I’ve mostly avoided books marketed as Westerns. I read the first Lonesome Dove book in high school, but all I really remember was a river-crossing scene with a giant ball of snakes in the water. Ghost Town, Robert Coover’s postmodern take on the Western, more or less unpacks all of the conventions of the genre, but doesn’t feel like a “serious” Western. Though I can never find a copy, I’d like to read Warlock by Oakley Hall, mostly because Thomas Pynchon wrote that he and his friend Richard Fariña formed a “micro-cult” around the novel. And Stephen King’s Dark Tower series features a gunslinger in the desert who eats jerky, but is more of a Fantasy/Sci-Fi/Horror Western with spirits, vampires, and a giant robot bear (for real).

I just started McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, which is beautifully violent. Just to *WARN* you, some of the following sentences are pretty graphic:

“A fistsized hole erupted out of the far side of the woman’s head in a great vomit of gore and she pitched over and lay slain in her blood without remedy.”

That last phrase “without remedy” is what does it for me.

“Now driving in a wild frieze of headlong horses with eyes walled and teeth cropped and naked riders with clusters of arrows clenched in their jaws and their shields winking in the dust and up the far side of the ruined ranks in a piping of boneflutes and dropping down off the sides of their mounts with one heel hung in the withers strap and their short bows flexing beneath the outstretched necks of the ponies until they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and then rising up again like funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their breasts, riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals…”

I hope I didn’t just dissuade you from ever picking up Blood Meridian. Violence is an important part of the book, but it contains beauty as well. McCarthy manages to describe the landscape, and particularly the sun, in striking ways.

“They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a giant red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them.”

“The sand lay blue in the moonlight and the iron tires of the wagons rolled among the shapes of the riders in gleaming hoops that veered and wheeled woundedly and vaguely navigational like slender astrolabes and the polished shoes of the horses kept hasping up like a myriad of eyes winking across the desert floor.”

Harold Bloom called Blood Meridian “the ultimate Western,” as in the last one. In his words, “It culminates all the aesthetic potential that Western fiction can have.” I was skeptical at first, of Bloom and of the blurb on the book jacket that compares the novel to the Inferno, the Iliad, and Moby-Dick. I haven’t finished reading yet, but so far they haven’t been proven wrong.

Tags:   Blood Meridian · Brooks · reading habits · WesternsNo Comments