Book Review: Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

I don't believe I've read a more bloody or savage book than this one. It is not unlike The Road, with it's perpetual wandering, running, but this desolation is the beginning of civilization, not the end of it. The formation of the American West was a brutal one, and this apparently well researched novel shows a ugly and vicious history.

The novel is peppered with strong bits of real philosophical musings, but this only comes after pages and pages of deserts and heat and rotting scalps and ears. There wasn't, though, much story here. We're brought along by the need for survival, but we don't learn much else along the way. Even the tension we see and the odd resolution are unsatisfying.

I hate to say that I was disappointed after enjoying Suttree and The Road so much, but I was. Maybe it's a question of subject matter or maybe the time is just not right to read about this sort of barbarism.