Emily May's Reviews > Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian has been on my to read list for well over a decade because, quite honestly, I sensed it was not my cup of tea.

I’m not sure why exactly… maybe it’s that I’ve suffered my way through Faulkner and Hemingway already and had this gut feeling that they and McCarthy would sit at the same super deep literary dudes lunch table, y’know?

But it is one of those books that has wormed its way onto lists of "must read before you die" and "greatest American literature" so I just had to know. And now I do.

Blood Meridian was pretty much ignored by critics when it was first released and it wasn't until later that a bunch of them-- Harold Bloom, David Foster Wallace, etc. etc. --decided it was a super deep and clever book about human nature and violence. I understand completely why it was ignored initially and not so much why it was rediscovered as a masterpiece.

What happens in this book is that a group of murderers called the Glanton gang go from town to town brutally killing and scalping indigenous Americans, as well as others. There is an unnamed protagonist, the "kid", and a dispassionate narration of this happened and then this happened and they all lay in pools of blood.

Lots of people die gruesome deaths, but they were just 2D, just words on a page, because Mccarthy made no effort to warm us to any of them. I was told the book was disturbing but I found it far too cold and unmoving to be disturbing. I would have been more disturbed if a single one of the characters felt real.

McCarthy describes the mountains and weather in exceptional run-on detail. It would go like… the cymballic thunder crashed and reflected against the shimmering water lightning cleaved the sky asunder behind the precipitous mountain shadows… and then he ripped the scalps off all the Indians and left a town full of corpses… before plundering on into the blood-red sunset through rolling grasslands and flower-carpeted meadows shrouded in post-storm haze.

Looong descriptions of rocks and grass and then PHWACK! there goes someone’s scalp...

I could not understand what we were supposed to care about in this book. Certainly not this band of murderers, but equally unlikely all the nameless, faceless "savages" and n-words dropping left and right.

I've been genuinely trying to understand the appeal of Blood Meridian to its fans. I read some reviews, and also some of the furious comments left on negative reviews, and it seems like there are people for whom this type of writing is truly the epitome of beauty. That's fair. McCarthy does spend a long time on description. But it is just not for me.

I read passages like this and I get Nevernight vibes:

“The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past men’s knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.”

It's an eye roll from me.

Also, I’m getting tired of authors who are just too intellectual and literary for punctuation. Great, you know how to not use speech marks and commas. I’m happy for you.