Cormack McCarthy
review
Blood Meridian is the kind of novel that feels like crossing the desert without a map: brutal, sun-scorched, and occasionally so beautiful you forget you’re half-dying of thirst. It took me longer than it had any right to—mostly because McCarthy ricochets between bone-simple dialogue (“You seen them tracks?”) and descriptions so baroque they’d make a thesaurus blush. Every time I settled into the plainspoken cadence, a ten-dollar adjective galloped in and bucked me clean off the narrative horse.
Plot-wise, the kid’s journey boils down to a vicious rinse-and-repeat loop: fall in with Glanton’s gang, massacre whoever’s breathing, hawk scalps, pillage a village, ride on. That repetition is part of the point—violence as America’s heartbeat—but after a few cycles even the most lurid carnage starts to blur like blood in water. It doesn’t help that most side characters flash by so briefly they might as well be mirages; aside from Glanton, Judge Holden, Toadvine, the priest (Tobin—I had to check, too), and the dueling Jacksons, everyone else vanished from my memory the moment the dust settled.
And about that vaunted Judge Holden. Internet sages hail him as fiction’s ultimate villain, but I’m not sold. Yes, he’s hairless, hulking, and spouts Nietzschean fire like “Whatever exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.” Impressive résumé. Yet beyond being a walking slab of evil philosophy with unsettling piano skills, he’s strangely one-note—more allegory than antagonist. By the 300th page his shtick felt less chilling and more like the world’s longest villain monologue on shuffle.
Still, credit where it’s due: McCarthy demolishes the mythic “western dream” better than a stampede through a saloon. His landscapes are so vivid you can taste the alkali dust, and his prose—when it’s not sending you scrambling for a dictionary—burns images into your skull. The book isn’t for everyone (clearly not for me), but its raw depiction of manifest-destiny mayhem is powerful, even if the philosophical ballast sometimes drags the narrative wagon into a ditch.
So, call it a magnificent slog: a novel that dazzles and exhausts in equal measure, worth experiencing once — preferably with a tall glass of water and zero expectations that the Judge will live up to his online hype. Maybe one day I’ll return to it wiser and ready to enjoy it more than I did the last time.
context
- Blood Meridian was written by Cormac McCarthy and published in 1985, though it’s set in the 1840s American Southwest and Mexico.
- The novel follows “the Kid,” a teenage runaway, as he joins a band of scalp hunters led by the historical John Joel Glanton.
- Loosely based on real events, particularly the Glanton Gang, who were hired to kill Native Americans but devolved into murderous mercenaries.
- The novel is known for its archaic, biblical-style prose, with almost no punctuation, no quotation marks, and long, hypnotic sentences.
- Judge Holden, the novel’s central figure and villain, is a towering, hairless, erudite madman — possibly supernatural, definitely terrifying, and the embodiment of war, control, and nihilistic philosophy.
- The book explores violence as a cosmic and sacred force, not just a human flaw — portraying war as something eternal, beautiful, and horrifying.
- It deconstructs the American Western myth, showing the conquest of the frontier as a savage, morally bankrupt genocide, not noble adventure.
- Philosophically, it touches on Nietzschean themes of will to power, moral relativism, and the idea that violence defines human history.
- Religion, fate, and free will are constantly questioned — with characters trapped in cycles of brutality that feel preordained.
- The novel contains extreme graphic violence, including massacres, scalpings, and cruelty, but treats them with detached, poetic gravity, not shock value.
- Considered one of the greatest American novels, often compared to works by Melville or Faulkner.
- Judge Holden famously claims: “War is god,” encapsulating the novel’s grim thesis: that violence is divine, eternal, and central to human nature.
- The ending is famously ambiguous and haunting, inviting endless interpretations about fate, morality, and the Kid’s legacy.
- Notoriously difficult but rewarding, the novel demands close reading and usually a bit of mental recovery time afterward.