Blood Meridian

Review

Reading this was an experience. Stylistically, it felt like McCarthy managed to flatten the form of the story to match the setting; the plot turned from banality to brutality and back again without any noticeable change in pace or tension. That complete lack of confrontation, from author or character or even narrative device, with the evil that abounded in the story is what made it feel the most disturbing and memorable to me.

The truth about the world, he said, 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 hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.