Blood Meridian
Something that I don’t need in my life: a brutal gang of scalphunters intent on superfluous violence roaming the United States-Mexico borderlands in 1849. I’m uninterested. To be honest, I don’t like Westerns and I never have. In my opinion, they tend to be too slow-paced, I get annoyed with the narrator’s drawl, there’s too much landscape description for my liking, I don’t relate to their plight, and every little detail feels like a trope. I gave Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy a chance because...it’s Cormac McCarthy. I never read All the Pretty Horses when it was assigned in high school (Sorry, Mr. Wood) and I also never got around to The Road (mostly because I used to confuse it with On the Road by Kerouac). No Country for Old Men is a phenomenal movie, but I haven’t read the book.
Basically, I read Blood Meridian because, like in the case of White Teeth, reading it allowed me to scratch off part of a poster. We’re all suckers for scratch-offs, admit it.
The most impressive aspect of the novel is its historical accuracy. Blood Meridian follows a teenager referred to as “the kid” as he gets caught up in the Glanton Gang. The gang originally kills Native Americans for bounty hunting; soon, they devolve into killing anyone and everyone for sport. Apparently, the Glanton Gang existed. They are all a bunch of morally devoid assholes and the only whisper of a moral compass lies in “the kid”. It’s a very quiet whisper.
Am I missing something? Blood Meridian was the biggest struggle for me to trudge through since Naked Lunch (which isn’t a novel, it’s vomit on some pages). McCarthy is clearly talented--his sentences are symbolic and he sure knows how to describe the countryside. But the book is 330 pages of murder and not much else, plot-wise.
I do not have a problem with the graphic violence; we’ve all been desensitized by the Saw movies and serial killer podcasts. Instead, I found the violence monotonous; again, I am uninterested. The crew seems to murder because they are bored and I, in turn, am bored. *Gang encounters large group of Native Americans. Kills them mercilessly. Gang encounters another large group of Native Americans. Kills them mercilessly. Gang encounters another large group of Native Americans. Kills them mercilessly*. I wonder what happens next??!?
There are countless novels and movies that contain violence and manage to use that violence to a creative end. For me, Blood Meridian has violence without the creatively satisfying payoff. Blood Meridian receives 1 out of 5 flames.
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