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"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.
Review
"McCarthy is a writer to be read, to be admired, and quite honestly—envied."
—Ralph Ellison
"McCarthy is a born narrator, and his writing has, line by line, the stab of actuality. He is here to stay."
—Robert Penn Warren
From the Hardcover edition.
—Ralph Ellison
"McCarthy is a born narrator, and his writing has, line by line, the stab of actuality. He is here to stay."
—Robert Penn Warren
From the Hardcover edition.
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt
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Most helpful customer reviews
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
An American Classic,
By Bruddy Dahl (Perth Amboy, NJ United States) - See all my reviews
Ce commentaire est de: Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (Paperback)
I recently saw Harold Bloom, the famous literary scholar from Yale, on a television show where he stated that Blood Meridian was the greatest work of any contemporary American author. I agree. I can't think of anything I've read that even comes close to this novel. First, you have the prose style, which is so controlled and crafted and at the same time flows so naturally that it must have taken years to develop. It reminded me of a missing book from the bible: hypnotic, enigmatic, ancient and at the same time, familiar. I kept thinking of the ocean when I was reading it because of the vastness of the landscape he describes. It seems as if the characters are on a journey, but they're not, unless they're circling further and further down into hell. I think the familiarity of the novel comes from it's relation to violence from a Christian standpoint. There's no doubt that McCarthy intends to have us react to this book from a moral perspective and yet at the same time be fascinated with it's violence. The setting, the wild wicked west, is a part of the American psyche that still takes forms today in our action films and tv shows that feed our hunger for blood and murder. By taking us back to our roots, stripping away the restraints of our Judeo-Christian values, MCCarthy steeps the story of death and evil in biblical prose and washes it with blood so that we see our dark selves reflected in all our ugliness. I compare this work to the works of the great Russian novelists ,Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who always went for the big questions, What is life?, Who is God?, What is morality? and the American Moby Dick which encapsulated a universe. When you read books like these a lot of what appears on the bestseller lists seems so meaningless. This is a book you simply stand in awe of if you're a writer or ever thought of being one.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sie mussen schalfen aber Ich muss tanzen.,
By
Ce commentaire est de: Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (Paperback)
McCarthy writes in such beautiful, abstract, and often confusing, images. I've never encountered a prose so close to verse in all my years, as if many of the passages through BLOOD MERIDIAN could be lifted directly from some of the more dark, free verse of Eliot or Williams.And never have I witness something so gruesome and visceral and completely unfaltering in terms of chaos. This book is something magical, has a pitch-perfect ending, and some of the greatest characters. the judge dances
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Fragility of Conscience in a Psychopathic World,
By
Ce commentaire est de: Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (Paperback)
Widely considered to be McCarthy's masterpiece, Blood Meridian explores the same themes which reached a wide audience in his more recent works The Road and No Country for Old Men (Vintage International), both adapted for the screen in recent years. McCarthy presents a world of chaos, violence, and inhumanity, a bleak landscape peopled by mercenaries, malice, and violence. But just as his desolate vision and descriptions of the horrific violence which characterized the much mythicized "Old West" are interspersed with expertly rich and poetic language, what at first appears to be a cynical and wholly amoral worldview holds something deeper nestled within.The book follows the fictionalized exploits of the historical Glanton gang, a group of mercenaries hired to kill Apache Indians in Mexico after the Mexican-American wa. Throughout the book stands the enigmatic and frightening character of Judge Holden, who many reviewers see as the personification of evil and perhaps the Devil himself. While the Biblical tone of the book definitely suggests this interpretation, McCarthy is as always saying something about the very real manifestations of evil in a world often viewed through rose-colored glasses. Holden is in fact a typical, if exceptional, psychopath. He is ruthless, remorseless, intelligent and malicious. He is larger than life and embodies the psychopathic worldview. (See Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us and Political Ponerology for more on the worldview of the psychopath.) Interestingly, McCarthy associates Holden with science and law. In Holden's hands both become tools of self-glorification bereft of any human feeling, the law simply a means to win, and science a means to conquer nature. But within the Holden-dominated landscape of the West, is the kid. Born under the Leonids, he is the only character with the seeds of a conscience, and even these are hidden and unexpressed in the majority of the book. And as the events build up to the famous ferry massacre, we learn that these very qualities are those which Holden seeks to destroy. Just as in The Road and No Country, McCarthy shows us, in his own inimitable style, the realities of life in this world. The dance of war is recurring, and now, just as then, the philosophy of psychopathy is the dominant ideology. And yet within this reality, conscience still lives. It is fragile, yet it persists. It is often destroyed and defeated, but it is what keeps us together and makes us human in an inhuman world. It is the fire that we hold inside, sheltered against the cold dark of "the world inside the devil."
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