Rating: 
Summary: EXTREMELY DIFFICULT READ
Review: I began reading Blood Meridian because it had been recommended to me by both my writing teacher and Harold Bloom - one of my heroes. Most critics laud the style in which it is written as unique, enviable, etc. I don't know if this brands me as an anti-intellectual, but I was completely put-off by the style. Call me old-fashioned, but I don't think that style should ever get in the way of clarity. MacCormack's prose is poetic but it runs on and on like a vast river tumbling endlessly into the wilderness where all the animals look on and ponder why anyone would want to write sentences like these that run on for pages and pages and don't stop no matter how much you want them to or how lost you are in the story without even having the decency to give us a comma or a quotation mark or any type of punctuation whatsoever and just keep connecting words using the word and on and on until you think you cant ever read the word and again. Give me good old Stunk and White English every day. Having made my way through the whole book, I don't think I got everything that was going on, but that is not my fault. However, just when things are getting boring, you are treated to over-the-top, Grand Guignol, gory, gratuitous violence to perk up your interest.The story, such as I can make out, concerns a 14-year-old boy, know simply as the kid. The kid is tough beyond his years and sets out on his own. He finds himself in the Southwest where he joins a band of outlaws, led by the diabolic judge, who kill Indians for their scalps. Even though this book is a "western" (it takes place mostly in the 1840's) it doesn't take place in a West I am familiar with. Blood red deserts stretch endlessly under blood red skies. In fact, I'd argue that the book really takes place in hell, because this is not even the earth I recognize. It is sophistry to argue that the judge is not a supernatural character. The judge is completely hairless - no eyebrows even - and spends much of the book wandering around naked. He is seemingly omniscient and immortal. He may be a manifestation of the Devil himself. This theory seems to be true from the first moment the party discovers the judge, sitting on a rock in the middle of an inhospitable desert with no tracks around him, to the very end of the book, which I didn't completely understand (it seems almost the end of the poem The Raven). There are things in the book I admire, but I can't really recommend it as pleasurable reading. I can honestly say that I have no intention of ever reading one of MacCarthy's books again.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent
Review: This is simply the most powerful book I have read. Once I read the last few pages in the book, I immediately started again. Over the years I've re-read it several times.
You may not actually "like" the book, in fact I can't imagine how anyone could like the book, but I can guarantee that you won't read anything quite like it.
Rating:
Summary: One of my favorite books
Review: Read this book only if you are willing to spend the time with it that it deserves. The story itself isn't complicated, there aren't many characters to memorize, and yet it took me a very long time to read. There were times that I literally re-read pages or paragraphs half a dozen times before continuing, it's just that beautifully written. Brief, simple, intriguing dialogue mixed with sometimes long flowing environmental descriptions, but you never have the feeling that any of it is overdone or over-dramatized. There is almost a biblical or mythological feel to his style that is very engaging. The story is rather dark, and has a few disturbing things to say about evolution and human nature - reading it is sort of like watching a nuclear explosion - fascinating and beautiful in it's own terrible way. This book is a classic.
Rating:
Summary: An extraodinary work
Review: The experience of reading this novel was something like watching
my first IMAX movie. McCarthy's ability to describe a scene vastly surpases everything else I've read. At another level, the sound of the language and the construction of the sentences themselves is beautiful and often poetic. Through this story you will witness some of the most depraved facets of humanity; it will be unpleasant but you won't be able to put the book down. McCarthy is hard to read and you will not be able to move through it quickly at first: like most really great things you have to work for it.
Rating:
Summary: Apocrypha of the West
Review: My disdain let alone intolerance for mediocrity is legendary. In the realm of literature my standards are so intractable and immutable, that very little of the current culture of scribes can find their way into the penumbra of my sensibilities. Enter Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian." The first 65 pages of McCarthy's 1985 novel reads like a pilgrimage through Dante's Inferno, with Bosch, Blake and Milton as our delirious and diabolical docents. Though tethered to a factual episode in American history, nevertheless, "Blood Meridian" depicts a Faustian fable of infernal majesty and horrifying invective. A veritable maelstrom of unimaginable brutality and insidious carnage. Alas! The Garden of Eden narrated by De Sade. McCarthy's prose is both voluptuous and carnivorous. Teeming with metaphors--stiletto-like, conceived to literally rip the integument from the skeletal frame of American history. Imagine Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" combined with Eastwood's "The Unforgiven," and you begin to develop a sense of what McCarthy's fictional apocrypha intimates. What elevates McCarthy's sanguinary tale above the current fray is how deftly the author negotiates the universal themes of evil and historical veracity. Make no mistake: This is no morality play. McCarthy avoids degenerating his tale into social sophistry imbued with activist pretense and spurious, pseudo-intellectual jargon, dedicated to resurrecting the preternatural loss-of-innocence fetish. No. McCarthy has crafted a parable of transubstantiated terror and spiritual vacuity. The embodiment of Nietszche's Will to Power chauvinism--sporting spurs and a Remington. The regeneration of values through abject violence. A virtueless vanguard ordained in blood--elucidating the hollow point of nihilism and concentrated evil. In the end, McCarthy reveals history to be bankrupt of moral conscience when definitively employed as a hammer to sanitize & ultimately disguise truth, in the shroud of self-delusion and empire. *Chaperone your literary appreciation and comprehension of McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" with "McCarthy's Western Novels" by Barcley Owens. This taut, incendiary exegesis on McCarthy's style and sensibility, will only serve to intensify your passion and pleasure for McCarthy's paean to perdition.
Rating: 
Summary: Badly in Need of A Writing Lesson
Review: Mr. McCarthy's book strikes me as a desperate cry for help. The poor man obviously needs to be taught the English language: the mediocre story is crushed under the leaden weight of truly dreadful prose.
I haven't read any of Mr. McCarthy's other books, and, I can assure you, I have no plans to. However, if you enjoy clichés, stylistic devices employed for no reason, and the overuse of the metaphor and of the simile, please, by all means, enjoy this book.
Rating:
Summary: Bosch Meridian
Review: Yes, fellow reviewers, this is a great work of literature and profound, hypnotic lyricism. And yes, the influences of Faulkner and Malcolm Lowry are evident: Both stylistically and thematically. But really, the impression left upon one, as noted by Alan Cheuse of the USA Today, is ultimately a visual one, rendered in passages of puisssant descriptive lyricism, reminiscent of the medieval paintings of Hieronymous Bosch. Anyone who has spent any deal of time absorbing these paintings and their twisted, dark visions of various forms of baroque grotesqueries and human depradations cannot help but feel a similar chord being struck in the reading of this work. The question the wonder at both these works poses to anyone drawn into deep contemplation of them is: What sort of world is this? Indeed, is this the "real" West of the time, despite its being loosely based on historical fact?-One wonders-The point is that this is not exactly "realistic" fiction. Rather, it is quite the opposite. In its essence, it is a visionary novel. -- Does anyone believe that a character such as The Judge, in all his omniscience and archetypal dancing immortality ever existed as described here? - No, this book, again presents us with with a certain VISION of the world, and that vision, as in Bosch, is irremediably bleak. As the "expriest" says, "But someplace in the scheme of things this world must touch the other."-This book, I would posit, is a verbal landscape of that place. Can we give this place a name?: With a nod to Dante, other reviewers have compared it to both The Inferno and The Purgatorio.- But as The Judge puts it, "The truth about the world...is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is...a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue or precedent....whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning...." This is the world of "Tomorrow and tomorrow...." in Macbeth. It is the ghoulish "walking dream" beyond hope. It is, in short, the world of the Gnostics, created by an evil demiurge when God wasn't watching, so to speak. This is what makes Blood Meridian a masterpiece. McCarthy manages to capture what few artists in any medium in any age have managed: A compelling and convincing vision of the human condition.
Rating:
Summary: Kudos to a fellow Western writer who has redefined the genre
Review: Being the author of a Western myself ("Bounties"), I picked this book up not sure of what to expect. I'd heard great things about "Blood Meridian" but had no idea that McCarthy had taken the Western novel and re-shaped it into an art form unrecognizable from anything previously written. Whereas in my books I try to rely on humor to get characters through the hardships of the Early American West, McCarthy allows the grit, sand, heat, and violence to define the lives the character's lead. As a writer, and not just a writer of Westerns, I feel obligated to thank the author for giving us a new view of what American literature, as well as literature about the West, can achieve. I strongly recommend this book for anyone who wants to get a clear, untouched picture of what the American West really was like.
Rating:
Summary: An American Classic
Review: Blood Meridian will become an American classic. It will stand along with Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Melville's Moby Dick as an epic evocation of American culture. The kid is Huck Finn gone bad, Huck Finn without the civilizing influence of Widow Douglas, Aunt Polly, or the moral example of Jim. The Judge, a hulking, hairless albino, without soul or conscience, evokes Melville's white whale, a symbol of absolute evil. These characters along with a host of others ride the blood red dust of the Sonoran desert, McCarthy's Mississippi and Atlantic. McCarthy is not a moralist, like Twain or Melville, but he does demand that the reader reflect the characters and action upon the history of violence in America past and present. (I couldn't help but relate Blood Meridian to Gangs of New York, which share both theme and character.) Blood Meridian is a literary masterpiece and a page turner. Note many books can reach that distinction.
The story is archetypal and mythical, but the style and narration are objective and naturalistic, the great periods of American literature, romance,realism, naturalism, and minimalism are all represented in the texture of this novel. McCarthy is a masterful stylist reminiscent of both Faulkner and Hemingway. His language is objective, vivid, and mesmerizing. And nowhere is there a better literary rendering of the topology and geology southwestern deserts in than this book. While the experience of reading this novel is unique, I also think it would make a great American film.
Rating:
Summary: With apologies to Mr. McCarthy
Review: I gave this one star because I am not sorry I read it. Now I can discuss it intelligently with people who insist that it is some kind of masterpiece, and know that what I am talking about: this book is simply just not "all that".
Yes, the text itself is lyrical, and elegiac, and enigmatic. It is, in fact, more than a little too enigmatic. If you don't mind wading through reams of repetitive descriptive passages and being hit over the head with Tone (with a capital 'T') and Mood (with a capital 'M'), then by all means, you read this book, too, and see if you can make sense of (a) the violence, (b) the ending, and/or (c) the point.
Alternatively, for a much more ultimately entertaining treatment of violence (with a capital 'V'), rent the movie "Clockwork Orange" and just imagine they are wearing cowboy hats. Yee-hah!
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