Blood Meridian

[Anonymous No.10606617]

Has anyone read this?

HO
LEE
FUCK

[Anonymous No.10606624]

>>10606617
I heard its like Stephen King on steroids

[Anonymous No.10606631]

I like it when they all have a bro-piss together and use their piss to make ammo and then they stand on top of a volcano and shoot at all the indians running down the volcano. 100% epic

[Anonymous No.10606641]

>>10606617
Any books similar to this in regards to the killing of injuns.

[Anonymous No.10606646]

>>10606617
>Has anyone read this
Who the fuck is Cormac McCarthy?
BLOOD MERIDIAN, what an edgy title.
Did you buy this off the best-seller shelf at Costco?

[Anonymous No.10606649]

>>10606624

That doesn't even scratch the surface

>The captain watched through the glass.
>I suppose they’ve seen us, he said.
>They’ve seen us.
>How many riders do you make it?
>A dozen maybe.
>The captain tapped the instrument in his gloved hand.
>They dont seem concerned, do they?
>No sir. They dont.
>The captain smiled grimly. We may see a little sport here before the day is out.
>The first of the herd began to swing past them in a pall of yellow dust, rangy slatribbed cattle with horns that grew agoggle and no two alike and small thin mules coalblack that shouldered one another and reared their malletshaped heads above the backs of the others and then more cattle and finally the first of the herders riding up the outer side and keeping the stock between themselves and the mounted company. Behind them came a herd of several hundred ponies. The sergeant looked for Candelario. He kept backing along the ranks but he could not find him. He nudged his horse through the column and moved up the far side. The lattermost of the drovers were now coming through the dust and the captain was gesturing and shouting. The ponies had begun to veer off from the herd and the drovers were beating their way toward this armed hides the painted chevrons and the hands and rising suns and birds and fish of every device like the shade of old work through sizing on a canvas and now too you could hear above the pounding of the unshod hooves the piping of the quena, flutes made from human bones, and some among the company had begun to saw back on their mounts and some to mill in confusion when up from the offside of those ponies there rose a fabled horde of mounted lancers and archers bearing shields bedight with bits of broken mirrorglass that cast a thousand unpieced suns against the eyes of their enemies.

...

[Anonymous No.10606651]

>>10606617
>Has anyone read this?
gosh no, this book has never been mentioned on this board before. thank you for bringing it to our attention

[Anonymous No.10606659]

>>10606649

>A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brim tone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

>Oh my god, said the sergeant.

>A rattling drove of arrows passed through the company and men tottered and dropped from their mounts. Horses were rearing and plunging and the mongol hordes swung up along their flanks and turned and rode full upon them with lances.

[Anonymous No.10606991]

>>10606624
>>10606631
>>10606646
i'm out

[Anonymous No.10607079]

>>10606617
Did you catch the necrophilia? It happens so fast every one misses it.

[Anonymous No.10607107]

Currently reading it. It took me like 5 times to get the first page as English is not my native language. Also, McCarthy mistakes pinole for "piñole".

[Anonymous No.10607162]

The scene where Glanton has his head split open by the injuns is one that I think about often. Been 7 years since I first read the book and now when I flick back through it there are many parts I have forgotten. I think it’s just because that scene happens so abruptly and matter of fact. That, and the part where David Brown ( I think it was him?)..swings the injun baby round by the ankle and smashes it’s head against a rock. Two of the rare moments in be been genuinely shocked by literature.

[Anonymous No.10607199]

Good, but overrated.

[Anonymous No.10607227]

>>10607107

He wrote it in 1985. You still can't type n~ on a modern keyboard, much less his probable pos desktop back then.


He knows the letter. He can't communicate it.

>>10607162

I paused at the vultures in the church. The rotting dead in a lake of blood. That one got me.

[Anonymous No.10607490]

>>10606646
>Best-selller
>Blood Meridian

No way soyboy.

[Anonymous No.10607576]

>>10607162
It was one of the Delawares who “dashed an infant’s head on a rock”. Notice your description was more detailed than the book’s.
>>10607107
I think Corncob has a vendetta for an old grammar teacher he had in his youth. There is a good case to be made he deliberately misspells some words. He has declared war on quotation marks. He uses archaic words and gives them meanings they never had before. He never uses exclamation marks, and sometimes he doesn’t even use question marks a lot of the time, substituting them with periods in interrogative sentence. Maybe he was raped by a grammar teacher. It would explain a lot about his books.

[Anonymous No.10608063]

>>10606617
Woah...
I love corncobs, spitting and le edgy violence....
This is so deep

[Anonymous No.10608381]

good? BAD

[Anonymous No.10609142]

>>10606991
>i'm out
But the second one actually happens and is 100% true...did you even read the book you pseud?

[Anonymous No.10609171]

>Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat. Above all else they appeared wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all.
Why the fuck would I even write after reading a passage like that? I remember reading it a few times, putting down the book and not even picking it up for the rest of the day. He has prose that sits on your chest.

[Anonymous No.10609219]

>>10607576
>There is a good case to be made he deliberately misspells some words.
He has an editor (who's job I do not envy) so you can rest assured every mistake is intentional. Also
>Maybe he was raped by a grammar teacher
top kek

[Anonymous No.10609651]

>>10607227
>>10607576

What I meant was he wrote "piñole" instead of pinole. Piñole is not a thing, while pinole is a traditional sweet powder made of sugar, cinnamon, vanilla, maze, etc. He in fact went the extra mile and added a silly "ñ" for no reason. But I guess in the context of BD it makes sense or whatever, since many words are mispronounced. I'm Mexican, I've eaten pinole lol.

[Anonymous No.10609661]

ah, blood meridian, monsieur that novel is the sark and chaparral of literature, the filament whereon rode the remuda of highbrow, corraled out of some destitute hacienda upon the arroya, quirting and splurting with main and with pyrolatrous coagulate of lobated grandiloquence. our eyes rode over the pages, monsieur, of that slatribed azotea like argonauts of suttee, juzgados of swole, bights and systoles of walleyed and tyrolean and carbolic and tectite and scurvid and querent and creosote and scapular malpais and shellalagh. we scalped, monsieur, the gantlet of its esker and led our naked bodies into the rebozos of its mennonite and siliceous fauna, wallowing in the jasper and the carnelian like archimandrites, teamsters, combers of cassinette scoria, centroids of holothurian chancre, with pizzles of enfiladed indigo panic grass in the saltbush of our vigas, true commodores of the written page, rebuses, monsieur, we were the mygale spiders too and the devonian and debouched pulque that settled on the frizzen studebakers, listening the wolves howling in the desert while we saw the judge rise out of a thicket of corbelled arches, whinstone, cairn, cholla, lemurs, femurs, leantos, moonblanched nacre, uncottered fistulas of groaning osnaburg and kelp, isomers of fluepipe and halms awap of griddle, guisado, pelancillo.

[Anonymous No.10609673]

>>10609651
It could be the characters' expecting it to be pronounced with a certain spanish twang.
Can't remember it from the book, though.

[Anonymous No.10609704]

>>10606646
>Did you buy this off the best-seller shelf at Costco?
kek

[Anonymous No.10609760]

>>10609673
It appears twice (chapter VI page 78 and chapter XXI page 313), we get both from the narrator. Funnily the ebook edition has the correct spelling. Not that any of this matters anyway lol

[Anonymous No.10609800]

>>10609760
This sounds like autism but I respect that

[Anonymous No.10610107]

>>10607199
It's really not desu. It deserves its place as one of the greatest works of the 20th century

[Anonymous No.10610123]

>>10609171
And this coming from a man who barely reads novels at all is astounding

[Anonymous No.10610138]

>>10609219
Apparently his editor has most of her suggestions rejected. Her job is apparently just to check for mistakes mostly while almost all stylistic suggestions aren't adopted by McCarthy

[Anonymous No.10610149]

>>10609760
Could be a typo. My copy doesn't have that spelling.

[Anonymous No.10610202]

>>10606631
personally i liked when the indian was swinging two babies by the feet and smashing them into the rocks.

[Anonymous No.10610226]

>>10610202
Fun fact.

[Anonymous No.10610260]

>>10609171
this is impressive? go read a thesaurus, that prose will sit on your chest

[Anonymous No.10610301]

>>10610260
“crenellated” is the only word in that passage you could justifiably say you don’t know as a well-read adult.

[Anonymous No.10610363]

>>10609171
McCarthy's prose is fun in that "lol this fucking guy" kinda way. Sorta like Lovecraft

[Anonymous No.10610398]

>>10609651
He learned Spanish just for the sake of writing the book, so he wasn't a native speaker or anything. Probably just human error on his part.

[Anonymous No.10610470]

>>10610149
which edition you do have? Mine's Vintage Books (352 pages), the newest one I think.

[Anonymous No.10610489]

My personal favorite.

[Anonymous No.10610761]

>>10610470
Posting from work and too lazy to google then but my edition's an older version (not original or anything, but bought it about 10 years ago)

[Anonymous No.10610770]

>>10610260
It's not impressive because of the vocabulary itself, it's impressive because of how he uses the words. You can't honestly say you don't see that with any self-respect can you?

[Anonymous No.10610782]

>>10610489
Child of God was the first time I ever heard anyone refer to a car as 'niggerized' and I laughed as well as thinking what an effective description it was
I love this man

[Anonymous No.10610936]

>>10610782
I just finished Child of God and that passage really stuck out to me because he said that from the perspective of the narrator, and later refers to the retarded toddler as a cretin. McCarthy almost wants you to think like you know you shouldn’t-but you think you should. His writing can be so odd with how it forces the reader to be honest with their own prejudice. I really wonder what goes on in that man’s head.

[Anonymous No.10610979]

>>10609142
this is 9/10, you held so strongly that he had to submit even tho you really should be scalped and fed to injuns

[Anonymous No.10611064]

ya it pwns

[Anonymous No.10611068]

>>10610936
I mean it's an accurate and succinct way of describing those cars. It was a really good choice of word invention. I'm not sure it's prejudiced as such, since everyone immediately knows the exact style of car he's talking about as well as setting the tone.
I'd also question quite strongly whether there's really any distinction between the narrator and the characters in his books. Most obviously Blood Meridian.

[Anonymous No.10611108]

>>10611068
It is an accurate and succinct way of describing those cars. Is his assessment of the retard child an accurate and succinct way of describing him? As a cretin familiar with the lowest dwellings of the house, familiar of cockroaches, with a face covered in crud? Later on he refers to the black in the cell across from Lester as a nigger, bear in mind “a black” would have been just as succinct. I consider your point about the distinction between the narrator and the characters and I remember that the narrator does his best in humanizing Lester with the child of god creed, him being a descendant of Adam like all others but we all know he sets Lester apart from the others, hence one of McCarthy’s favorite words- “reprobate”, a word he frequently uses to describe folks just a little different from us civilized folk.

[Anonymous No.10611130]

>>10609651
>>10609760

Besides this error, he has very good spanish. Good syntaxis and grammar, in my experience most english speakers that learn spanish tend to have a problem with spanish syntaxis, and genders but that's another story. I'm also Mexican. I've read the novel about two years ago so you've made me check, I have this edition and, while the page number is different than the one you posted, it does have that spelling mistake. Might be the edition then.

[Anonymous No.10611131]

Fuck, am I the only one that hated this novel? It felt so repetitive and tryhard. What's the need to go through the dessert and describe it ten times per chapter? Not to mention every single character had little to no personality whatsoever, even though I must admit the judge was really well built and was one of the only things that kept me from not finishing the book. Also the spanish dialog felt very unnatural and the names of some characters were just cringy (Bathcat, Caballo en Pelo, others I can't remember).

But probably I just didn't get it. Might re-read it once again in a year or two just to be sure.

[Anonymous No.10611136]

>>10611131
It is repetitive in a way. But I believe that's the intention of Mccarty. In regard with the character, I believe, there's a more important motive to describe their actions of violence rather than their personalities. I think because one the motifs of the novel was that the scalphunters themselves are swallowed, so to speak, with something beyond them, this being violence itself. I can understand why you didn't like it though.

[Anonymous No.10611138]

>>10611136
Just to add something more to this. In my opinion, Mccarty gives so much importance to descrive the desert as to show how the land they traverse is itself violent and unpersonal.

[Anonymous No.10611187]

>>10611131
The landscape described is described endlessly so you can feel the gang’s boredom. Every chapter has its action, and every chapter has its journey, such is the life of scalp hunter in the desert of Mexico. It’s a historical novel and McCarthy gives the same treatment to realism as he does superstition.
>no personality in the characters
From chapter one-
“and not again in all the world’s turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay”
“Whether his own heart is not a form of clay.” “The kid looked like a tailor’s dummy.” “The men looked like mud effigies.” “He looked like a great clay voodoo doll made animate.”
The men in this story do not have souls, they are puppets acting out a show for a cruel deity. The only one given any semblance of humanity, though wholly inhuman, is The Judge.
>the Spanish dialogue
You are the first I’ve heard complain about this.
>the names
Bathcat’s name is actually grounded in history. So is Toadvine’s, very uncommon today but it was actually a transliteration of, if I remember correctly, a French name. In fact, nearly all the named characters are pulled from history: from Glanton to the Judge, to Reverend Green, to Tobin, to Davy Brown, to Webster, etcetera.

[Anonymous No.10611219]

>>10611108
Hm, fair point. I'm not quite sure I ever felt that the intention was to make me consider my own prejudices though. Or maybe I'm too lacking in self reflection to care. But I always felt that the narrator was more like the voice of a god or somehow mythic and the characters were sort of spoken through. I just felt that Lester was set apart by the narrator because the narrator wanted us to hear a myth of sorts through Lester. That's why I gave Blood Meridian as the strongest example of this because as >>10611187
points out the frequent descriptions of clay and puppetry and the judge doesn't even speak as a real person, rather as a vox dei or at the very least in a strongly didactic tone.
I suppose what I'm getting out is that it seemed to me to take a neomythological tone (and does so in almost all his works I can think of) where we follow Lester's journey, and the characters are all described relative to that, to be scenery more than real characters. The child is a cretin because the child just didn't matter to me as a person. We don't need to humanise the child, he's scenery or just another puppet. The black prisoner is a nigger because Lester sees them like that and all the novel is there to serve him as the focal point of our narrator's mythic instructions.
I just don't think Cormac McCarthy writes characters any more than he needs. They're all puppets and clay. The narrator is the only one who actually matters.
That's how I couldn't help but see it anyway. But I'm not dismissing other interpretations. Just can't help but see it like this every time I read his books.

[Anonymous No.10611247]

>>10606617
The first deadly encounter with the injuns made me shit myself. 10/10

[Anonymous No.10611403]

>>10611219
I’m both of those posters. I believe the intention was to make you consider the truth in the reader’s unconscious prejudice. If the reader had conscious prejudice, he was shoved onto Lester, who first sees a black figure mounting the white in the first car he encounters at the turnaround, though the male face that turns to greet him is in fact that of a white man. I believe McCarthy thinks there is some truth to viewing some men as cretins and niggers, but ultimately what they leave behind them in death is the only determinant of their value in this world. He says all good novels are about life and death after all but I genuinely think he views retards as animals in this world because of this fact, and you see this in the
Road, Child of God, and Blood Meridian. All of the retards here are born reprobates, McCarthy believes some men are just predestined to be nothing but worthless.

[Anonymous No.10611457]

>>10606659
>>10606649
there are other good passages you know. you'd think these are the only two pages in the novel by the way people on here go on about them

[Anonymous No.10611466]

>>10609661
got em

[Anonymous No.10611622]

>>10606631
That part was genuinely amazing.

[Anonymous No.10611628]

>>10611457
I think that passage is when the pin drops for many people that Cormac knows his shit about prose.

[Anonymous No.10611637]

>>10607107
Get ready to point out every time he doesn't use an apostrophe. Cormac has a real dislike for punctuation and actively goes out of his way to drop it whenever possible because he argues it distracts and takes away from the cohesion of the book.

He's not exactly wrong either, Cormac McCarthy books have been the quickest reads I've experienced.

[Anonymous No.10611693]

>>10607576
> There were in the camp a number of Mexican slaves and these ran forth calling out in spanish and were brained or shot and one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and humans on fire came shrieking forth like berserkers

[Anonymous No.10611840]

One of my favorite passages. I found Glanton interesting because of how he was more human than the Judge but just as evil

[Anonymous No.10612014]

>>10611840
Glanton wasnt really as horrible as the judge, who raped children and wanted to subjugate the whole earth

[Anonymous No.10612044]

>>10611628
Honestly his prose is already top tier from the first page, but when he has space to expand and breathe he creates these grander architectures and the prose becomes almost incantatory. It's amazing that he can suddenly go from already great to absolutely unmatched.
Like another anon said and like I've heard some other people say sometimes I read his prose and think why the fuck should I write when this guy creates these absolutely amazing sentences. Probably he and Milton and maybe Melville at times are the only ones who have really had that level of intimidating effect on me when I've read just how good they are.
Having said that, he never really did hit that same level of greatness after Blood Meridian, even in The Road and Suttree so at least that's something

[Anonymous No.10612051]

>>10611637
I really think he intends the sentences to be read aloud sometimes. You can hear this rolling assonance in his prose quite a few times and the lack of punctuation gives it a kind of flexibility

[Anonymous No.10612124]

You’ve been tasked to cast the movie adaptation of this novel,set to be directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Who do you cast, anon?

> mads mikkelsen as the judge
> josh brolin as glanton
> Paul dano or Logan lerman as the kid
> Tom hardy as toadvine

[Anonymous No.10612132]

Tried to, but it was too boring. Did I like it?

[Anonymous No.10612169]

>>10607107
Yeah it must be a hard read since it's basically redneck ebonics

[Anonymous No.10612646]

>>10612124
Alright for Glanton and Toadvine, the other two are fucking awful choices. And The Kid should be a child

[Anonymous No.10613223]

>>10606617
>Get about half way through the book
>Brutal, but good
>Now the Judge has some redskin kid? Alright then
>Huh, maybe he's actually good and intelligent, just trying to get by in a trying time pe-
>OH FUCK NO WHAT ARE YOU DOING
Haven't picked it up since, should probably finish it

[Anonymous No.10613378]

>>10606617
>Has anyone read this?

[Anonymous No.10613588]

What the fuck has happened to this board? Why can't we have actual discussions without a bunch of retards ruining everything?

[Anonymous No.10613603]

>>10606617

[Anonymous No.10615118]

>>10613378
>>10613603
The absolute state of /lit/

[Anonymous No.10616872]

>>10612051
Will have to try this next time I read one of his books actually, never considered this.

[Anonymous No.10616991]

>>10616872
Read just this well known snippet aloud to hear what I mean:
>A legion of horribles, hundreds in number
If you're autistic like I probably am you hear the sound of the alliteration followed by the double assonance of hundred and number (both syllables)
Then watch when he does it again in the same sentence
>gaudy and grotesque, with daubings like a company of mounted clowns
Gaudy/grotesque then assonance with gaudy/daubings then alliteration again company/clowns with assonance again with mounted/clowns
The sound is certain to be intentional

[Anonymous No.10617178]

>>10616991
Thank you for highlighting this to me, anon, there definitely is a sense of rhythm going in his prose that I doubt I would've noticed beforehand.

[Anonymous No.10617228]

>>10615118
What's the problem sweetie?

[Anonymous No.10617233]

soy

[Anonymous No.10617413]

>>10607162
hack away you mean red nigger

[Anonymous No.10617433]

>>10617228
The state, the absolute STATE of /lit/

[Anonymous No.10617434]

>>10617433
Darling, can you please elaborate?

[Anonymous No.10617439]

>>10607162
For me it's the one where the Judge is naked under the moonlight and surrounded by nectar-bats feeding on the flowers

[Anonymous No.10617446]

>>10615118
>>10617228
>>10617433
>>10617434
The absolute state of /lit/

[Anonymous No.10617448]

>>10617446
What on Earth are you talking about, buttercup?

[Anonymous No.10617481]

I never understood how Toadvine's ears had been cut off yet he could still hear.

[Anonymous No.10617533]

>>10610363
Your bad taste reminds others to reach for greater things in life. I thank you.

[Anonymous No.10617552]

>>10610489
Where's this happen? Is it still the kid's initial wanderings before he joins the gang? I can't place it.

>>10610782
There are some really true moments that I've never seen in other writers. I think it works because McCarthy makes simple, colloquial language interact with his heightened prose. I lost it at a passage in Suttree that went something like (about Harrogate, who'd been arrested for fucking melons in a field) :

>The talked long about the bordello they would build up, melons in lacy black negligees. Could a cantaloupe turn queer?
>Better keep the niggers away

And

>They tried to get me for best. Beast. Best-
>Beastiality?
>Yeah, but my lawyer got me out of it. He told them melons ain't no beast. He was a smart sumbitch.
>I see

[Anonymous No.10617939]

>>10617552
Wait, sex with all abnormal things animate or inanimate is bestiality? I thought it was strictly animals. I thought sodomy was for the generally disgusting and immoral stuff

[Anonymous No.10617946]

>>10617939
The joke is that it's obviously not beastiality.

[Anonymous No.10618002]

>>10617946
Yea but they tried to charge him with it in the first place, hence my asking.

[Anonymous No.10618107]

Blood Meridian is the only thing I've read by McCarthy. Where do I go next? What's his best, in your opinion?

[Anonymous No.10618137]

>>10618107
You started with his best

[Anonymous No.10618163]

>>10618137
I kind of assumed that, but surely there is something that comes close? Someone recommended All the Pretty Horses a while back. It being a part of a trilogy kept me away.

[Anonymous No.10618376]

>>10618002
I can't believe the literal retards taking up space on this board.