Lest anyone think it's getting to be all Susan McClary all the time around here, with her "feminist" this and "alternative" that, I present you with my most recent read: Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian , otherwise known as "the most grotesquely violent novel I have ever read. Anybody picking up Blood Meridian can certainly rest easy in that regard: most of the legion atrocities committed in this book are related in brutal, bullet-by-bullet detail - although, to call them "crimes" would be to ignore the fundamental moral vacuum that dwells at the heart of McCarthy's border country.
Blood Meridian takes the romanticized, sepia-toned mythos of the Wild West, the legends about men escaping restrictive over-civilization and achieving a freedom to live in rough but rewarding brotherhood, and systematically destroys it in an avalanche of casual scalpings, gurgling pools of blood, and trees full of murdered babies hung by their jaws.
Its bounty-hunting characters, far from the charismatic outlaws of folk legend, are blood-blackened butchers, completely lacking in the notion of any higher virtue than to survive as long as possible at the expense of anyone and everyone else.
The times, far from being simpler, are fraught with war, exposure, and bare desperation. Almost every time I picked the book up, I encountered multiple passages that inspired me to make revolted noises out loud - and then, much to his chagrin, to share said passages with David as he tried to concentrate on something else.
One night, as we walked the dog and I recounted the part about the man dragging himself through the desert after having the soles of his feet cut off, David asked, reasonably enough: "So What redeems this morass of gore-soaked treachery?
