Blood Meridian Book Review

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. This book was a Did Not Finish for me, and that would be untenable as a first book review if not for the fact that I am the target audience for this book. Man with compartmentalized anger. One word for this book: relentless. Two words for this book: relentlessly violent. A basic summary shows a simple cowboy story with cowboys and Indians well… scalping each other. When you put a pen to paper, you can make anything happen. Which is why it is a bit obvious that Cormac McCarthy is living through something when he paints these Uber-rugged-masculine characters. Writers want to be cowboys and cowboys want to be…well, cowboys. And just so you know i’m not trashing the greatest American novel, i liked Lonesome Dove better.

If you rise up above the violence, you will find beautiful prose. It is grand and it is sweeping, and it is too much all the time. The mountains are always rising. The skies are always sweeping. The grass is always grassing grassily. The prose is biblical in that— often a sentence or two will carry you hundreds of years, seemingly. The same sentences will take you from low to tall places. The prose has historically been graded as among the greatest and I do say this takes the book up several notches.

One thing i do give credit to the Author for is that most cowboy stories are little nests for big men to get emotional. Not for Cormac, this is full on blood and guts. Maybe he is a real cowboy.

As for the characters, they all walk like shadows. In the text and also the subtext, only their shadow self shows.

As as for plot, the plot is a big nothing burger A cowboy joins a riding group, goes on hunting Indians and Indians come back with more.

The villain is supposed to be the most evil character and symbolize the God of war, but he made all the characters so bloody violent, that when it came to the evil character he ended up coming off as flat because he had nothing else to offer.

Violence is fine in a story—after all it’s just a book. The prose however is what will leave your face bloody. Overall, it is fun and beautiful, but it is relentless.