You don't need to take it from me that this Western novel from Cormac McCarthy is a masterpiece - there's plenty of other places online that have made the same claim and with far more veracity since it's publication in 1985 than I will here. I'm merely writing this post to encourage those of you who know nothing of it or do and have yet to embark on it to seek it out. Blood Meridian is without question one of the finest works of art I've ever come across in any medium.
If you've read McCarthy's work before (The Border Trilogy) or watched a film adaptation of one of his novels (No Country For Old Men, The Road), you have an idea of what to expect -- it's a tragic, beautiful, bleak, dense and hauntingly violent story. I've only read two of his novels, but McCarthy's prose has an unique ability to make me feel alive in a way no other author I've been exposed to is able to do. And Blood Meridian accomplishes this feat with far more regularity than when I took on The Road.
Someday I'll re-read this one (something I rarely even consider with most books these days), partly because I'm sure its finer points will have escaped me and also because something this magnificent must be experienced again. I wonder if I'll have a drastically different opinion of it when that time comes, kinda like how some scholars say a 20-year-old will interpret War & Peace vastly differently than a 50-year-old would (and some of those attest that you shouldn't even attempt that one until reaching a more advanced age). I can't imagine at 31 I've read this one too soon, but if I have, it was worth spoiling it.
So, again, I advocate all of you to open this one up. There have been recent rumblings about an attempt to film it, but I frankly don't see how it'd be done effectively, even by the great Nicolas Winding Refn (so says Wikipedia which means it must be true despite lacking a source), let alone that James Franco directorial rumor.
After the jump, my favorite passage from the book. Read at your own choosing.
