Blood Meridian By Cormac McCarthy

 

Blood Meridian

By Cormac McCarthy

 Blood Meridian loosely follows a fourteen year old nicknamed The Kid as he joins a gang on the hunt for Indian scalps in the 1850s on the Texas-Mexico border.

This is a very graphic and depraved look at the morals this group of men lacked on their bloodthirsty quest to make money from the heads of those they deemed to be less than human. In so doing, their own lack of humanity is on full display with McCarthy's mastery of prose. It is a sick and twisted narrative elevated through amazing writing. The setting is bleak and nightmarish with despicable characters, some based on real people, who engage in the grossest displays of evil with no remorse.

One of the most vivid and memorable of these characters is a man called the Judge, who seems like a devil creature who is the decider (the judge) of what is allowed to exist and what is not, as he spends his time between massacres drawing and cataloguing the things he sees. He is the ultimate decider on whether The Kid lives or dies, and he does so gleefully.

This book lives up to its reputation. It is an easy 4-star read based on the prose alone. McCarthy is a master here. I couldn't give it 5 stars, if only because of the repetition of scenarios and the never-ending landscape that rarely changes. I would like to have seen more of The Kid in the book. We get none of his inner sense of self or how her feels about anything, which I'm sure is a device McCarthy meant to use, but I still wanted more of him and his internal world.