War Is God: Blood Meridian Review

Of the novels I have read from Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West is perhaps the most difficult to describe. It is a harrowing epic following a gang of scalp-hunters across the US-Mexican border in the 19th century. Unlike Homeric epics, however, it has little plot, little drive to move the action from one scene to the next. There is plenty of action, but it seems to arise organically and for no human reason, like lava from the ground or like water particles gathering overhead into storm clouds. The kid, who is the closest thing to a main character in the story all but vanishes from the narration for a large swath of the book — he is present in the gang, but McCarthy allows him to fade into the group. As in all McCarthy’s fiction, it reads like a prose poem. The book is perhaps the most violent thing I have ever read and it has little direct commentary on the violence. In other words, Blood Meridian is a nightmare. It does not fit in the genre of horror. It is horror.

McCarthy does not offer horror as Hollywood gives it to us. This is not voyeurism, nor does the book try to make us jump with twists and turns and monsters who show up outside our window. People like to go to horror movies to feel momentarily frightened, but then realize that they are really safe. McCarthy does not let the audience feel safe afterward.

In the World, but Not of It: All the Pretty Horses (Book) Review

I have quickly become enamored with Cormac McCarthy’s prose. He writes with an unmistakable voice characterized by quiet immediacy and a sure style. Reading a McCarthy novel is like reading one long prose poem.

All the Pretty Horses (1992) earned McCarthy a National Book Award. It is the first of his Border Trilogy and follows the sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole whose father is distant and mother ran away when John Grady was a toddler. The story opens with the funeral of his maternal grandfather on whose ranch John Grady has lived his whole life. His mother, the heiress of the ranch, has made it known that she intends to sell the land. Disenfranchised and convinced there is nothing left for him in Texas, John Grady sets out on horseback with his friend Lacey Rawlins for Mexico.

The Fire and the Good Guys: The Road Review

A man and his son walk along a road in the midst of ash-covered desolation. That is the central image of Cormac McCarthy’s wonderfully haunting novel The Road, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. McCarthy creates a post-apocalyptic world in which the majority of humanity and nearly all animal and plant life have been destroyed. The Sun and Moon are nearly always obstructed or at least dimmed by dust in the air. When snow falls, it is gray. Clocks froze at 1:17. McCarthy never tells readers what caused the destruction, but because of the lack of vegetation and abundance of ash, we can guess that something like a nuclear holocaust happened. The worst horrors of the story do not come from trying to piece together the annihilation, but the image of life left in its wake. Governments have fallen and roaming gangs of cannibals rule the roads. The man and the boy — we never learn their names beyond those titles — consider themselves “the good guys” because they do not resort to the evil actions of the gangs. This tiny family are the carriers of the fire.

Because of the immediacy of the characters’ situation, much of the narrative focuses on their conscious actions. They search abandoned houses for cans of food, build fires, seek shelter and improvise shoes in order to stay dry over snowy mountain passes. They hide from the gangs. The characters do not have much space to pontificate or engage in philosophical discussions. The boy was too young when the cataclysm occurred to remember the world prior to this desolation. The man understands that what was the past is almost entirely lost. All he has is a future and that is his son. They are, “each the other’s world entire.”