Review: “Blood Meridian”

They rode out under a sky blistered with stars and smeared with old wounds.

Cormac McCarthy’s violence-riddled western novel is book as scripture. It doesn’t speak so much as howl.

The book follows scalp hunters who kill Apaches for bounty and Mexicans for sport and anyone else for the sheer democratic joy of it. They traverse the deserts of America’s south-west, committing atrocities with such ferocious artistry that you begin to wonder why God has turned away. Blood flows and seeps into the ground, into the earth. Carnage rules.

Then there is Judge Holden. Towering, hairless, depraved. He dances, he lectures, he murders, and he writes in his ledger as if the world were merely a bookkeeping error. He tears apart men, women and children. He is both man and myth and possibly the devil.

McCarthy’s sentences stretch across pages like the dying sun. There are no quotation marks. Dialogue bleeds into narration, into thought, into wind, into ash.

Violence is rendered with the precision of an apothecary and the enthusiasm of a mad child let loose with matches. No one is spared. Not the innocent, not the guilty, and certainly not the reader.

You don’t read this book for pleasure but for baptism in fire. It won’t entertain you. It won’t comfort you.

It will disembowel your assumptions, salt the earth of your literary comforts, and hang your sensibilities from a dead cottonwood tree.

A strange and terrible beauty pulses beneath the gore-slicked sermons and sun-scoured voids. A vision so stark and unflinching it becomes a kind of truth.

McCarthy is not telling you a story. He is dragging you through the blinding desert, whispering that this is the only story there ever was.

Here is McCarthy’s testament writ in ash and blood and bone.