Blood Meridian (original 1985; edition 1994)

The Road was wretched and hopeless, but humans behave inhumanely in extreme conditions. Child of God was wretched but was just one monstrous person. Blood Meridian might be more wretched than The Road (if not as desolate of hope) because it's many people choosing to act inhumanely. To borrow a phrase (from the book's last dialogue), "Good God Almighty."

As ever, Cormac McCarthy awes me with the contrast between the unschooled dialect of his characters and the masterful craft in his narration. And his words! I don't have immediate access to an OED, but did he invent "thrapple" as a portmanteau of throat and adam's apple? "Tainture" from paint and tincture? "Laggard" from lag and haggard? "Pyrolatrous" instead of idolatrous? Also, someone "scapples" a pictograph from a rockface instead of scraping it. Pandemoniac! I love a really fitting neologism.

He describes heat as "crenellated." As a figure of speech, I don't get it, but maybe I haven't been in the desert, the "siliceous griddle," enough. Let's keep it that way. One that I did get, that stunned me with its perfection, was, to describe the ground after a massacre, "frail black rebuses of blood." Who will be left to read the tale? And another: "terra damnata."

I have, in the past three months read or reread or relistened to a few McCarthys -- Child of God, The Road, All the Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian -- and I need to space him out. In the first chapters of The Crossing he writes something like "Ahead of him the mountains were blinding white in the sun. They looked new born out of the hand of some improvident god who'd perhaps not even puzzled out a use for them." That book was only my second McCarthy and that passage blew my skirt up (so much that I memorized it). I still think he is a rare artisan of American prose, but sadly some of his phrasing now seems repetitious.

When I mentioned that to my husband, he asked, "Like with the coin?" No. The coin -- the cointoss for Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, the blank, the die, and the mint in the great-aunt's speech in All the Pretty Horses -- is a recurring motif in his books, and that's fine. But when a passage strikes me as much as the one in The Crossing did, to read about newly formed mountains and itinerant gods in other books seems less magically inventive and more rote to me. I don't want McCarthy to seem rote. ( )

Holy cannolli, this was definitely one of the hardest books I've read in a while. Not only because it was a difficult writing style but because it was so graphic and gut wrenching.

This story follows the adventures of "the kid" and "the judge" as they wreak havoc across Mexico and the American border. It's loosely based off historical fact which makes it all the more disturbing. When the fourteen year old kid falls in with the judge and a group of other ruthless men he finds out firsthand what the price of Indian scalps are worth. The story mainly takes place over a year and chronicles the massacres, debauchery, and savagery that this band of men conflict on many innocent and other savage men. The writing style is so graphic and detailed that you feel as if you're with them in this mid-nineteenth horror story.

It's a rough read but I can easily understand why it's been chosen as one of the top one hundred books of all time. McCarthy vividly brings to life one of the most ruthless and captivating stories of all time. ( )

One of these Halloweens, I'm going to dress up as Judge Holden. ( )

Gristly, gory, harsh, and perfect for the train. ( )

Holy shit. I still feel a little sick after putting this down. But I'm beginning to figure out what McCarthy was trying to do in this unbelievably violent book. "It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. ... As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. ... War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god." ( )