Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

 

Considered one of the great American novels, Blood Meridian tells the story of the Old West, not the one of John Wayne fame, but the one of hard men and bloody battles, of little sentiment and the willingness to kill men for little or no reason.  It is set in the deserts and small towns of the American southwest and northern Mexico in the time period 1849 and 1850, after the American-Mexican War.

The reader follows the life and growing up of 'The Kid' who is fourteen when the story starts.  An orphan, he does whatever he can to stay alive and falls in with the Captain Glanton gang.  This gang roams the area, killing and scalping both Native Americans and Mexicans for the bounty on their heads.  They are an especially brutal gang in a land of brutality and blood lust.  The Kid is a sharpshooter and willing to kill to defend himself but he doesn't have the blood thirst of the rest of the gang, just the desire to have a purpose and food and shelter.

The villain of the book is The Judge.  He is described as an almost supernatural being, seven feet tall, bald, a man who has vast knowledge but no mercy.  When he and The Kid fall out, The Judge tracks him across miles and miles of desert but never manages to kill him.  The Judge adopts a man who had been displayed in sideshows as a brute but who was in reality someone who was mentally challenged.  The Judge regards him as a possession rather than another human being.

This was a reread for me and I anticipate reading it again.  This novel is considered an American classic and shows the opposite side of the Western expansion, that of the brutality and bloodlust of those who wrenched the land away from earlier inhabitants.  It sets aside the concept of Manifest Destiny and shows what really took place in the American desire to capture all land between the oceans.  

Cormac McCarthy was an American author who many consider one of the best American novelists to come along.  In addition to this novel, he wrote the Border Trilogy books, No Country For Old Men and The Road which won the Pulitzer Prize.  I love his writing although it is bleak and violent and not for everyone.  This book is recommended for historical and literary fiction readers.