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A review by erickibler4
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy
5.0
It's strange that two of my favorite writers are P.G. Wodehouse and Cormac McCarthy. To one, life is a frolic; a comedy. To the other, life is a seemingly meaningless series of horrific events, the meaning, if any, known only to some dark god or other.
Blood Meridian blew me away. Judge Holden is one of the most terrifying characters in literature. It occurred to me while reading that he and Stephen King's Randall Flagg could be the same entity. Both appear in the wilderness and proceed to foment discord and mayhem among men, disappearing when the maximum carnage is achieved, only to reappear later, renewed and ageless.
But where King is content to be a storyteller, McCarthy aims higher. Every novel I've read by him intends not only to tell a story, but to unsettle the reader with the hard "truth" that the universe is meaningless, and that human beings aren't any damn good for anything but causing misery and death for one another. I would definitely be one of the sheeplike victims of the dark forces at play in any McCarthy novel.
And yet: although I've finished the book, the sun has come up, life appears rosy once more, and there are some Wodehouse books on the shelf. The antidote to a hard dose of McCarthy.
Blood Meridian blew me away. Judge Holden is one of the most terrifying characters in literature. It occurred to me while reading that he and Stephen King's Randall Flagg could be the same entity. Both appear in the wilderness and proceed to foment discord and mayhem among men, disappearing when the maximum carnage is achieved, only to reappear later, renewed and ageless.
But where King is content to be a storyteller, McCarthy aims higher. Every novel I've read by him intends not only to tell a story, but to unsettle the reader with the hard "truth" that the universe is meaningless, and that human beings aren't any damn good for anything but causing misery and death for one another. I would definitely be one of the sheeplike victims of the dark forces at play in any McCarthy novel.
And yet: although I've finished the book, the sun has come up, life appears rosy once more, and there are some Wodehouse books on the shelf. The antidote to a hard dose of McCarthy.