Thanks for this. I have yet to read Blood Meridian. I have read The Road and NCFOM. Both were great and absorbing reads. But I have one major gripe with CM (if I am allowed to do so). It's not his style - in fact it's his unique and great style of writing that would make anyone forget about what I'm going to say.

My problem with CM: his themes of post-apocalyptic, desperate humanity at war with itself and the singular savagery of ONE man against all - takes the assumed position that humans by nature (generally, of course) will almost always reduce to selfish savagery even to the point of normalising cannibalism. Of course, he needed to create this assumed backdrop for many of his stories (eg The Road needed this literally visceral danger for a father to demonstrate his instinctive protection for his only son) but CM's imagined scenario of a society that's eating itself is far from real evidence we have seen of humans. Real evidence shows that during catastrophic moments like earthquakes and prolonged famine and even war, human societies have shown remarkable strength to save and to protect and to help one another, sometimes at great individual sacrifice.

I know you can't criticise a work of fiction this way, an author is entitled his artistic philosophy and outlook. But when the writing is so masterful, when the rest of the philosophies of the stories are so elevated and cerebrally engaging, one can't help but find the story of humans cultivating others for food jarring and out of place.

(This is my first "criticism" of any work of literature.)

The Road is his only post-apocalyptic novel, it's not really a theme of his.

The potential for savagery, how easy it is for some to take a human life or completely disregard it is a theme that runs in many of his novels. In a post-apocalyptic scenario like in The Road, where everyone is literally scavenging for their lives you can bet your ass life will become a horror show. Not for everyone, not anywhere, but for enough people to determine that it is part of human nature just a much as extending help to one another.

To me CM's work explores the duality of beauty (in the most expansive sense of the word) and tragedy that exists in the world.

I recommend All the Pretty Horses if you want something less intense than The Road or Blood Meridian but no less powerful. One my favorite quotes:

“He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.”

With good authors, I would always keep metaphor in mind. In the case of The Road, I think what you're hitting on arguably the single most critical question the book asks: do we cooperate because we're benevolent, or do we cooperate because we're selfish and cooperation furthers our own interests?

When working together is clearly beneficial, not cooperating is simply illogical. But what happens when cooperation is not only not clearly beneficial, but may even be actively detrimental? What happens if you're starving to death, and you see a weaker man who has enough, barely enough, to feed himself approaching? And that is all there is?

Adding a notion of a child, of the future itself, into the picture makes it all the more difficult.

Some of this is in the service of making commentary on broader topics. I view Blood Meridian as a treatise on the horrific nature of war. McCarthy accomplishes this via an endlessly gruesome tale, but the underlying message couldn’t be more clear.

>... CM's imagined scenario of a society that's eating itself is far from real evidence we have seen of humans. Real evidence shows that during catastrophic moments like earthquakes and prolonged famine and even war, human societies have shown remarkable strength to save and to protect and to help one another, sometimes at great individual sacrifice.

This is very tangential, but this is one of the reasons I could never get into The Walking Dead and similar shows. It was really hard for me to suspend my disbelief there.

> ...but CM's imagined scenario of a society that's eating itself is far from real evidence we have seen of humans. Real evidence shows that during catastrophic moments like earthquakes and prolonged famine and even war, human societies have shown remarkable strength to save and to protect and to help one another, sometimes at great individual sacrifice.

I've literally only read the Cliff's Notes version of The Road, but the scenario it describes seems far bleaker, prolonged, and hopeless than any historical event you might look for as precedent. It seems quite plausible that what the book describes is after some people tried to pull together in some feel-good way, and then failed and fell apart again because it wasn't going to work.

I highly recommend Suttree, which is much less in that post-apocalyptic vein. It’s incredibly humanistic and funny and I think it’s his best work. It still has his incredible command of the English language and sequences of just absolutely beautiful prose, and in some ways it can be quite devastating but it’s much more balanced with the endearing parts of humanity I think.

I second Suttree. I love the preface so much I memorized most of it.

Suttree is an early work, and said to be heavily autobiographical. I read it as a key to understanding McCarthy's view of the world, being essentially tragic.

I'd suggest there's a similar identification between the author and the Kid of Blood Meridian.

What McCarthy thinks of Melville's Moby Dick I have not heard, but for the reader anyway, there's a rich cross-fertilization. Both of ideas -- being a pawn within a monstrous, doomed enterprise -- and of technique, as with the cryptic oracles of catastrophe who say their piece and then vanish from the narrative.

At the end of The Road, there are The Good Guys.

It is an allegory of fathers and sons.

> Real evidence shows that during catastrophic moments like earthquakes and prolonged famine and even war, human societies have shown remarkable strength to save and to protect and to help one another, sometimes at great individual sacrifice.

I find it hard to agree with this after COVID showed that a substantial portion of the US and global population weren't willing to wear masks to protect their fellow man and life saving vaccines were purposefully politicized. I also think that post apocalyptic novels typically live in a world where traditional power structures have been abandoned/destroyed and individualism is necessary for survival so I'm not sure one can draw a parallel between typical catastrophes and apocalyptic events.

For real evidence of Humanity's cruelty: Read Pinker's "Better Angels". Luckily, we're trending upward.

> post-apocalyptic, desperate humanity at war with itself and the singular savagery

If you were to show me that phrase and ask which book matches it most closely, I would have to say "Blood Meridian". It's a singular work. Texas-Mexico border area, 1850s. It's definitely post-apocalyptic, the aftermath of an invasion of technologically sophisticated but genocidally savage aliens ... for the native Americans.

It's also worth noting that for Blood Meridian, McCarthy learned Spanish and did five years of historical research with his MacArthur award money. The broad strokes of the story are true - there really was a group of scalp hunters who went rogue, raping and murdering the people they had been hired to protect.

Any historical "invasion of technologically sophisticated aliens" in the time period blood meridian is set in happened centuries before. It's actually near a zenith of native political and military power. Spain is gone, Mexico is struggling to build a government, and the US hasn't yet become a dominant power in the region.

Blood meridian is a book I often recommend as an approachable introduction to what people experiencing the period might have thought, but framing the context is somewhat important.

Love Cormac as well he is also one of my favourite authors. That Judge passage is also one of my favourite passages in literature, alongside the ending of The Road which I have framed with a technical drawing of a brook trout:

    Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

Just finished Cities of the Plain after reading the rest of the border trilogy and not being that impressed, but this one absolutely floored me and I shed tears at the end. Will need to go back and read all three in quick succession at some point.

Still really need to read Child of God.

Have you spent any time in the southwest United States? Those books hit me a particular way after many trips to west Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. McCarthy has a way of capturing that landscape....

No I’ve never been to the states, I’ve always wanted to though. I want to visit so many states since America has such a huge cultural influence on me especially my fiction, but I live in Australia so it’s kind of impractical. Can’t wait to get there some day!

His prose is just immaculate. Do yourself a favor and read the above passage out loud. It has a driving rhythm. What’s amazing is that he maintains the beat for entire novels.

Maybe it's just because it was the order I read his work in, but I'd start with "Blood Meridian". It's just beyond so many other books out there. Same with the Border Trilogy.

I'm coincidentally reading "The Road" right now for the first time -- somehow I never made it to it over the years -- and honestly I'm not sure I'd have gone into the rest of his work so deeply if I had started with it. Same with "Suttree". They're good, but "Blood Meridian" and the Border Trilogy I barely took breaks from while reading. Just plowed through them front to back. When I got to the end of "Blood Meridian" I just started at the front again. No need for a warm up, just jump right in to some of the best literature you'll ever encounter.

Child of God is an easier read than Blood Meridian, and acts as a pretty good way to get used to his minimalist punctuation

Sure, though my point is that I read Blood Meridian first and didn't find it all that hard to get into. It's just so good you'll give it your full attention and effort. Had I started with Suttree or The Road I may have just given up and not gotten to Blood Meridian at all. I put both of those books down for significant periods of time. I'm trying to finish The Road right now.

I actually found "All the Pretty Horses" to be the harder read, since he'll just write full dialogues in Spanish, and it's not just a couple of times, it happens often (my Spanish is just ok, enough to survive traveling in latin america).

Ok that passage from Blood Meridian is obviously great, but posting it out of context like this makes my skin crawl! It's almost a spoiler. Without knowing the preceding events, and the general way in which the story is grounded in reality, the otherworldliness of this passage is totally out of context!

That's my 2c.

Blood Meridian is like a poem, that is movie but in a form of a sculpture and in prose.