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My stay-at-home westerns project continued with 'Blood Meridian�, a book I tried to read some years back and gave up on. This time I made it through to the end. I didn’t enjoy it, but then I don’t think anyone was ever meant to enjoy it. The novel starts with violence and stays violent right up to the end. I like to read westerns through genre themes such as civilization and wilderness, the garden and the desert, society and the individual, and the world of this book lies firmly in the realm of the latter in each case. If churches in westerns are usually on the boundary between civilization and the wilderness, here they are lost in the wilderness with no civilizing effect at all. It is a world in which it is difficult to separate madness from the violence that seems to be a part of every sane person. It is a world of which we are forced to wonder what kind of God there could possibly be. Blood Meridian is in no way a pleasant read, but is a powerful one, and one that stays with you long after you have finished its puzzling epilogue and laid it down to rest. .