Blood Meridian is one of the most unique books I’ve read in my life and it took a couple weeks of digesting for me to wrap my head around it. The story centers on an unnamed character known as the boy, following his early years but mainly his adolescence. The life he experiences is hard and unforgiving, set against the backdrop of the American southwest in the mid 1800s. It’s an era of cowboys, Indians, bandits, and above all mind-numbingly horrific violence. Blood Meridian is without a doubt the most savage and cruel book I’ve ever read, many of the things that happen I should not describe here.
However, the brutal violence is not why I find this book unique and interesting. Honestly, after the first few occurrences you become accustomed to it and read right past it. What makes this so unique for me is that it structurally is very different from most books. You typically go into a book where you meet the characters, they go on a formative journey, and they come out the other side changed with lessons and themes for the reader to take away. Blood Meridian doesn’t fit that description, as much of Cormac McCarthy’s work does not. Rather, we are introduced to characters, we watch them suffer and struggle to survive in a brutal world, and then the book ends. There isn’t a nice narrative arc, the characters don’t really grow and change, and there aren’t really any distinct themes present. What stuck out to me is how that arbitrariness is really a reflection of the real world. We live, we go through a sequence of events, and we die. There is rarely a lesson, and neither karmic justice nor narrative closure are a thing. Some people just suffer and die, and life goes on.
What I really love about this book however is how McCarthy is able to beautifully describe the harsh world the characters go through. I have a decently active imagination, but it’s impressive how he can paint a canvas for you to watch life play out. I’ve been able to spend a lot of time in the American southwest the last few years through roadtrips to National Parks, and it has much more to offer than just cacti and sand. However the characters are often stuck in landscapes that are so bleak there isn’t even sand, but McCarthy is still able to make it beautiful. For those reasons, I give it a 4/5.
--Luke Melander
