Review: Blood Meridian

Spoilers in the details tags.

Everyone's favorite punctuation and quotation mark hater depicts a beautiful and dreadful Wild West as an unliveable proto-nuclear wasteland where the bones of humans and their stock and carts litter dry pan and dunes and deserts and so many arrayos and lightning smears blue flames across everything and the faces of Glanton's gang and their horses and their bridles and just anything that could be described as being covered in blue flames is covered in blue flames and did I mention the arrayos and high mountain passes and heat and cold and heat and cold and buzzards and ten bajillion species of desert shrub and tree and I don't know what any of them look like.

Jokes aside, that guy with a broken comma on his keyboard does a great job of elevating the landscape of modern Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and north-western states of Mexico into something mythic, with supernatural lightshows at night, illusory cities during the day, jagged mountain passes, violent blizzards, baked and cracked pan, sand fine enough to pass through a sieve, and endless desert. There's a lot of description in the landscape, and I can recommend both taking the time to really build a mental image of it, and skipping it when you don't feel like it.

There's also a great sense of bleakness and sorrow to the hamlets and cities passed through (the Spanish words were often used, but I can't remember any of them); they're often in a state of abandonment or decay. Life isn't easy outside the major settlements, if at all sustainable. I can confidently say that if I had any romantic ideas about the Wild West™, they've been thoroughly dashed.

I enjoyed the perspective mechanic employed; when the kid is alone or in a small group, or when there is downtime, then the actions and personalities of individual people are made explicit, but often, Glanton's gang is coalesced into a singular entity, their debauchery, suffering, and crimes shared like a 1840s Walmart Black Friday mob.

The Judge is something else entirely. Is he the devil, a demon, a god, or just an incredibly gifted egomaniac? Regardless of the truth, he's both entertaining and horrifying, a learned scholar and cold-blooded killer, the adjective being especially pertinent here since many in Glanton's gang, the kid included, tend to be quite hot-blooded and lash out to perceived or actual slights, or as a method of venting frustration, whereas the Judge is always calm and reserved, even when

throwing puppies into a river or scalping a child he's been caring for.

You get glimmers here and there of how absolutely terrifying it must be to face him, such as when he

crushes someone's head against a wall while smiling

, but it doesn't become fully apparent just how much of a horror-genre monster he is until

the Jakes.

I liken Holden to a premonitionary and predestination vulture; foresmelling death and follows its yet-untraced tracks, gorging himself on violence itself, never the instigator but always the beneficiary; he was waiting for Glanton's gang in the desert not because he knew they would be there, but because he could see the arriving potential, the scent of death not-yet-occured.

He didn't stop the knife-wielder in the bar because he knew how it would escalate if he didn't and did I mention he crushes someone's skull against a wall? Scary man.

One scene I really appreciated was

the altercation near the end with a child not unlike the man in his youth, highlighting how he's become more patient and less inclined to rankled fur and insult; he's not a fundamentally good person now, just world-weary and mellowed.

Blood Meridian is a gruesome and beautiful book that's definitely put a large sway of the southern US and northern Mexico on my modern-day visit list, and my time-machine never-visit list.