Frank H. (perryfran) reviewed on 6/20/2023 + 1223 more book reviews

Cormac McCarthy died last week (June 13, 2023), age 89, at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was a masterful prose stylist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who plumbed the depths of violence and vengeance in his novels such as "Blood Meridian," "No Country for Old Men" and "The Road."

Blood Meridian is an historical novel based loosely on the exploits of the Glanton gang, a group of scalp hunters who massacred Indigenous Americans and others in the United StatesâMexico borderlands from 1849 to 1850. The gang was hired by Mexican authorities to hunt the Apaches and were rewarded $100 per scalp. But the gang didn't stop there. They also killed peaceful Indians and murdered Mexicans to claim the bounty on scalps. The narrative of the novel follows a fictional teenager from Tennessee referred to as "the kid" as he is drawn into the Glanton gang after being rescued from prison. But the center antagonist of the novel is a vile personage know as "the judge" described as a physically massive, highly educated, skilled member of the gang who is extremely pale and completely bald from head to toe.

This novel is full of violent descriptions of the bloody encounters between the Apaches and the scalphunters. There is violence on both sides and McCarthy's prose does not hold back in showing this. This is considered by many to be McCarthy's masterpiece and he has been compared to writers such as Faulkner, Twain, and Melville. To me his writing is somewhat like Faulkner's with a lot of long sentences and thoughts strewn together. McCarthy doesn't use a lot of punctuation such as quotation marks and sometimes I did find it difficult to determine who was saying what. But I would definitely say that he is masterful in his narrative descriptions. I definitely need to read more of his work.

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