Blood Meridian By Cormac McCarthy

Posted by Rosanna on November 15, 2010 at 3:21pm


Blood Meridian


 By Cormac McCarthy



The men as they rode turned black in the sun from the blood on their clothes and their faces and then paled slowly in the rising dust until they assumed once more the color of the land through which they passed." If what we call "horror" can be seen as including any literature that has dark, horrific subject matter, then Blood Meridian is, in this reviewer's estimation, the best horror novel ever written. It's a perverse, picaresque Western about bounty hunters for Indian scalps near the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s--a ragged caravan of indiscriminate killers led by an unforgettable human monster called "The Judge." Imagine the imagery of Sam Peckinpah and Heironymus Bosch as written by William Faulkner, and you'll have just an inkling of this novel's power. From the opening scenes about a 14-year-old Tennessee boy who joins the band of hunters to the extraordinary, mythic ending, this is an American classic about extreme violence.

"Blood Meridian" is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.

Describing events of extreme violence, McCarthy's prose is sparse yet expansive, with an often biblical quality and frequent religious references. The book features McCarthy's unusual writing style; there are, for example, many unusual or archaic words, no quotation marks for dialogue, and no apostrophes to signal some contractions. The media-shy McCarthy has not granted interviews regarding the novel, leaving the work open to interpretation.

McCarthy conducted considerable research to write the book. Critics have repeatedly demonstrated that even brief and seemingly inconsequential passages of Blood Meridian rely on historical evidence. The Glanton gang segments are based on Samuel Chamberlain's account of the group in his memoir My Confession: The Recollections of a Rogue, which he wrote during the later part of his life. Chamberlain rode with John Joel Glanton and his company between 1849 and 1850. His book has been criticized as embellished and historically unreliable. The novel's antagonist Judge Holden appeared in Chamberlain's account, but his true identity remains a mystery. Chamberlain does not appear in the novel. Some critics have suggested that "the kid" is a fictional stand-in for Chamberlain.


20 Parts

Unabridged

blood meridian unb-001.mp3

blood meridian unb-002.mp3

You need to be a member of Times Past to add comments!

Join Times Past

Tags: classic, drama
Email me when people reply –
Follow

Replies

This reply was deleted.