November 3, 2009
Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy There is no way to get to the bottom of what McCarthy was trying to do in this book with my precious little capsule review here on tumblr.  There were a few things I knew about this book before I started reading.  Harold Bloom had put it down twice before finally finishing.  Casey had done the same.  And my brother, who I had lent this book to earlier this year, had done the same as well.  I was given vague reasons why this was so - the extreme violence, and a character known as the judge.  I had been warned. This book is saturated with blood.  We follow a young man, known only as ‘the kid’, until he joins up with a group of scalphunters lead by a man named Glanton and a mysterious judge named Holden.  The Glanton Gang murder, torture, and burn just about everything they come across.  McCarthy used the violence in the book as a part of the setting, just like the desert, or the horses.  It was constant.  The horror was constant.  There is an underlying terror here as well.  Things unsaid or alluded to that we just don’t want to admit we know.  These allusions create the monster that is the judge.  We are shown a group of heinous, amoral men carrying out the worst crimes man can perform on one another.  Then McCarthy shows us the judge, saying almost, “Look how terrible I have made this man.  Look how he stands out amongst this group of evil men, even, as a purest evil.”  The others have been swallowed up by the gang and have fallen in line.  They are unthinking monsters.  The judge is different, he is intelligent and can articulate what he is doing.  He knows exactly what his actions mean, yet carries them out all the same.  Scary, tough, tough read, but a must. - Jon Original NYT Review here.

Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy

There is no way to get to the bottom of what McCarthy was trying to do in this book with my precious little capsule review here on tumblr.  There were a few things I knew about this book before I started reading.  Harold Bloom had put it down twice before finally finishing.  Casey had done the same.  And my brother, who I had lent this book to earlier this year, had done the same as well.  I was given vague reasons why this was so - the extreme violence, and a character known as the judge.  I had been warned.

This book is saturated with blood.  We follow a young man, known only as ‘the kid’, until he joins up with a group of scalphunters lead by a man named Glanton and a mysterious judge named Holden.  The Glanton Gang murder, torture, and burn just about everything they come across.  McCarthy used the violence in the book as a part of the setting, just like the desert, or the horses.  It was constant.  The horror was constant.  There is an underlying terror here as well.  Things unsaid or alluded to that we just don’t want to admit we know.  These allusions create the monster that is the judge. 

We are shown a group of heinous, amoral men carrying out the worst crimes man can perform on one another.  Then McCarthy shows us the judge, saying almost, “Look how terrible I have made this man.  Look how he stands out amongst this group of evil men, even, as a purest evil.”  The others have been swallowed up by the gang and have fallen in line.  They are unthinking monsters.  The judge is different, he is intelligent and can articulate what he is doing.  He knows exactly what his actions mean, yet carries them out all the same.  Scary, tough, tough read, but a must.

- Jon

Original NYT Review here.