Recommendations from our site
“It’s somewhat loosely based on the history of the Glanton Gang, who were a bunch of murderous outlaws in the southern US in the 19th century. McCarthy is using them as the occasion to think about how one chronicles an unspeakable history, or how one can reckon with a nation that comes from chaos, and what that means for the nation itself…In Blood Meridian, there really is no system at all. If there is one, it’s a kind of debased violent impulse, which is why the novel is both perpetually on the verge of an explosion of violence, and also often, frankly, quite monotonous. Because how else can you depict unsystematized chaos in the long form? Blood Meridian has these 18th-century-style subtitles for its chapters which summarize what is about to happen, and to me these summaries indicate the utter inevitability of the world that McCarthy is describing. By the time you read the chapter itself, it’s effectively already happened, it’s predestined. And the novel ultimately moves towards this kind of dance of the devils. It ends in total bacchanal, with Satan at its centre. It gravitates to what it has always desired, which is true chaos. I can’t mention this novel without mentioning Judge Holden, who is one of the most monumental antagonists in all American literature — a giant, hairless demon in human form, who is present at all sites of human violence.” Read more...
“It is his opus, his great work. There is obviously debate about that, but for people who study McCarthy, it usually comes down to Blood Meridian, Suttree or The Crossing. These are probably the most difficult books, the most challenging books, the longest books. So I risk irritating some of my colleagues by going for Blood Meridian rather than Suttree, and I should acknowledge that they’re both great. But Blood Meridian is really the masterpiece; it’s just such a rich mixture of history and metaphysics.” Read more...
The Best Cormac McCarthy Books
Stacey Peebles, Literary Scholar
“A difficult read that I savour for its wondrous prose and stark vision of humanity.” Read more...
Esi Edugyan on Books That Influenced Her
Esi Edugyan, Novelist
“For me, this is one of the three great novels of the last century…. It’s wild in so many senses. It’s wild in the astonishing indifference of the desert landscape to human practice – McCarthy evokes this more purely than any other writer I know. It’s wild in the sense that humans are animals in it. I mean that both in the colloquial sense, that they behave ferally, but also that they are creatural, driven almost entirely by base instinct – avarice, lust, greed, revenge. It’s an astonishingly, ethically undifferentiated and austere drama which gets played out against an astonishingly undifferentiated and austere landscape.” Read more...
Robert Macfarlane, Literary Scholar
“It’s possibly the greatest American novel of the past 25 years. It is unique. Blood Meridian is amazing, because it’s so rigid in its outlook, so committed to its vision, that it does not care about the conflict of the reader who, if sane, has to be uncomfortable. It is the most violent book I have read. This is a book about a bunch of scalp-hunters in Southwestern American territories before the Civil War, who were hired to hunt, kill, and scalp Native Americans. It follows them as they ride on and roam around killing Indians, committing horrible massacres. It is quite literally apocalyptic. There’s a stretch of about 60 pages, when the only subject is the group, and the most common sentence is ‘They rode on’.” Read more...
Aleksandar Hemon on Man’s Inhumanity to Man
Aleksandar Hemon, Novelist
