Cormac McCarthy

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

"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.

Or the Evening Redness in the West

Blood Meridian

Noah Syrkis

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.

Blood Meridian, Or, The Evening Redness in the West

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.

Кървав меридиан, или вечерното зарево на Запада

тази книга ми взе скалпа :О

Allison Raines

You speak truer than you know. But I will tell you. Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance.

Jade Flynn

Read for the Mini Magical Readathon: Visit Hogsmeade! Prompt - Madam Puddifoot's: Start a read with a cup of tea. 
Read for the #makeyourmythtaker Readathon 2020. Pirate. Prompt - Read a bargain book. 
Read for the #olympicgames2020 Readathon - House Artemis. Prompt - Read whilst the moon is up.

Christian Bering Pedersen

Daryl Houston

McCarthy's style is frankly astonishing. At times I felt like the book just contained too much stuff, one brutal event after another after another. Maybe that's the point; it's probably a pretty good approximation of what life on the border was like 160 years ago. I began to feel a little fatigue after a couple of hundred pages of the same grind, though. I liked the book a lot but could have done perhaps with a little less of it (and I'm one who likes the thousand-page novel). 

One thing that really strikes me about the book is that it made me play a movie in my head -- something I was able to do when reading as a child but that I rarely manage as an adult. McCarthy filled my head with landscapes and wounds and fighting, and this latter is all the more amazing because of the deliberate (almost slow) manner in which he tells the story.

The judge is an unforgettable, horribly unsettling character.

Riley

Rough read. I really don't have much to say about this book that wasn't on the back cover, the blurb and review excerpts nailed it. A nightmare odyssey, a journey of grit and violence without point and even without end, really.
Would give it 5 stars but I do value enjoyment factor, as well as emotional involvement, and reading this took more out of me than it gave, while not leaving me feeling particularly strongly in any way.
An undeniably brilliant piece of writing, however.

Erlank Pienaar

Hectic. Amazing. Brutal. Must read. Not for the faint-hearted. Wild West with a sadistic and surreal twist.

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

Reviews

Highlights