Blood Meridian, Or, the Evening Redness in the West

A lot of carnage, but if you can handle it (symbolically, oh and you should know basic spanish) it is the best book written in last 120 years. Faulkner, Stienbeck, all bow down to McCarthy.

Reading Cormac McCarthy is like driving through the ghetto: harrowing, heart-wrenching, potentially harmful, but at least you don't live there.

This book has no parallel in contemporary English Language Fiction, even if the obvious 'derivative' slur may attack it, as it surely has(of Melville and Faulkner). It starts as a western adventure, possibly a more phantasmagoric take on McCarthy's earlier novels, but by the second page you know this is serious stuff; it doesn't try to be serious and fails, thus becoming...more

This book has no parallel in contemporary English Language Fiction, even if the obvious 'derivative' slur may attack it, as it surely has(of Melville and Faulkner). It starts as a western adventure, possibly a more phantasmagoric take on McCarthy's earlier novels, but by the second page you know this is serious stuff; it doesn't try to be serious and fails, thus becoming transparent; it literally transforms from page to page, utilizing sentences that range from beautifully surreal landscape scenes to wretched naturalist everyday scenes in the early west; from furious Joycean style dialogue to honest conversations. This book touches themes as old as Man and Woman, and the effect is not comforting: discovering, for example, that we do not really not know that much about ourselves; that history is brutal, violent, and humans have the capacity for inflicting pain on others more than any other species. That this history is ignored, or at best, sugarcoated. That civilization is a myth. The expansion west deserved such a work of fiction, and McCarthy rose to the ocassion with brio. Serious contender for being regarded as a 'classic'. The problem is, since it is quite violent, classrooms will probably not stock up so suddenly. f   hide

I now understand why No Country for Old Men and the The Road have been billed Cormac’s most accessible works. If it were not for working backwards in McCarthy’s cannon I would have been utterly lost. The Bad Guy’s and the Chigurh’s of the later two show up in the form of the Judge who if he wasn’t dark enough to put Fonda’s Frank in his place we have a man named Glanton to tip the...more

I now understand why No Country for Old Men and the The Road have been billed Cormac’s most accessible works. If it were not for working backwards in McCarthy’s cannon I would have been utterly lost. The Bad Guy’s and the Chigurh’s of the later two show up in the form of the Judge who if he wasn’t dark enough to put Fonda’s Frank in his place we have a man named Glanton to tip the scales. Blood Meridian is best served with the grit and nightmare found in Clint Eastwoods Unforgiven or HBO’s Deadwood.   hide