*Blood Meridian* clocks in at 337 pages, yet seems much longer, each chapter crammed with so much force and baroque ambition as to overwhelm the uninitiated reader, pummeling our sensibilities with its bloody license, its terror-networks of human splatter, its lines of lit glycerin, its miles of pain. Initially, Captain Glanton's regiment of scalp-hunters seem little more than bloodthirsty pilgrims of hate, an ignorance-cult borne of excess and syphilitic mind-rot. But more vitally, they are the war ensemble of Judge Holden's theology of martial gamesmanship, itself reducible to a few happy bylaws:

1. Men are born for games, and war is the game that swallows up stakes, rules, players, all.

2. There is no mystery to war, for war is god.

3. War is thus the truest form of divination.

Most brutal case of Hobbesian one-upmanship you will ever read....

I'll try and resist the obvious and reflexive comparisons of Judge Holden to Ahab and Iago and MacBeth and the Miltonic Satan. The word McCarthy himself uses in Chap. XXII (pg. 309) is "mutant," hypothesizing a creature specially adapted to the primeval wastelands of the American Southwest, a nomadic barrister of martial law incarnate, a pure demigod risen from some antediluvian vomit-bowl, one whose Mars-haunted spirit has internalized the whiteness of the whale, and is prepared to externalize this principle by whitening the West into a boneyard calcified by Judgement.

Clive Barker once remarked that he took it personally when something died, but the Judge takes this precept even further, convinced that nothing on this earth shall be permitted to die without his permission, without his blood-stamped ratification. His knowledge and his works are listed in the insanity provision of the criminal code, his running shadow itself half-way toward becoming an occult artifact. By the end of the novel, ageless and sleepless, he becomes less a mutant or demihuman than a pure principle or Intelligence, a roving nexus of judgement beyond origins or ends, Ares Unbound.

In my own experiences as a reader, the Judge is one of the few authentic father-figures I'd be willing to follow into the desert, a posthuman prodigy whose martial consciousness is lodged in the atavistic as much as in the epistemological, a true avatar of post-millennial ethics that must be reckoned with by all 21st-century readers. As Harold Bloom noted, *Blood Meridian* is far more important to us today than it was in 1985 (or even the 19th-century where it is set), helping us to calculate the number of the beast in, for example, the ruins of war-torn Kosovo, as in any future site of genocidal bombast....

The Kid is a recurring figure in McCarthy's fiction, an orphan and drifter fallen into bad company, yet vouchsafing some blurred trace of empathy in the bloodthirsty maw of Glanton's paramilitaries. It is this shred of "humanity" which the Judge condemns as a betrayal to the regiment, a heroic disloyalty to the Hobbesian principle of universal conflict, in the end providing an apologia for the Kid's penultimate, er, shall we say liquidation?

*Blood Meridian* is also a linguistic odyssey whose shadowy vocabulary recalls the work of certain SF fabulists who construct an alien language to reconnoiter their imagined worlds. (It is not surprising that McCarthy is such a revered figure in the vanguard of contemporary science-fiction; the novels of Jack Womack and William Gibson in particular simply wouldn't exist in their current form without his influence.) The difference is that most of McCarthy's "jargon" can be found in Merriam-Webster's, and the ambitious reader may want to prepare a glossary before embarking on this great novel; my own list includes: acacia, acequia, alcalde, almagre, aloe, anchorite, archimandrite, arroyo, artemisia, azotea, bagnio, baldric, bodega, boleta, bungstarter, bursar, cabildo, caisson, cartouche, chaparral, chattel, cholla, corbel, cordillera, coulee, crinoline, dorys, dragoon, egrets, enfilade, esker, fandango, farrier, felloes, filibuster, fulgurite, fusil, galena, guidon, gypsum, hackamore, holothurian, ilex, isomer, jacal, jakes, javelina, jornada, kiva, lazarous, lemniscate, littoral, malabarista, malpais, matraca, Monroe Doctrine, mortice, nopal, ocotillo, palmilla, paloverde, pannier, playa, plover, porphyry, presidio, pulque, pumice, purlieu, quirt, rebozo, remuda, revetment, sacristy, saguaro, sally-gate, scantling, scapular, scow, scree, scrog, selvage, slurry, solpuga, sotol, spall, specie, sutler, suttee, swale, switchback, tamales, tern, thrapple, tumbril, tyrolean, vedette, viga, vinegarroon, weskit, whang, wickiup, withers, yucca, and if you've read this far, it should be clear that I have no life to speak of...(!)


Unrelenting journey into the darker side of man   March 4, 2001
 116 out of 136 found this review helpful

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.


An American Classic   November 20, 2001
 55 out of 61 found this review helpful

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.


Read the first page   July 8, 2005
 39 out of 81 found this review helpful

If you want some clue regarding the alleged "brilliance" of McCarthy's prose style, read the first page, and then take my word for it: it doesn't get any better later in the book. The self-consciously literary subject-verb inversions, the endless streams of dependent clauses, the literary diction ("The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her bosom the creature who would carry her off.") and the simply incomprehensible ("The Dipper stove." (?)) go on and on for 300+ pages. The crude comic-book violence is relieved only by the pseudo-intellectual philosophical maunderings of the bad guy, who says, basically, that war and violence are the only real things in life and that everything else is just window dressing. Tell it to your mama, Cormac.

I bought this gobbler after reading Harold Bloom's giddy review, which, as it turns out, is far better written than the book itself, if equally misguided. If you want dark and gloomy, highly philosophical, and readable, try Moby Dick or As I Lay Dying. Leave this overwrought, pretentious attempt at fashionable nihilism to the obscurity it surely deserves.


Tales of the Beast told with awesome beauty   May 25, 1999
 37 out of 40 found this review helpful

While this book contains some of the most powerful writing of the 20th century, the book isn't for everyone. I've steered several of my 'frail' friends away from it, not everyone should be exposed to some of the scenes in here. But for those with the nerve to read it, this is as good as it gets. One of my 2 favorite books of all time (the other being 'Blood Sport' by Robert F. Jones). I won't try to add much to the details and descriptions other reviewers have listed here, but I will point you to the source material. Look for 'My Confession:Memoirs of a Rogue' by Samuel Chamberlain. Until I read 'My Confession', I didn't think there could be anything like 'Blood Meridian' anywhere in literature. There's no comparing the writing, McCarthy is simply the master in top form when he wrote Blood Meridian. On the other hand, Chamberlain lived thru the actual events described in both books, and adds some true to life details that fans of McCarthy's work may want to sift thru. I was shocked to find that The Judge is not a fictional character. In fact, McCarthy didn't take many liberties describing him. How could such a beast have escaped the scrutiny of history? Where did he go, what became of him? Is he still out there, drawing artifacts and then tossing both the drawing and artifact into the flames, dancing the fandango or playing the violin, roasting innocent passersby over a small fire?