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 | | Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy ISBN-10: 9780679728757 ISBN-10: 0-679-72875-9 ISBN-13: 9780679728757 ISBN-13: 978-0-679-72875-7 Paperback 1992-05-05 Vintage Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridianbrilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west." Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. | ||
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. | ||
Reviews | ||
Chilling and Thrilling Much of what has been stated in the other reviews I tend to agree with. The writing is superb. The delineated violence is horrid yet so beautifully drawn that it is difficult to put this book down. What is most engaging to me is that many if not all of the events described in this tale probably really happened; and from what I know of that period of time in that part of the world, these events were most likely worse than they are depicted. We may shudder at McCarthy's beautifully lurid visualizations; but brutality and man's inhumanity to man are as old as the Beard of Moses. It is chilling to consider that the pictured acts of the Dalton gang and the Judge may have been even worse in reality. We live in a modern society that has a short memory or, in many cases, no memory, of the violence and cruelty that took place in the untamed territories of the West, not to mention much of the rest of the world. We shudder today when some over heated pressure cooker of an individual finally explodes and shoots a half dozen people at a shopping mall or court house. These events are considered anomalies in today's modern world. The truth is that we are the decendents of people who lived daily with violence, murder, and the knowledge that life was often cruel and unfair. It's unfortunate that I have no time machine to return to that period to see the extent of things vis a vis McCarthy's renditions. I guess I'll have to settle for McCarthy's poetry and his vivid, nasty, beautiful, cruel, malevolent, and often sublime depictions of the human animal and his struggles, both moral and physical, in another time and another realm. | ||
Without peer...unforgettable This is the most amazing book you will ever read. I first read "Blood Meridian" more than a decade ago. It was the most brutal, haunting, and beautiful book I had ever read. At one point the brutality was so overwhelming I had to set the book aside for a while before I could finish it. I tossed "Blood Meridian" around in my mind for more than 10 years before I decided to read it again. I could read this book many times, each time finding greater depths without ever feeling that I reached the bottom. Many critics have explored this book from different angles -historic, frontier myth, religious, etc. All (or almost all) of these perspectives are valid. The book is complex, engaging, and poetic. The characters, drawn from historical reports, are both real and mythical. The judge, the great hairless giant, moves serenely and unscathed through the blood-soaked wasteland. He is L'enfant terrible, an overgrown infant, a brutal killer, a genius, a pedophile, Shiva, Yahweh, and the anti-Christ. Humor is rare in this book and never removed from the horror. Tobin, the ex-priest turned Indian killer, recounts a story where two deserters are found hanging upside-down from a tree. "They'd been skinned and I can tell ye it does very little for a man's appearance." The writing is beautiful, even when the topic is horrible or depressing. For example, "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." The vocabulary and writing style can be challenging, but never gratuitous. Every scene, every word, every gesture has a purpose. What a book! McCarthy is a truly gifted writer and this book is among his greatest works. | ||
Dark. Depressing. Unrelenting. Truly a LONG & SLOW read; twisted descriptions; mean evil characters. No good to be found here. This is the last time Mr. McCormac wastes my reading time. No real plot, just a meandering scenario of meanness, torture and filth. All the men were ruthless, merciless, unkind; the women were all one-dimenstional working girls. | ||
A very good, dark read... I read this in 2001, at the suggestion of a good friend, and completely enjoyed the book. It's pretty dark, but is a compelling tale of a man's journey in the old west. I especially enjoyed the sinister character that keeps re-appearing and could be more than just a man.. seems like the same character turns up in lots of Cormac McCarthy's books. Overall, I would recommend this book | ||
unbridled havoc In addition to watching the recent movie No Country for Old Men and reading The Road, I thought I'd explore Cormac McCarthy more deeply by reading his novel Blood Meridian. I'd heard about it from friends and intrigued for a good story, I dove in. Thrown in is more appropriate, like an infant into the deep end of the pool, from atop the high dive while held by a seven-foot-tall, four-hundred pound freakshow delicately bouncing upon the board to get as much leverage as insanely possible. The atomic splat of sentience that resulted after reading the work brought a self-awareness that I now have truly entered McCarthy's world in as much as his writing syntax will allow. Which is an exquisite thing. Blood Meridian is an astounding work that spans styles and genres, from the most erudite works of literature, to historical fiction, to sheer horror. It takes a story, an era (the old West) that has been fantasized and romanticized to the point of nausea, and recreates it for what it most likely approximated in my opinion...unbridled lawlessness, havoc and murder. Blood Meridian is a work depicting immense violence, detailing the events surrounding the escapades of a young character called 'the kid', as he makes his way westward from Tennessee around the year 1848. He wanders purposelessly until faced with the prospect of adventure in joining a band of scalp hunters destined for the American Southwest. Initially starting with a more specific objective, the band's purpose slowly embraces the means rather than the end, under the direction of their leaders Captain Glanton and Holden, more commonly known as 'the judge'; the band consequently sweeps across the southwest deserts and mountains in a sandstorm of terror, through Texas, Mexico, California and all places in between. Though without glorifying war, McCarthy's style of writing leaves no detail of atrocity untold. The extent to which he elaborates on brutality and chaos reifies his more or less consistent theme of society's lack of morality, or at least the laughable facade of law and order. Which leads a reader to believe that this work is just as much a philosophical offering as it is one of fiction. That there are those among us who can manipulate situations and people to the extent as one particular character does in this story is the most frightening aspect. His insistence that existence of something requires someone else's consent is a highly disturbing credo and is the underlying current to the justification of events as they progress. In any case, that violence is eternal is but one aspect and message of Blood Meridian that's thoroughly thought provoking and engrossing and bizarre and frightening. Read it, if you get the chance. | ||