Rating: 
Summary: An incredible read
Review: Having read the spectrum of the World's great classic novels, I typically have shied away from fiction altogether. Books like War and Peace, and Les Miserables seldom have an equal in the present-day fiction realm. This book though, by Cormac McCarthy, is one of those that can satisfy even the harshest critic. I first learned of Blood Meridian while reading How to Read and Why, by Harold Bloom. His essay was suchthat I had to see for myself if this McCarthy fellow was all that Mr. Bloom proclaimed him to be. By the time I was half way through, I was in complete agreement. Blood Meridian is a fascinating book whose prose is mesmerizingly captivating, grabbing ahold of the soul and not letting go. It is rare that I find myself in need of a good dictionary while reading present day literature, but I advise having one handy should you undertake this effort. Regrettably, many in our schools today will never know the joy of reading a work like this. I am grateful to Harold Bloom for sharing it with me.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful, but Brace Yourself
Review: I add my awe to the sentiments already posted: simply, a beautifully written book, a long poem seeking to enlighten the descendants of some of the bravest and basest people to ever live. I love the heritage, the romanticized version of the history of this country, but if this McCarthy book was taught in schools, we'd all have a more sober view of our origins. I am intrigued by a book filled with characters that I neither like nor sympathize with; it's the mark of an artist to populate a world with misfits and miscreants and still create something totally involving, hypnotizing, and compelling. Hats off to Mr. McCarthy.
Rating:
Summary: Blew Me Away
Review: This is one of the greatest books I've ever read. I was absolutely stunned. I read it several months ago, and I still think about it everyday. Although challenging, the language is some of the most beautiful prose I've ever read, and the action is riveting. It is a raw, gory, hardcore book that makes you feel as if you're right there with the scalphunters just after the Mexican-American war. The depth of the philosophical undertones is also captivating. You could start a club based around this book alone -- there are so many nuances to turn over and discuss. I couldn't give this book a higher recommendation.
Rating: 
Summary: How the West was won
Review: Blood Meridian is a detached, objective rendering of the absolute worst of which man is capable. It is not an exploration of the "heart of darkness" because it posits that there actually were and, guessing from the implication of the closing paragraph, possibly still are men without spiritual hearts, men without the slightest shred of conscience. The Kid, the Judge, and Glanton each represent three plausible explanations for the existence of such creatures. The novel is a venue for each of the representations to be examined by the reader -- it is a book of action whereby the reader is given the opportunity to somehow comprehend the incomprehensible -- a task which the author knows full well is doomed to fail from the outset. The Kid's violence is presumably his destiny. We are with him at his birth when the book opens and can trace his progression towards violence, the presumption being violence was the only way he ever knew or could possibly ever have known. Glanton's is the epitome of violence for gain, he is a machine devoid of humanistic value judgements -- the rogue idolator. The Judge is the enigmatic philosophic sociopath -- a solipsistic parasite.The author correctly avoids any personal involvement in the narrative since a conventional resolution would be impossible, hence the cold detachment -- the author has no stake or interest in getting mixed up too deep with the inner workings of his characters. The seemingly repetitious description of barbarism is also essential. It is required for the full portrayal of the three representations. If you pay attention, you will notice that each passage gives us something new, shows us a different side to one of the characters. In this book actions speak action, there is no inner being to explore. Even the Judges inane platitudes are objectified, we see his thoughts through his words which are always readily available for anyone who can bear to listen. This is ultimately evidenced when a dimwit like the Kid destroys the Judges sophistry as if he were crushing a bug on the ground. In a final classic exhcange with the Judge he says "even a dumb animal can dance." The tone of the text is never meditative, nor does it seek to glorify or justify the action. The actions in Blood Meridian are the characters, and when the characters are incapable of reflection, the author must also avoid it.
Rating:
Summary: The praise is justified.
Review: ... I won't go into the storyline here, as many others have, but rather let me tell you that this book is a rare experience: it gets you to understand the sheer amoral brutality that got us to our current state. Better than any other book, it presents the philosophical underpinnings of our ethics as people and Americans in the characters of the Kid (protagonist) and the Judge (the character of most interest). The book is rich with allusion, language, and stunning passages -- my book is marked up and dog-eared from my first reading. Go and read this book if you have a love for literature ... this is a book that will survive as a classic. It may not be the best novel of the last 25 years, but I'd be hard-pressed to name a better one. Like any great work of literature, I have many questions about the novel, things I'd like to discuss with friends, arguments that I'd like to have about it. It's a real shame that McCarthy is most associated with All The Pretty Horses which is a FAR inferior novel, but it often happens to great novelists. This final message: if you have, like me, disliked the sappiness of McCarthy's Border Trilogy, don't be put off. If you are a fan of his books, and missed this one, then read it immediately.
Rating:
Summary: if this book is so good, why .........
Review: I have read the reviews. Everyone claims this is the greatest book written in the last 50 years. Maybe so. But there is something I don't understand. If this is such a great book, why hasn't anyone made a movie out of it? I think I know the answer, but I would like to hear what others think.
Rating: 
Summary: The old west's killing fields
Review: _Blood Meridian_ concerns a bunch of drifters who contract with the government to kill and then scalp Indians for a profit. The setting is the Texas-Mexican border in the 1850's. A great deal of the book presents scene after tedious scene of mostly white men senselessly massacring innocent men, women and children who have the misfortune to be Apache Indians. Mexicans who get in the white Americans' way are not exempt from these murdering marrauders. We are introduced to the book's two major characters: a teenage boy, referred to throughout the book as "the kid" and "the judge," neither of whom has a name. The kid runs away from home at the age of fourteen and eventually joins up with this miserable gang. "He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence." The judge is described as a large, totally hairless man, who despite his intelligence and a tendency to philosophize, is a completely violent and evil man, totally without conscience. He takes joy in gratuitously killing a child and defenseless animals. The book is filled with such endless scenes of carnage and destruction. Carcasses and bones of men and animals are shown strewn throughout the landscape as if the old west were one huge graveyard. Years later the kid and the judge (accidentally?) meet up with one another in a bar. What ensues is a veritable "dance with the Devil" with a fiddler providing accompaniment. It is a chilling ending that not only defines what the old west was truly about, but also makes poignant what otherwise would have been just another dime western full of mindless shoot-em-ups.
Rating:
Summary: Don't believe your college literature professor...
Review: The nature of westward expansion is not accurately portrayed in this book. BLOOD MERIDIAN is a meditation on violence by a writer with no apparent first-hand knowledge of the subject. I wouldn't be surprised if Mr. McCarthy has never even been on the back of a horse. By the way, there is a scene in the book that is stolen straight out of an old Star Trek episode (both "the Judge" and Capt. Kirk know how to make gunpowder out of elements found in the landscape). For an authentic tale of violence in the West, consider I'VE KILLED MEN by Jack Ganzhorn. To learn what Western Expansion was actually like, consider THE WINNING OF THE WEST by Theodore Roosevelt. For the horror of war, consider WITH THE OLD BREED by Eugene Sledge.
Rating:
Summary: Cynical & Thought Provoking
Review: Never one to look at the world through rose-colored glasses, McCarthy really outdoes himself here. Written in his usual quirky syntax, McCarthy will show you a side of the wild West to which you might have preferred to remain oblivious. He will also encourage you to consider the men, great and evil, who built this country and made it what it is today. Finally, for me at least, it set off a new evaluation of the quality and value of life.
Rating:
Summary: A hellish vision of the American Southwest
Review: "Blood Meridian" is one of the most graphically violent and one of the best novels I have read. It is a Western in the sense of where and when it takes place, but what it portrays is nothing less than a vision of a nightmare world, the ultimate confirmation of man's sadistic potential for evil. The novel takes place in the American Southwest and northern Mexico in the middle of the nineteenth century. Local governments are paying gangs of mercenaries to hunt down and scalp Indians, mostly Apaches, who are considered a dangerous menace to the settlers. The "hero" of the story is a scruffy, pugnacious, Tennessee-born teenager known only as the kid, who, after proving his skull-smashing mettle, is recruited into a renegade military regiment on Indian-scalping missions. After an ill-fated encounter with some Comanches, the kid joins another gang headed by a man named Glanton, a merciless brute who performs his job with such insane bloodlust and inspires such rowdiness in his gang that the residents of Chihuahua wonder if maybe the Indians aren't better after all. The most physically striking and imaginatively fascinating member of Glanton's gang is a hairless giant named Judge Holden. When we first meet him in the novel, he gives the impression of a charming trickster when he debunks a phony preacher he's never even seen before. However, as the novel proceeds, we learn that he is something of a Renaissance man -- scholar, artist, philosopher, natural scientist -- even while he is every bit as coldhearted a killer as Glanton himself. By the end of the novel, we realize that he may be something more than just human, a living manifestation of the endless cycle of war and death. McCarthy's writing style, with its masterful descriptions of scenery, strong narrative dynamics, and Faulkneresque flair for dramatic scene building, elevates "Blood Meridian" to the highest plane of literary art. Two scenes in particular stand out to me as masterpieces of storytelling: The first is the appearance of the Comanches in Chapter IV; McCarthy's description of the attackers is genuinely frightening, a nightmarish depiction of a diabolical masquerade of costumed demons. The second scene, in Chapter XIX, is (Glanton gang member) David Brown's visit to a blacksmith in San Diego with a request to saw off the barrels of a shotgun; the dialogue and the unexpected but realistic outcome of this scene is, again, very reminiscent of Faulkner. Excessive violence in a novel (or a movie, for that matter) can become cartoonish just from sheer overkill, but McCarthy writes so well that every gunshot, arrow wound, knife stab, and axe cleave seems not gratuitous but necessitated by the requirements of realism and historical accuracy. In fact, the violence is so rampant and relentless that the cold hard fact of its eternal ubiquity seems to be the novel's main thematic element, relegating to the background any hackneyed statement that might be made about the horrors of man's inhumanity to man.
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