Or the Evening Redness in the West

This dark Old West novel was an offering on our Siblings’ Book Club list in 2021, yet I don’t think any of us actually finished it. This week, I thought I’d go back and give it another try. I made it about 60% through it, but man, that’s more than enough for me. I’m done.

I’ll give the book credit where it’s due. Though published in 1985, it could easily have been published a century before, what for all the realism that McCarthy employs. Of course, 1885 and 1985 both were really good years for cowboys and the Old West—and I say that mainly because Doc Brown in Back to the Future III thinks it’s true. Marty McFly agrees.

Even the stylization of Blood Meridian gives it an antiquated feel. McCarthy adds scene descriptors at the start of each chapter. He includes fancy decorations in the headings. He even eschews quotation marks (which really annoyed me, actually). His publishers might have cranked the pages by hand out of an old printing press for all I know.

The uniqueness of McCarthy’s approach was about the only thing I liked about the book, though. For all the rest, I felt it was an over-the-top attempt at Old-West realism that shows where one’s mind can go when it removes all barriers of decorum. And I’m talking about McCarthy’s imagination, not the fictitious Kid’s behavior.

This book is truly gritty, and maybe should have been the cowboy novel best deserving of that title, True Grit. Well, no. Truly Gratuitous would have been far more fitting.

Blood Meridian is filled with murder, rape, and so many morbid details of the gore that exists in the midst of battles and human depravity—it was all so unnecessary. I know that McCarthy was thinking, “This is how life really was. No one is brave enough to write about it. I will. I’m that good.” Yet was this really how life was in the Old West? I sort of doubt it.

Sure, outlaws killed people. The Civil War was a horrendous period of bloodshed, and thousands upon thousands of soldiers suffered PTSD without having a clue that it was even a thing. They became broken, lost, and unstable men. Death absolutely was an everyday companion.

What I can’t get past, though, is that there’s death on virtually every page of this novel. The Judge’s band of outlaws murder villagers by the score, town after town, torturing, scalping, and probably raping the people day after day, and leaving no survivors in any of them. That’s hundreds if not thousands of people murdered in just this one little portion of the story. It’s relentless. Death everywhere and always. Blood everywhere and always. I felt like I was reading the Walking Dead set 135 years ago.

Add to this relentless violence the language of the book, and “gratuitous” can’t begin to describe McCarthy’s world. Cormac McCarthy apparently loves using the N-word (you know, as “art”), because for every Mexican murdered in these pages, there’s at least 2 racial slurs to keep things lively. I haven’t fact-checked that, but I bet I’m close. So, great job, Cormac, in bringing racist realism back to literature. I’m so glad people celebrate you for your wicked imagination. You’re the Quentin Tarantino of the literary world.

But if it’s 1800s realism that people want, and if people love this book because of its original feel, then why don’t we just read novels from the 1880s? Honestly, when I read The Scalp Hunters by Captain Thomas Mayne Reid, I was floored by the style and action of writing—much like how I responded when first reading H. Rider Haggard. Sure, these authors inflated the realism of their stories, but they did so for the sake of action and thrills, not to see how many feathers they could ruffle. They didn’t write about “savages” and eye-less babies hung dead by their jaws from trees or how the Indians would abuse the bodies of defeated enemies (I can’t even hint at the deviance McCarthy describes). Even if ostensibly historical, scenes like this need not be described in lurid detail. The desire to do so is the sign of a twisted mind, one that wallows in the depths of depravity and feeds off the worst of perversions. I don’t need to feed my mind with such trash.

This book reminds me a great deal, actually, of Shogun by James Clavell, of which I’ve written before. I hated that book for the same reasons as this, for the authors’ choosing the worst stereotypes of a people or time period and maximizing them, as if these were every-person, every-day experiences. It’s ridiculous, it’s misrepresentative, and it neither teaches nor informs but disturbs and perverts.

I had once thought that I’d like to read McCarthy’s The Road, because I had watched and enjoyed the movie. I enjoy dystopian or post-apocalyptic books and movies, so new spins on the concept are always exciting to me. Now I’m doubting whether that book would be healthy for either my imagination or my spirit.

Once again, I’m reminded to fill my mind with good things, and to be willing to put book down books that hamper my growth. This was one such book. Good riddance.

©2022 E.T.