Reviews with content warning for Racism - Blood Meridian

Reviews tagging 'Racism'

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

142 reviews

zhaneordo's review against another edition

dark mysterious sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

This was the worse DnD campaign to experience, not because the journey, but because of the horrible players. Worse than your local murdering hobos, The Kid falls into a real life larpers group, who take their quest far too seriously.

A book full of quotes with no quotations, means a lot of rereading. The rereading is worth it in this death filled western. The only good thing that happens to you in this book is when you’re finished and you no longer have to experience it anymore.

It’s okay, randomly you’ll have a thought about how horrible these people were and hopefully we’ll all use it as our ethical meridian in life.

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geonox's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious reflective tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? N/A
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? N/A
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

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asuresh's review against another edition

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dark reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

5.0

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ddavare's review against another edition

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challenging dark tense medium-paced

2.0

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frogreads_'s review against another edition

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It was hard for me to finish this book. So i didnt! Not necessarily because of the content, just the opposite really. I found it boring and i got about halfway through. I did not like McCarthys writing style; there were a lot of run on sentences for descriptions of things.

I wanted to read this book before watching a breakdown a youtuber i like did of it. I went in expecting the brutality but was not forwarned about the casual use of the n word for both black people and native americas (hellooo pre civil war America!)

But overall i was not expecting a book lauded as being so gratituously violent to feel like pulling hairs and walking through quicksand to get through.

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taicantfly's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

A heartbreaking book that chronicles the violence and colonial depravity that went into building the American empire.

Structurally, it is brilliant. A narrative with the rhythm of its plot, self-similar, meandering, filled with neologisms and words so archaic I had to change dictionary app on my phone, almost hostile to its reader at points. Perfectly isomorphic to a drunken odyssey of carnage through the desert, going nowhere, collecting scalps along the way. The descriptions are vivid and inimitable, leaving me open-mouthed in awe when directed at desert still life and open-mouthed in horror when directed at the intricacies of the corpses of innocents.

It is told from the perspective of The Kid, in my view a representation of the American people. At the start of the book, before the colonial violence begins en masse, these people are nothing more than starving and disposable serfs, isolated from their metropole (the Kid's mother dead) and surrounded by a pre-existing and justifiably hostile ecosystem of Indigenous peoples ("Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves.") The Kid soon finds the simplicity of violence, a seemingly omnipresent phenomenon and often a means of achieving if not a living wage (hence his stint in the army) substantial riches. Likewise, American civilians soon find they can subsist and blossom off of the violence of slavery and the genocide of natives. Before long violence becomes the Kid's default state, never questioning. He is intrinsically inseparable from the events of the book as both witness and participant, but there will be chapters where his name appears only twice or thrice. Always present, always entangled in immeasurable violence, always detached from the situation at hand. This dichotomy of invisibility and obviousness is one of the most delicious nuances of the book.

As a demonic figure in symbiosis with the manpower the Kid and those like him provide, there is the Judge, inhuman, polite, sadistic, polymathic. He represents the ideological side of American colonial violence, one that is not nihilistically living a cycle of violence he has become too accustomed to to abandon, but a visionary whose motives for violence are wholly expansionist. Seeking genuinely complete control over the physical and mental spheres, as did American expansionism with its murderous westward pilgrimage, he (and by extension the colonial status quo) cannot tolerate threats to his (and its) authority. For this reason he massacres tribes, scapples away ancient paintings. Hell, he says it best himself:

"Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent. He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he'd collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men's knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth."

A genocidal fervour like this will only feed off of anything it is given - the Judge, as the violence in the book intensifies, seems to be less and less human, almost immortal, almost omnipresent. Thus is the American colonial-turned-imperialist mentality, in McCarthy's depressed candour, similarly immortal. At the end of the book, the Judge rapes(?) and kills the Kid, the colonial drive turned inwards towards the American populace, a grim prediction of an empire's violence leading to its own downfall. I've rarely seen a metaphor so consistent and incisive as that of the interplay between Kid and Judge and it speaks volumes to McCarthy's writing.

This was the first McCarthy book I read and I was by no means disappointed. A flawless, soul-crushing and very difficult read which I would not recommend to anyone struggling with misanthropic thoughts. This is the kind of book that has no replacement, and if not for its deeply traumatising contents, I'd make it mandatory reading in schools.

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billyjepma's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious tense slow-paced

Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

A towering, alienating, raging tapestry of the violent, bloodthirsty heart of the American condition. It’s a nightmarish read, one that forces you to wrestle with its foggy, murky plotting and aimless pacing—there’s a reason it took me months to finish. But that’s part of the nightmare McCarthy is cataloging for us, and his disdain is palpable even (especially?) as he coldly pontificates on the situation of the men his story follows.

“In the days to come the frail black rebuses of blood in those sands would crack and break and drift away so that in the circuit of few suns all trace of the destruction of these people would be erased. The desert wind would salt their ruins and there would be nothing, nor ghost nor scribe, to tell to any pilgrim in his passing how it was that people had lived in this place and in this place died.”

There are a lot of quotes that speak to the intent of this book—a book I might someday understand better—but that one might be the one I latch into. McCarthy understood violence and its roots in the masculine soul better than almost any other American writer.

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