A review by billyjepma
Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy

challenging dark mysterious tense slow-paced
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
A towering, alienating, raging tapestry of the violent, bloodthirsty heart of the American condition. It’s a nightmarish read, one that forces you to wrestle with its foggy, murky plotting and aimless pacing—there’s a reason it took me months to finish. But that’s part of the nightmare McCarthy is cataloging for us, and his disdain is palpable even (especially?) as he coldly pontificates on the situation of the men his story follows.  

“In the days to come the frail black rebuses of blood in those sands would crack and break and drift away so that in the circuit of few suns all trace of the destruction of these people would be erased. The desert wind would salt their ruins and there would be nothing, nor ghost nor scribe, to tell to any pilgrim in his passing how it was that people had lived in this place and in this place died.”

There are a lot of quotes that speak to the intent of this book—a book I might someday understand better—but that one might be the one I latch into. McCarthy understood violence and its roots in the masculine soul better than almost any other American writer.
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