Western Genre Annotation

BLOOD MERIDIAN, OR THE EVENING REDNESS IN THE WEST
AUTHOR: Cormac McCarthy
GENRE:  Western; literary fiction; southern fiction

In a devastating epic, the fourteen year-old Kid, having left his drunken, abusive father, joins a brutal gang of mercenaries hired to kill Indians and terrorize the Southwest around 1850.  The riders move back and forth across Mexico and California, killing everything in their sights. The harsh landscape is its own character as the narrator describes in detail its savage assault on anyone who dares to traverse it.   More than that, man's cruelty to man is featured in all its glory as the gang massacres and pillages with horrible efficiency.  American westward expansion is portrayed as a blood-soaked, cutthroat nightmare in which death was almost preferable to life.  In a twist of the Western genre, the hero of the book, while perhaps the least repugnant of his compadres, is no hero. And his mission is not noble.  He'll be tempted by evil personified in The Judge, an immense, albino, hairless monster of a man.  Will he be able to resist the darkness? 

APPEAL FACTORS
Tone:  Atmospheric, bleak, disturbing, menacing
Writing style:  Gritty, lyrical, stylistically complex
Storyline:  Character-driven, open-ended
Character: Unlikeable

READ-ALIKES

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy:  This is much like Blood Meridian with its bleak, violent tones.  In the late 20th century, Llewelyn Moss happens upon a massacre and $2 million in cash and his decision to take it will plunge him and his family into a typical McCarthian nightmare.

The Winter Family by Clifford Jackman:  Follows the adventures of group of outlaws from their formation during the Civil War through a blood-soaked three decades to 1900.  This book has the same gritty writing and bleak tone, as well as unlikable characters that populate McCarthy's books. 

Savage Country by Robert Olmstead:  A widow organizes a buffalo hunt to pay off her dead husband's debts.  What follows is a dramatic story of survival in a harsh and inhospitable landscape.  This story contains the same gritty violence and character-driven story line as Blood Meridian.  Incidentally, Blood Meridian contains a scene relating to the horrific buffalo slaughters of the same time period.  

MY TAKE

Boy, was I glad to finish this book!  The ghastly violence and horrific cruelty was almost too much to bear.  McCarthy managed to craft a lyrical image of hell on earth which while gorgeous in its prose, was sickening in its gore.  There isn't much of a story line except that the riders rode and killed and rode and killed and rode through the deserts and the mountains and through sand and through snow.  They came upon no less than eight massacred Mexican villages and visions of horrific brutality.  They hunted Indians and were hunted by Indians.  And the ending.  That ending!  I hated the book, but I had to love the beauty of McCarthy's writing.  His prose is unbelievably complex and many times I had to re-read a sentence several times just to understand it.  Had there been a real story arc and less horror, this would have been one of my favorites.  

This is not a typical Western.  Where Westerns usually feature a hero riding into town and saving the day or the lady, this book featured terrible people doing terrible things.  There are no good guys fighting the bad guys.  Further, while the landscape was drawn in detail as harsh and treacherous, McCarthy's landscape fairly throbs with menace.  The overall mood in the book is menacing and hopeless.  I would definitely not recommend this to a patron asking for a Western.  While it has Western elements and is listed in the Western genre, it's more of a literary novel.  Also, patrons should be made aware of its unremitting violence.