[katdad]

I want to again persuade you (with a couple of quotes) to read “Blood Meridian” by Cormac McCarthy, Pulitzer winning author of “The Road” and “No Country for Old Men”. I regard Blood Meridian as the greatest American horror novel of the century.

Understand when I say “horror” I’m not saying “supernatural”, because Blood Meridian is an account of a scalphunting expedition in 1849, a rampage of blood and murder throughout the Texian-Mexican region, conducted by a band of irregular raiders and killers. But to call this group “killers” is mild. Friends of mine have been unable to finish the book because of its graphic horrors. I myself had nightmares.

The scalp bounty is an historic fact, established in an attempt by the Mexican government to eradicate the Apache. But of course, who’s to know from whom the scalps actually come? The scalphunters are led by a man named Glanton but in truth their leader is one of the most powerful and memorable characters ever in a Western novel, The Judge. Huge, nearly 7 feet, totally hairless and fair skinned, this immense albino monster is as immortal as Moby-Dick, and as evil. Intelligent, educated, speaker of many languages, rapist and murderer of children of both sexes, rumored cannibal. The Judge is a creature among us, more frightening than any Alien or Predator could ever be. Two small excerpts:

When the “victors” ride into a small city:

“They entered the city haggard and filthy and reeking with the blood of the citizenry for whose protection they had contracted. The scalps of the slain villagers were strung from the windows of the governor’s house and the partisans were paid out of all but exhausted coffers and the Sociedad was disbanded and the bounty rescinded. Within a week of their quitting the city there would be a price of eight thousand pesos posted for Glanton’s head.”

And a Comanche raid on a smaller and unprepared group of scalphunters:

“…their short bows flexing beneath the outstretched necks of the ponies until they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and rising up again like funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their breasts, riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground … and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered with gore tbey might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them… and the horses of the dead came pounding and circled with eyes whited with fear and some were feathered with arrows … and stunbling and vomiing blood ,,, lay in the bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming.”

Nearly every page is like this, a ceaseless litany of death and blood (one subchapter is headed “a tree of dead babies”). Yet the writing style is mythic, like Faulkner or Melville, literate and compelling, both in its horror and its poetry.

You can find paperback and hardback copies of Blood Meridian in most bookstores. There’s an excellent Modern Library hardcover edition, very reasonably priced. A major warning: If you get this edition, do NOT read the superb introduction by the Harvard scholar Harold Bloom until after you finish the novel. Too many spoilers. Please.

I can only urge you to fire up your Kindles or used book purchases or whatever and to read this modern masterpiece of horror. There is literally nothing like it and I guarantee that you will be unnerved by this book. It will stick with you like few others.

Anyone else read this masterpiece? Your feedback is welcomed.