Blood Meridian

"The novel's unflinching depiction of human evil and the American frontier's brutal landscape aligns with Stephen King's exploration of horror rooted in historical violence and the dark side of humanity. Its visceral prose and relentless tension fit his interest in the psychological impact of extreme circumstances."

"It’s possibly the greatest American novel of the past 25 years. It is unique. Blood Meridian is amazing, because it’s so rigid in its outlook, so committed to its vision, that it does not care about the conflict of the reader who, if sane, has to be uncomfortable. It is the most violent book I have read. This is a book about a bunch of scalp-hunters in Southwestern American territories before the Civil War, who were hired to hunt, kill, and scalp Native Americans. It follows them as they ride on and roam around killing Indians, committing horrible massacres. It is quite literally apocalyptic. There’s a stretch of about 60 pages, when the only subject is the group, and the most common sentence is ‘They rode on’. What is most uncomfortable for the reader is that there’s no space in the book from which you can judge it, no space into which the reader could step to protect himself or herself from this world – there are no good guys. Of course, you can close the book and go away, but there’s one scene of a massacre of Indians that is one continuous sentence for a couple of pages. If the sentence ends, or if it’s broken up into little sentences you could quit after, you know, the 25th sentence, but they are strung together paratactically, and you ride on in the sentence. There’s also to my mind the most amazing character in American fiction in the 20th century: the Judge, who provides theories that justify the world in which these men operate. Also what I like about it is that it entirely blocks the kind of reading that is based on empathy. You cannot identify ethically or morally, or even intellectually or psychologically, with any of the characters. There’s no expression of emotion, no interiority: those men act, and when they act, they act violently. It desensitises you; not because you don’t care, but because the violence is a part of a larger plan. It is not a question of individual agency but rather of the state of the world, or the underlying laws that govern the world."

"I adore Cormack McCarthy, so I'm not dissing on him at all. Right. You can see that you could totally see the rooms. It's extraordinary. Totally extraordinary."

"Yes, it’s somewhat loosely based on the history of the Glanton Gang, who were a bunch of murderous outlaws in the southern US in the 19th century. McCarthy is using them as the occasion to think about how one chronicles an unspeakable history, or how one can reckon with a nation that comes from chaos, and what that means for the nation itself. With Beloved , which I’ll come to shortly, Toni Morrison is thinking about systematized brutality and its repercussions; in Blood Meridian , there really is no system at all. If there is one, it’s a kind of debased violent impulse, which is why the novel is both perpetually on the verge of an explosion of violence, and also often, frankly, quite monotonous. Because how else can you depict unsystematized chaos in the long form? Blood Meridian has these 18th-century-style subtitles for its chapters which summarize what is about to happen, and to me these summaries indicate the utter inevitability of the world that McCarthy is describing. By the time you read the chapter itself, it’s effectively already happened, it’s predestined. And the novel ultimately moves towards this kind of dance of the devils. It ends in total bacchanal, with Satan at its centre. It gravitates to what it has always desired, which is true chaos. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I can’t mention this novel without mentioning Judge Holden, who is one of the most monumental antagonists in all American literature — a giant, hairless demon in human form, who is present at all sites of human violence. You can tell that McCarthy, like Melville with the white whale, was aiming for something truly elemental here, and I believe he pulls it off. If ever I think about the last scene of this novel – and I spend quite a lot of time trying not to think about it – I remember the sheer pitch of horror in that final unseen act the Judge commits, which is the only act of violence that McCarthy keeps off the page, as if even in this world it’s too much to bear."

"It’s another difficult read that I savour for its wondrous prose and stark vision of humanity. I have read it a few times now, and I’m still trying to puzzle out how he fit those strands together so beautifully. It is a miracle of a novel."

"For my money it is his opus, his great work. There is obviously debate about that, but for people who study McCarthy, it usually comes down to Blood Meridian, Suttree or The Crossing . These are probably the most difficult books, the most challenging books, the longest books. So I risk irritating some of my colleagues by going for Blood Meridian rather than Suttree, and I should acknowledge that they’re both great. But Blood Meridian is really the masterpiece; it’s just such a rich mixture of history and metaphysics. “ Blood Meridian is the masterpiece; a rich mixture of history and metaphysics” Of course there’s interest in the region and engagement with the idea of the Western, but most people who have read it would say there’s no other Western like Blood Meridian . People have made some interesting comparisons to Sam Peckinpah’s films, but as a reading experience Blood Meridian is singular. It’s one of those books that, when you finish it for the first time, you think: ‘I’m not sure what to do with that.’ Harold Bloom said it took him, what, three attempts to actually finish it? You have to let it open up, come back to it, read it again, because there’s just so much there. I was recently teaching David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest , which is this massive, thousand-page-plus book. David Foster Wallace was very interested in Cormac McCarthy. You can go to his archive and see his own copy of Blood Meridian that’s marked up all over the place. And I think those two books, as different in emphasis and style as they are, are rather similar. You finish each one and just think, ‘Oh, okay, I have to live with this, digest this for a while before I will really know what to do with it.’ I like that about a piece of literature. And that’s one of the reasons that this book in particular has kept being so interesting to me over the many years that I’ve taught it, studied it and written about it. Yes. The quote often mentioned is from that Woodward New York Times piece from 1992. McCarthy said: “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can improved in some way, that everyone can live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.” So he seems to be someone who thinks you have to look at this stuff. If you’re going to try to capture the human condition in some way, shape, or form, then violence is something that you can’t ignore. Particularly as somebody interested in the American South and the American West—these areas certainly have a history of violence that you really have to grapple with. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a counterbalance in his work; I think he’s also devoted to the idea of human connection and connection with the natural world. But he’s not going to give you that without first talking about conflict—and not just easily comprehensible conflict, the mythic gunfire shootout in the middle of the street at high noon. That’s much less messy and extreme and irrational than violence as it actually occurs. So yes, his stuff is hard to read, and Blood Meridian is a very difficult text for that reason. At the same time, it’s not a gratuitous representation of violence. He does it for a reason, and he does it in a way that works. I think if you want to talk about Cormac McCarthy as an author of intense interest to a certain kind of person, it’s really got to start before that—with his strange little Southern novels and then with Suttree, which is a lot bigger, very funny, and a sort of love letter to Knoxville. People who are really interested in that stuff came to McCarthy pretty early."

"For me, this is one of the three great novels of the last century, along with Lolita and Ulysses . It’s wild in so many senses. It’s wild in the astonishing indifference of the desert landscape to human practice – McCarthy evokes this more purely than any other writer I know. It’s wild in the sense that humans are animals in it. I mean that both in the colloquial sense, that they behave ferally, but also that they are creatural, driven almost entirely by base instinct – avarice, lust, greed, revenge. It’s an astonishingly, ethically undifferentiated and austere drama which gets played out against an astonishingly undifferentiated and austere landscape. At one point McCarthy uses the image of “optical democracy” – by which he means the way that the desert light plays equally upon all surfaces. There’s something of that in the quality of McCarthy’s prose, which narrates the death of a baby – murdered and then hung on a mesquite tree – with the same impassive calm as the flow of a river or the roll of a boulder in the desert. The reading experience is terrifying and astonishing. The main action is the activities of a scalp hunting gang who are paid to kill Indians in the American south-west and in forays over the Mexican border. They are a truly unpleasant group of human beings. It also features a peculiar figure called “The Judge”, who is a kind of cosmic-comic Ahab figure. His counter-character is a boy, by no means innocent, who is just called “the kid”, and who is pursued and terrorised by the judge. The chorus line of the novel is: “And they rode on.” It features this gang of mercenaries riding through the bad lands of the American south-west, alternately pursuing and being pursued by Indians, doing their best to kill them and scalp them, and to avoid being killed and scalped by them."

"Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian remains a watermark in my reading. It's the combination of Faulkner and Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns that gives the book its spark for me."

"Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian is without question the book that made me want to try to be a fiction writer as an actual serious undertaking."

"The Judge now holds first position for "Fictional Character Who Has Given Me the Worst Nightmares.""

"Antihero: Judge Holden, the huge hairless gunman in Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian.""

"My most memorable adult experience of this remains my initial reading of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. I remember nothing of the journey, between my door in Vancouver and the hotel room in which I finished the book."