It's easy to lose your way in McCarthy's prose in Blood Meridian. The characters and their motivations are almost wholly opaque. They speak in short, inscrutable utterances, alternately in rural American English and Mexican Spanish, and the dialogue is mostly unattributed. The violence is narrated in graphic detail—but it is never explained. The events narrated are connected to one another by practically nothing other than their sequence. The plot cannot be taken as a thematic whole without the expenditure of more effort than I am willing to lay out.

Into that morass of underexplanation, McCarthy inserts The Judge, who, though palpably evil, is the work's most attractive character—in that he is the only one who ever undertakes to explain anything. For the reader, The Judge is a lifeline. His language is clear and he espouses an identifiable worldview. He is a symbol of something in a work where much of the setting and many of the characters are just so much furniture, without obvious literary correspondence or symbolic resonance. In this way, The Judge is as irresistible to the reader as he is to the characters in Blood Meridian. He is the one you keep reading to find out about, because he is the one who might have the answers.

I read this book twice now, finishing an audio version just recently. I know I will read it again, and I know that even after that reading, I will still wonder what all I have missed in this complex and compelling read.

A quick google search of the book will let you know what people think and feel about this book about the expanding west and a lawless time.

Some will say that it is satirical and holistically symbolic of the violence regarding the western expansion of the young US. Some will say it is a detailed account of men with no inhibitions, that become collectively scarier than any monster ever created in the horror genre, or some will say that it is a deep and symbolic book with Gnostic overtones and other historical accounts on every page, dripping with violence.

But this book, quite simply, is about satan on earth. This is a book about the devil, and it is a detailed account of how he takes a group of men and ravishes the country side. This devil is not a brute or some stereotypical baddie, but personifies science, law, modern philosophy, culture and at times even civil behavior. But this is all without love, faith or god. He exhibits all qualities that society holds dear and strive for, but leaves out what makes us our best.

This is Cormac McCarthy's way of telling us that no matter how advanced we become, no matter what new technologies we bring, and no matter how `just' we make ourselves out to be, that without love, we are nothing and we are inherently evil.

The amount of violence in this book is appalling, and it is not for the squeamish. But after that qualifier, if you can get past it, this is a marvelous read that is difficult to get out of your mind once you put it down.

Others have made this comparison, so this is not original here: but this book reminded me of first time that I read Moby Dick, in that the details of an expedition were given in such real and brutal words, that the violence and conflict don't seem out of place or they don't seem to be used simply as a plot device, but as a central and necessary part of the story. The story is violence.

Judge Holden is by far the scariest monster ever put to fictional page, and you are left with a want for justice once this book is done, but McCarthy doesn't give it to you, like in many of his reads, he won't let you off easily.

Justice isn't served, and you are left with your fists clenched and your teeth grinding, but you want to read it again. ( )

quite simply, one of the greatest books of the past [fill in the blank] years. Probably the greatest book of the 1980s. ( )

Oh my goodness... This is a western novel that doesn't sanitize the west like the television shows Gunsmoke or Bonanza did. This novel peels off it's skin and pisses in it and drags it through bloody viscera, blackened ears, and spit. It's what I imagine part of the wild west was really about in the early/mid 1800's. And I'm glad I was conceived later in life.

What I do know is I wouldn't have survived one breath with that gang of scalp harvesters. I can't sleep when I'm cold. I like to take baths. Wearing another's blood unnerves me (not that I ever really wore blood before). I don't do well in the presence of someone losing limbs, especially heads. And I don't spit well. And you have to spit. And you have to spit at the right time and in the right place. Attitude is all about spitting. One wrong spit could get you killed.

So a gang of bad-asses roam the southwest collecting scalps from 'injuns' and anyone else they happen to kill. Imagine the four horsemen of the apocalypse, but more of them. Imagine the movie 'Natural Born Killers' with a whole bunch of Mickey and Mallory's set in the west...

The story follows the 'Kid', a 16 year old man, shot twice at the age of 15, and will more likely kill you than answer a simple question. He joins up with the scalp harvesters and ventures west towards the coast. Many things happen. Bloody and terrifying things.

And then there's the Judge, the hairless philosopher and all-round crazy man. If Satan is ruler of the earth, the Judge is surely Satan.

He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

Death can be creative. Death can come in many ways. And I believe McCarthy has described them all. ( )

This book is one of my current favorites and I'm adding Cormac McCarthy to my favorite authors list, just for this book. Beautiful language, but not for readers who have sensitive stomachs. I would describe it as macabre magical realism. I read more than one book at a time and right now I'm also reading a nonfiction book about urban planning and transportation and cities (okay, David Byrne's Bicycle diaries) which I enjoy, agree with but I found that I had to put it down to get a fix of Blood Meridian. I needed that awful beauty, needed to be wide-eyed by the descriptions of the landscape. You can SMELL these images. ( )