Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (Paperback)

by Cormac McCarthy (Author) "See the child..." (more)
Key Phrases: didnt answer, kid spat, second corporal, David Brown, Captain Glanton, Captain White (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
"The men as they rode turned black in the sun from the blood on their clothes and their faces and then paled slowly in the rising dust until they assumed once more the color of the land through which they passed." If what we call "horror" can be seen as including any literature that has dark, horrific subject matter, then Blood Meridian is, in this reviewer's estimation, the best horror novel ever written. It's a perverse, picaresque Western about bounty hunters for Indian scalps near the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s--a ragged caravan of indiscriminate killers led by an unforgettable human monster called "The Judge." Imagine the imagery of Sam Peckinpah and Heironymus Bosch as written by William Faulkner, and you'll have just an inkling of this novel's power. From the opening scenes about a 14-year-old Tennessee boy who joins the band of hunters to the extraordinary, mythic ending, this is an American classic about extreme violence.

Review
"McCarthy is a writer to be read, to be admired, and quite honestly?envied."
?Ralph Ellison

"McCarthy is a born narrator, and his writing has, line by line, the stab of actuality. He is here to stay."
?Robert Penn Warren


From the Hardcover edition. -- Review

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (May 5, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679728759
• ISBN-13: 978-0679728757
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 4.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (340 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,655 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

89 of 99 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An American Classic, November 20, 2001

By	Bruddy Dahl (Perth Amboy, NJ United States) - See all my reviews

I recently saw Harold Bloom, the famous literary scholar from Yale, on a television show where he stated that Blood Meridian was the greatest work of any contemporary American author. I agree. First, you have the prose style, which is so controlled and crafted and at the same time flows so naturally that it must have taken years to develop. It reminded me of the bible: hypnotic, enigmatic, ancient and at the same time, familiar. I kept thinking of the ocean when I was reading it because of the vastness of the landscape he describes. It seems as if the characters are on a journey, but they're not, unless they're circling further and further down into hell.

I think the familiarity of the novel comes from it's relation to violence from a Christian standpoint. There's no doubt that McCarthy intends to have us react to this book from a moral perspective and yet at the same time be fascinated with it's violence. The setting, the wild wicked west, is a part of the American psyche that still takes forms today in our action films and tv shows that feed our hunger for blood and murder. By taking us back to our roots, stripping away the restraints of our Judeo-Christian values, MCCarthy steeps the story of death and evil in biblical prose and washes it with blood so that we see our dark selves reflected in all our ugliness.

I compare this work to the works of the great Russian novelists ,Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who always went for the big questions, What is life?, Who is God?, What is morality? and the American Moby Dick which encapsulated a universe. When you read books like these a lot of what appears on the bestseller lists seems so meaningless.

This is a book you simply stand in awe of if you're a writer or ever thought of being one.

134 of 155 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Unrelenting journey into the darker side of man, March 4, 2001

By	Ian Muldoon (Coffs Harbour, NSW Australia) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

BLOOD MERIDIAN is the story of "The Kid", born in Tennessee in 1833, who decamps from the home of his drunken widower father and heads south. Illiterate and, at 14, already containing within him a taste for mindless violence,The Kid begins a journey reminiscent of Dante's descent into hell. This journey begins with a flatboat ride on the Mississippi -shades of Huck Finn - shades of the Styx river where Phlegyas ferries souls into a swamp and forces them overboard into the fifth circle of hell of the WRATHFUL. On the flatboat The Kid is shot in the back and the front and survives. His journey takes him to New Orleans, Texas and Mexico. He is a soldier, then a bountyhunting marauder led by one Glanton. Wolves, dogs, bats inhabit the McCarthy landscape but the greatest horror of all, is man. There seems no limit to the savagery men are capable of and there are many scenes to attest to that: " The way narrowed through rocks and by and by they came to a bush that was hung with dead babies. They stopped side by side, reeling in the heat. These small victims, seven, eight of them, had holes punched in their underjaws and were hung so by their throats from the broken stubs of a mesquite to stare eyeless at the naked sky." (p57) The shock of this is helped by the contrast of the innocuous "by and by" with "dead babies". One has to read it over because it seems unbelievable. One major theme of BLOOD MERIDIAN may be that "moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favour of the weak" (p250) and that man's purpose on earth is eventually to have domain over every living thing on it - man as wrathful destroyer. Towering over the novel is the figure of "the judge" - God or Devil - who in the end is still towering over all, who is dancing, dancing, and who says he will never die. A Western, and not a horror story, but a Western like none I have ever read. BLOOD MERIDIAN is filled with powerful and vivid images -" far to the south beyond the black volcanic hills lay a lone albino ridge, sand or gypsum, like the black of some pale seabeast surfaced among the dark archipelego" (p259) Because of this, it may be helpful to describe its "mis en scene" with reference to the cinema. An iconic Western film that represents a mythical West is SHANE with its noble hero, simple but decent homesteaders and postcard setting. UNFORGIVEN by Clint Eastwood is an alternative and revisionist view of that West where savagery and cruelty and stupidity prevail among the people. EL TOPO adds to the savagery with surreal Biblical references. BLOOD MERIDIAN reminds one in part of EL TOPO out of UNFORGIVEN except that its savagery and power goes way beyond either. We are in the realm of imaginative literature of a high order. McCarthy's style is self consciously literary from the opening words " See the child." The Biblical poetic style is reinforced with an ironic reference on the opening page to the philosophy of poet William Wordsworth - the child is father of the man - where in Wordsworth the "natural" man was innocent and pure uncorrupted by urban development in the form of the Industrial Revolution. McCarthy turns this on its head where the "natural child" who could not read or write was like a savage beast. McCarthy's point might be that man NEEDS education, urban life, what we call "civilisation" to become truly human. What then are McCarthy's progenitors? The Bible. Swift. Dante. Neither uplifting nor enlightening, BLOOD MERIDIAN is an unrelenting descent into the darkest side of man. A fitting work to find its place in the 20th century, the century which gave full rein to the destructive possibilities of humans.

32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Sanctity of Blood, April 12, 2002

By A Customer

I've read all of Cormac McCarthy's earlier books set in Tennessee, such as "The Orchard Keeper" and "The Outer Dark" and I've read his "Border Trilogy" which contained the wonderful, "All the Pretty Horses." Nothing, however, that this wonderful author has written can prepare the reader for the sheer brutality and the sheer lyricism of "Blood Meridian."

The Old West portrayed in "Blood Meridian" is not the Old West of Zane Grey or even of Larry McMurtry. Images of the most horrific abound in "Blood Meridian," (charred human bones, blood-soaked scalps, a tree hung with the bodies of dead infants), all rendered in McCarthy's gorgeously lyrical writing.

As far as I'm concerned, "Blood Meridian" is McCarthy's best book, by far. It doesn't have the "feel good" qualities sometimes found in "All the Pretty Horses" but I didn't expect it to. "Blood Meridian" is the book in which McCarthy makes crystal clear the one theme that runs through all of his writing: the undeniable presence of evil in the world. The fact that he writes about this evil in language so lyrical and so elaborately beautiful only intensifies the horror of it all. We feel as though we have left the real world behind and entered into some surreal place from which no escape is possible.

"Blood Meridian," which takes place in 1847, is loosely based on actual events and is the story of a fourteen boy, known only as "the Kid." Drifting through the American Southwest, the Kid joins a disparate and bloodthirsty band of Indian-hunters-for-hire led by a mysterious and learned man called, Judge Holden.

It is after the Kid joins Judge Holden and his band that McCarthy really hits his stride. Juxtaposed next to descriptions of the most horrific and grotesque are images of the most sublime beauty. Consider this description of a group of Indians, "...wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery...one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a blood stained weddingveil." That's prose most authors would kill for.

McCarthy, unlike most writers who portray horror, concentrates not on the horrific images themselves, but on his characters' reactions to them. I'm not at all surprised at this, for McCarthy is not a horror writer; he is a writer of literature of the very highest order.

Although many people would have expected McCarthy to keep his emphasis on the Kid, he chooses to concentrate on the character of Judge Holden instead. Anyone who has read this book knows it was a good choice for the Judge is the dominant personality in "Blood Meridian" and all the other characters in this book are defined only in relation to the Judge. It is also the Judge who exemplifies McCarthy's major themes and it is he (the Judge) who becomes a metaphorical and spiritual father to all of McCarthy's later characters.

This is not a typical "Western novel," not even a very, very good "Western novel." In this book, the line between the victims the perpetrators of evil is subtlely drawn...if it is drawn at all. McCarthy seems to be telling us that all men are villains, all men are perpetrators, all men are bloodthirsty...if only the reward is high enough. And for some, evil, itself is its own reward.

I am giving nothing away by saying that the ending of this book is a sophisticated and stylistic masterpiece involving both the Judge and the Kid. The last image we have of the Judge is one that epitomizes the sheer lunacy of the man. In a saloon where a trained bear dances on the stage, we see the Judge, "...naked, dancing...He says that he will never die." In a beautiful and enigmatic epilogue, however, McCarthy skillfully denies the Judge the last word in the novel.

This is a sophisticated and complex book, far more complex that it would appear on the surface or even after one reading. It is filled with the Faulknerian prose that has become a McCarthy trademark (though McCarthy employed it less in "The Border Trilogy"). These convoluted sentences, (in my opinion, far better than anything Faulkner ever wrote), can be difficult, since they contain within them the seed of all of McCarthy's writing.

This brilliant novel is more than just a book; it is an experience. It is an experience of horror, of beauty, of the insanity of man. Set in a time when man attempted to sanctify himself in the blood of other men, this is, without a doubt the rawest exposition of horror I have ever read, yet, at the same time, it is probably the most beautiful book I have ever read as well. It is something that simply defies description. Read it for yourself and see.