Lady Catherine spat. Ill not forget how youve treated me this day. Her finger moved closer to the knife that hung at her hip.

++++++

And here's one of the Bible's more memorable passages, McCarthyized:

19:1 From out the dark sky over all Gods reckoning the two drifted like fallenleaves downward as Lot tipped back the widebrimmed hat, rubbing his thumb over stubble and spat on the grounddirt. Raising heavy to his feet and stretching he ambled forward dust raising an etherial plume in the nightair like ghosts of sinners dwelling on the threshold of the dark. the untamed past hovered there in the darkness by Sodom. 

19:2 Come in ifn you want. 

We don't mind sleepin outside. 

No really I got plenty room. Cmon in. 

The angels came in bare feet on the packed dirt covered with indescribable years of footprints crisscrossed into an impossible to fathom reckoning of feet stretching back through indescribable years. So many feet and such a dirty floor. 

19:3 He cooked bread. They warshed up and ate. 

19:4 Out the window shadows encroached from the jet locustridden expanse of Sodom. Figures in stillness, nooses dangling from withered hands and that dust rising like the dead pounding from the other side of eternity trying to return trying to be unforsaken from the temporal purgatory the men dwelt in. Who them men we saw with them white robes. 

19:5 Gone home, Jenkins, he said. 

Not til we know who them fugitives is you harborin. They aint niggers is they. 

Didn't you see they white robes. They aint no niggers. 

Lot walked out the house into that humidity the wind like the word of God drifting with threats of retribution and reckoning. Tell you what, men, you better get back on home and mind ya damn business. This aint no affair of yourn. 

The Willis boy had a strapon fixed to his forehead pointing up accusingly at the heavens an erection of defiance. He wore that collar that said Slave as always. He was danglin handcuffs from his hand like like a hypnotist without a pocketwatch. We just wanna see um. We just wanna meet um. Maybe have a little fun with um. 

19:7 Lot spat a wad of nasal discharge loudly upon the earth and glanced back at the house. Tell you what boys. I invited them men into my house and I wont have them mistreated but I got them two good fer nothin daughters. You leave my visitors alone Ill bring them on out. 

19:8 Willis nodded, that plastic tusk swaying in the nightair. What fer. 

Whatever yall find fittin. It aint fer me to say. Just leave my visitors alone. 

Okay, apparently it's not easy to write in Cormac McCarthy's style without sucking. I suppose the only way THE CORMAC MCCARTHY PROJECT can be effectively carried out is if McCarthy himself were to actually write these translations. So, if anyone runs into Cormac, let him know about this project, and how important it is for him to get to work right away. After all, there are lots of classics. I believe he lives in New Mexico. So, if you're wandering through a dark, dank cave and hear the sounds of typewriter keys pounding away, you've probably found his lair. Approach slowly, and don't make eye contact. 

I suppose, while I'm at it, I could say something about Blood Meridian. FUCKING AMAZING! I hate giving five star ratings, probably because I'm so curmudgeonly. But, for the third time, McCarthy is making me give him one. I just can't find anything to fault here, and the story is different from any I've ever read before. The writing is amazing, the characters are good (although the Judge fits a certain fiction stereotype, he's a very memorable version of it), and I was startled by the horror of it all . . . until I became numb to it. Which was the intention, or I think it was at any rate. 

This is the horrifying story of a group who are being paid to hunt down injuns and scalp them. Over time, the bloodlust of the group grows and they begin scalping those they're intended to be saving, and basically everyone they come across. When it comes time to be paid for the scalps, the scalps all look the same anyway. Sothey make tons of money from the indiscriminant slaughter of soldiers, villagers, travelers and everyone else. And, from there, things get uglier. 

This is all based on historical events, or so I've heard. I haven't researched it enough to know how closely. But, this is a very dark vision of the "wild west," and the blood that was spilled while the land was still wild. If you have the stomach for it, this is an amazing book.

Maite Alarcon Leon

Deep, intense novel that could have used a more friendly narration. Big cosmic concepts. Beautiful hostile scenery.

Gavin

In one sentence: The greatest and truest western. 
 To be read when: strong-stomached; drunk as fuck. 


Say it is 1985 A.P. (After Peckinpah). How can anyone write anything new about poor white psychopaths in the hot rural places of Victorian America? The answer turns out simple: just have prose so tight and freshening - a jet hose comprising one-third Bible, one-third Emerson, one-third Ballard - that you again uncover the elemental bones of the Western. Also savagely de-emphasise your characters. Place them in enormous, indifferent vistas; give us no inner monologue - nor even indirect report of subjective life; have no speech marks to set their words apart from the landscapes (do not draw the eye to their presumed humanity); have no apostrophes, no hyphens even, lest we remember; have as few names as possible, leave them as types - "kid" or "captain" or "mexican" or "brave"; set their incredible violence among such vast places it looks like little; have few capital letters but for God's.

Lock your readers out; make everyone and everything opaque. As he says himself:

  
 In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence.
  



These cowboys and injuns punctuate the beautiful land of Central America with hanged babies; rings of decapitate heads; a four-eyed dog; a man calmly eating his own shit; endless thirsty hallucinogenic despair. This is exhausting, quite hard to read:


  
 All night the wind blew and the fine dust set their teeth on edge. Sand in everything, grit in all they ate. In the morning a urinecolored sun rose blearily through panes of dust on a dim world and without feature. The animals were failing... That night they rode through a region electric and wild where strange shapes of soft blue fire ran over the metal of the horses' trappings and the wagonwheels rolled in hoops of fire and little shapes of pale blue light came to perch in the ears of the horses and in the beards of the men... the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear.
  



(As well as this Nabokovian trudge through the middle section, McCarthy sometimes steers close to the comical with sentences like 'Itinerant degenerates bleeding west like a heliotropic plague.')

A typical human interaction in this book is "The kid looked at the man"; no more. There's plenty of grandeur - just not in humans. 

At the centre stands the Judge: Satan, Ahab and Moby Dick all in one. ("His skin is so pale as to have almost no pigment.") Racism, fear and poverty form the baseline. The Comanches, for instance, are here worse than demons 

  
 ...grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns... riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning...
  

- "at least demons are Christian"!

Lots of descriptions of the stars, inbetween brutalities

  
 The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely a space of black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less...


 The stars burned with a lidless fixity and they drew nearer in the night until toward dawn he was stumbling among the whinstones of the uttermost ridge to heaven.
  


For the first time I understand why Aristotle's physics divides the world into different celestial and terranean operations: from down here back then, the stars look so clean and permanent, they're just not of our world, dirty, unhinged, and endangered as it has been, for almost everyone.

 
Galef type: 
Data 2 - What does it imply about the world, that X could happen?, & 
Style 3 - tickle your aesthetic sense in a way that obliquely makes you a more interesting, generative thinker.

Alex Shinsky

Alexis Palew

It took nearly a year to finish this - pure brutality written at the pace of a suffering journey across the desert west

Ryan LaFerney

Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West is a violent American odyssey through the Southwest. Loosely based on historical events, the novel follows a fictitious 14-year-old called only ''the kid'' - born in 1833, exactly 100 years before the author - as he drifts through the Southwest. He soon joins an outlaw band of Indian hunters who have been hired by a Mexican governor to return Apache scalps at $100 apiece. These misfits - including an ex-priest, a man with initials tattooed on his forehead and a mysterious, erudite judge named Holden - have a taste for blood and death that Mr. McCarthy seems to revel in.

I have since found out that the Glanton Gang that McCarthy wrote about is actually a historical gang that actually went around killing and scalping Native American tribes in the 1850s and actually got paid to do so. 

Blood Meridian aims to, like most of McCarthy's fiction, explore the nature of violence. The Kid is contrasted by The Judge Holden. The Judge is a terrifying character, devoid of emotion and any humanistic traits. He is a giant, hairless murderer and psychopath. The Judge had monologues that displayed his philosophical thinking and his inhumanity that were in some parts exhilarant and in more parts just ridiculously menacing. He is spine-chilling and every line within this book about him will disturb you. The Judge is very reminiscent of a later McCarthy character: Anton Chigurh from No Country For Old Men. Chigurh is a hitman who is devoid of conscience, remorse, and compassion much like The Judge. The Judge in many ways is Satan. 

Blood Meridian will keep you glued to the page due to McCarthy's god-like prose and his dark story-telling. It is in many ways a gothic, bloody coming of age story of a kid traversing the realms of hell. The Kid is literally baptized a man in the blood of the Southwest and it is there, in his 40s, after years of drifting meets his fate - the fate that awaits every man. The narrative closes with ambiguity pertaining to the final state of the kid, or the man. But the reader can only infer that the kid has meant his end.

Blood Meridian is also an exercise in theodicy. A recurrent theme in the novel the issue of the general justification of metaphysical goodness in the presence of evil. Does God exist in the universe of McCarthy's Southwest?

That's for the reader to question.

McCarthy's magnum opus, Blood Meridian is one of the greatest works of American Fiction and one of the most harrowing tales ever put to the page.

Hellboy TCR

A truly astonishing piece of work, there is no genre this book belongs to, it rises above all that.

Alex Buchner

I guess this was just too American for my tastes. Regeneration through violence my ass

to be Frank, I nearly dropped this book because I was bored. The prose is beautiful as much as it is horrifying but I just didn’t like the sort of vignettes that make up the plot. I was far more engaged in the last few chapters when the story was slightly more consistent and linear. Just not my thing story wise. 

Bowie 

Omar AlHashmi

Well. it finally happened. I finally managed to find a book that I had to stop reading without completing it. This book was such a pain to read. It seems like the author thinks that just having gruesome and disturbing things happen is enough to make for a compelling book. which is not true obviously. This book was so infuriating to read. None of the characters felt the least bit human, the story was random and all over the place, and nothing made any sense! I cant believe people like this book so much. Nothing about it works. I'm the type of person who usually sticks with a book no matter what. But this is the first time ever I physically could not continue reading, 1/5 would not recommend

So apparently the wild west was not as fun as seen in movies.

Vojtech

Based on incidents that took place in the southwestern United States and Mexico around 1850, this novel chronicles the crimes of a band of desperados, with a particular focus on one outlaw, known as "the Kid," a boy of fourteen. 15,000 first printing.

Fraser Simons

I really liked this even though it is a very hard book to get through. It felt like it's written in a style that's reminiscent of something like Homer, but just a bit more up-to-date. It gives the sense that you're going to be getting a heroe's journey, an old-school, classic tale set squarely in western fiction but then it subverts those expectations. 

There is no glory or heroism in this story. For anybody. While it's winding some of the best prose I've consumed, it's showing just how terrible human nature is and has always been. How much the America people have in their heads doesn't exist, and why people should be asking more of the country they refuse to view as anything other than soaked through with so much blood and death and overt racism that only the trappings of the nation have been changed, not the soul of the thing. 

It was pretty tremendous.

What can I say. The Judge is easily the most genius character ever created by anyone ever. The novel can sometimes go into extremely lengthy, almost poetical tirades describing the environment which puts a lot of people off but I find it's one of the factors that makes this book so atmospheric. Truly gut wrenching at times and makes you feel sick at times. An extremely ugly glance into an extremely ugly corner of human history where no horrors are held back. The violence, even the most grotesque moments, are not conveyed in a "Hollywood" format to shock and spook you. It's just reality painted in very fine strokes. 

Jeff Brown 

Wow. While this was my first McCarthy book, I had heard about his tendencies. But I cannot imagine a more violent book could be written. Yet, even with his seemingly simple writing style, and knowing that there was to be more gore in another page or two, I was somehow captivated by the writing. I had a little trouble getting into it at the beginning, but by the mid-point, I would have to stop reading just to try and grasp what I just absorbed. I would stop short of calling it “brilliant”, but it is engrossing and not like anything I’ve ever read. Not for the squeamish — I “squeamed” a good bit. Lots of squeamishness. But I will not forget this book.

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

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