A heavy and difficult book, and not an easy one to review while I'm hepped up on antibiotics, but let's give it a shot.

Blood Meridian is considered Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece, a dark and violent novel set along the US-Mexican border circa 1850. The novel follows a protagonist known simply as "the kid," who falls in with the Glanton gang, a historical band of bloodthirsty scalphunters. Led by the wild and savage John Joel Glanton, the real antagonist is Judge Holden - a pale, hairless, disturbing man serving as Glanton's advisor and second-in-command. He fancies himself a philosopher, an educated man, and yet he seems to thrive on violence and depravity, and is implied to be a pedophile - children often go missing when he is around.

I've read one other McCarthy novel, The Road, but this one struck me as a lot more similar to Moby-Dick. They are both deep, thematic novels focusing on the darkness of human nature and the weight of the world, with the characters very clearly being drawn towards an inexorable doom. After the kid joins the gang the narrative shifts away from him, largely focusing on Glanton and the Judge, which reminded me of how Ishmael fades from view once Ahab and Starbuck come into focus in Moby-Dick. And The Road, for all its bleakness, had an optimistic and uplifting ending. Blood Meridian, on the other hand, sinks into a black hole of utter and infinite despair.

It's unwise to try to judge an author after reading only two of their books, but my preliminary impression is that McCarthy is a one-trick pony. Now, it's a very impressive trick to be sure: lyrically beautiful prose describing a landscape soaked in brutal violence. I suppose that's the equivalent of a stallion doing a backflip on a trapeze. But it's a single trick nonetheless. If you had to pick this or The Road, I'd probably say Blood Meridian - while The Road was one long sad trudge through a landscape of ashes, Blood Meridian at least takes place in a living, breathing world, and thus presents a lot more diversity.

It's a good book I guess. I generally split books with literary merit into two groups: those that are fun to read (Cloud Atlas, Never Let Me Go, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) and those that are tedious and boring (A Passage To India, The Sheltering Sky). Blood Meridian hovers somewhere in between those two groups, just like Moby-Dick: it's not fun to read, not particularly enjoyable, but you come out of glad that you did so. Whatever. I'm going to sleep. ( )

Featuring one of the great, horrific bad guys of all time - the Judge. ( )

2003: I wish I could say I enjoyed this book. Well, I could, but I would be lying. I had to hack my way through; in some ways reading Lacan was easier.

13 June 2009: This review is from a re-reading of the novel, and I have to say it's a lot more compelling the second time around. I still do not like the narrative tangent that McCarthy take about 2/3 of the way through--where the Kid drops out of the narrative and it focuses on the Judge and Glanton. Once we pick back up with the Kid, I had an easier time again. Read this text for its environment and you will be pleased; read it for its narrative and you will be disappointed. Greatly. The Judge could be read as a personification of human machinations--over other humans and over the natural world. ( )

This book was so brutal and violent, and yet there was a strange kind of beauty mixed in with all the blood. Reminded me of pictures taken during war that show the horror and humanity mixed together. I found the kid the most interesting character although he seemed more of an observer than an actual part of the story. I haven't had my vocabulary expanded by a book this much since high school. Enjoyed the sentence structure, though it slowed my reading down considerably. Definitely not forgettable. ( )

Well, Below is what I wrote on my Club Read 2009 thread (Solla's reading and other thoughts).
Aside from this I'd have to say that the book left me feeling puzzled, and not amazed or transformed. I can't really say that it is something that I feel anyone ought to read, unless, perhaps, to get a more complete sense of McCarthy's writing, assuming you've read enough other work of his to be interested. Anyway, here goes:

I have just finished Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. I'm not sure what I think of it, but perhaps writing about it will give me an idea. First the language of it is very beautiful. It is extremely violent. The victims are mostly Indians, chiefly Apaches, but not all. And there are other Indians (different tribe) in the party of the Indian killers. The time is mid 19th centuries when bounties are paid for scalps. There is a detachment in the way the story is told. The point of view character, usually referred to as the kid, is also presented in kind of a detached way. We are told that he came from a family where he was not much cared for and that he left at 14. He seems to drift. He is violent when he in the midst of violence, and perhaps, at first, a little from a generalized anger. He drifts into a friendship with a character named Toadvine, but having done so, he is loyal to him later when they meet up again. He spends some time in an army troup on a mission against the Mexicans around what was or became Texas and south of it. Then he is captured and ends up in a Mexican jail, where he meets up with Toadvine again.

He gets out of the jail by Toadvine's presenting of the two of them as Indian hunters, and they join up with the Glanton gang, which, according to the intro by Harold Bloom was an actual gang sent out by Mexican and Texas authorities to scalp Indians, and the book tells of their actual expeditions. Besides Glanton, presented fairly simply as someone who is simply brutal to the Indians they are seeking, and frequently anyone else encountered outside their group, there is also the character of Judge Holden.

At first Judge Holden appears to be a philosopher, and something of a naturalist, sketching items found in their travels. However, as the book goes along, he is revealed to be a thoroughly unredeemable sort. He is not a frenzied murderer as Glanton is. The one murder we know of is of an Indian child whom he rescues, and the other men come to dote on. Then the judge kills the child. He is apparenly a child molester, and other children seem to disappear and die when he is about. What the judge appears to run on is a sense of himself as a superior being in the way that he approaches existence. His actions always appear to be deliberate, and he is described as good at most everything that he does.

The kid, on the other hand, strikes me as redeemable. He participates in the slaughter of the Indians, and sometimes others, and we aren't given much insight into what he thinks of it. But, also, there are several times when he has a choice between acting humanely, or not, and he chooses to be humane. Still, he continues to drift. His only act of rebellion is in resisting the judge's demand to sell the judge his gun. This is at a point in the book where the Glanton gang was mostly decimated, most dead, others lost. The kid was with one companion and both were injured. The judge was naked when he found them in the desert, and they gave him clothes, but the kid refused to hand over his gun.

This is presumably what turns the judge against him so that twenty or so years later when they meet again, the judge tells him how he is disappointed in him. Even at that point the kid still seems to drift. He knows the judge is dangerous, but he doesn't flee. The most he seems to do is to evade the arguments of the judge after they encounter each other in a tavern. The kids gets out of the bar, but hangs about the town. In the end he seems to drift into death at the judge's hand.

Well, I've read some comments about The Road as being dark or depressing, but I didn't really find it so. Blood Meridian, though, seems truly dark and fatalistic. At one point the judge refers to war as "the testing of one's will and the will of another within the larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence." It could be that when the kid tells the judge that he is nothing, that he is pointing out that this justification ultimately fades away to nothing. I remember being in a group where one college student was talking about wanting to be in war to feel alive. If you need to be in a war to feel alive, you are so afraid of yourself that you are left with a feeling of emptiness. There's nothing noble about it. ( )