The story is based on My Confession, the questionably authentic autobiography of Civil War Commander Samuel Chamberlain, which recounts his youth with the notorious Glanton Gang – a group of American mercenaries hired by the Mexican government to slaughter Native Americans.

We become one of these dead-eyed cowboys riding into town covered head-to-toe in dried blood and gristle. The bile that reaches the tip of our tongue at reading of a tree strewn with dead infants hung by their jaws at the beginning of the book (a scene often sited to me as the point many readers stop) becomes almost a casual passiveness when a character is beheaded later on. The story brings us to what we think is a peak of inhumanity that seems impossible to exceed, and just as we stop to lick our wounds, an even more perverse cruelty emerges. Like the mercenaries the narrative follows, the nonstop onslaught of cruelty after cruelty makes us jaded. Like how the long, drawn out bulk of Moby Dick exists to make the reader feel the numbingly eventless life of a whaling vessel before it reaches its climactic destination (McCarthy is frequently compared to Melville, btw), Blood Meridian exists to break the reader’s spirit.

But unlike, say, the movie 300, the violence serves a purpose – in fact the gratuitousness itself serves a purpose.

It’s both mentally and emotionally exhausting, even in a day and age where television and movies have numbed us to such things. It’s also one of the best.įor those who would consider that a turn-off, I offer this caveat:įor the overwhelming majority of fiction that involves a lot of violence, the violence itself is an act of masturbation representing either the author’s dark impulse or, perhaps worse, pandering to the reader’s similar revenge fantasies (this might explain why the majority of Blood Meridian fans I know personally are men, where as the majority of those who’ve told me they were unable to finish it are women).ĭon’t get me wrong, the violence in Blood Meridian is gratuitous. Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is unquestionably the most violent novel I’ve ever read.

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