D E S I G N /// ck

I just finished up my reread of Blood Meridian, and wanted to share some thoughts about it. I'm going to try and write something here from time to time when I finish reading a book:

I started reading Cormac McCarthy with The Road, then backtracked and started reading his earlier books. He's quickly become one of my one of my favorite authors (if not the favorite), but I felt that these other books (like the Border Trilogy) were just his "practice" books leading up to his eventual masterpiece.

I was wrong.

McCarthy has another equally masterful book that marks (as I believe The Road does) a transition in his writing career. Blood Meridian is equal to The Road, and now I think perhaps even better. Whereas the latter portrays evil through secondary characters and the landscape itself, Blood Meridian has the edge because it gives shows us evil personified: Judge Holden. In my opinion, he may be the number one literary villain of all time. And Holden isn't just a passing presence. We get to study him throughout the entire book.

Three scenes have burned themselves in my memory like I've watched them in a movie: the massacre of the filibuster army, the Glanton Gang furiously making gunpowder on the hill top as the Indians approach to scalp them, and The Kid hiding from the Judge in a dead animal carcass at the desert waterhole. Stuff like that sticks with you.

This is a must read for anyone who can stomach it. In my opinion, it's the best novel of the best modern American writer.