:INFO
The Book That Tested Everything I Think About Violence in Fiction
Blood Meridian is set in the American Southwest in the 1850s and follows a nameless boy who joins a scalp-hunting gang. Cormac McCarthy does not use quotation marks. He does not use chapters in any conventional sense. He does not offer psychological comfort. The violence in this novel is not stylized or aestheticized. It is described with the same biblical plainness as the landscape, which is the point. I finished it and believe it is the most important American novel about what violence actually is.


:NOTE.half
McCarthy describes violence with the same flatness as landscape. That is the point.
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:COUNTER.half
351 Pages

:QUOTE [quotetype:plain, subtitle:Cormac McCarthy]
Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.


:JOURNEY
Reading Blood Meridian
3 Dense and demanding
5 Extraordinary prose
5 Most terrifying
4 Refuses meaning

:NOW
Thinking about No Country for Old Men, which is McCarthy using a similar moral frame with more conventional structure, as a companion to this novel.

:NOTE
This is the most violent book I have finished. It is not violent for shock. The violence is the argument. Whether that argument is worth engaging with is a decision you have to make for yourself.