Blood Meridian: The Evening Redness in the West

[Tages]

Finished reading it.

Wow.

I don't know how else to put it. The prose is a bizarre, surrealist pastiche of Melville, Faulkner, Hemingway and a Georgia O'Keefe painting put to words. It's one of the most violent books I've read in a long time. It beautifully juxtaposes horrifying images of slaughter with haunting passages describing the stark beauty of the landscape.

And the Judge...just thinking about him makes my blood run cold. Not to mention that ending.

This is one of the best books I've read in years. If you haven't read it I highly recommend you do. Just be prepared to feel its power long after you close the final page.

[CaptMagellan]

Ok. You sold me. I just put in a request at my library for the next hold.

[zombie]

I've never even heard of this book, but now I really want to read it. Maybe over Christmas break.

[Nate C.]

Tages, read what Harold Bloom has to say about it. He is a huge fan of the book and thinks it is seriously underappreciated. (He makes the connection with Moby Dick in a big way and proposes Blood Meredian as Mellville's closest successor.)

[CaptMagellan]

I started it last night and am really enjoying it. I love his use of different tenses, person, and voices. The use of short, staccato, sentences in present tense (with the occasional 2nd person voice thrown in) in the first section was very effective.

It's too soon to tell, but my first thought 30-40 pages in, was that this reminds me of William S Burroughs "The Place of Dead Roads."

[CaptMagellan]

Finished it on Friday and spent the weekend thinking about it.

It is certainily worth all of the praise that everyone gives it. Very powerful and effective. I personally see the gnostic themes that certain reviewers have attributed to it, whether they were intended or not.

Maybe that's because of the incredible 'hellishness' of the world that McCarthy describes. It's a damn fine way of illustrating the Cainite idea that our existence=Hell.

And the Judge was just a bit TOO skilled, knowledgeable, and (almost) supernaturally powerful to not represent something like an "Archon."

And the last scene (before the epilogue proper) was beautifully written.

My only criticism with the book is a personal asthetic one: I didn't like the archaic way of conveying the dialogue. While it gave the book a 'period' feel, I personally found it clumsy and distracting.

I'm sure other people loved that aspect of it though and I do think that McCarthy handled it skillfully.