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I finished Blood Meridian. This is the fifth Cormac McCarthy book I’ve read, so I definitely am a follower of his writings. There are 100s of 1000s of reviews of this book online so won’t go into details about it. Just to say it is in a genre all its own, a subversive, pathologically violent story of historical counts during the mid 1800’s wars against Native Americans, mostly Apaches. It’s an anti-western so if you like the romantic version of the old west in story and movie form be prepared for a total recall and shake down of that experience. I appreciate this novel, perhaps because it’s one of the best literary books written about America. It’s a terrifying story and yet the descriptions of nature are exquisite and breathtaking. Some parts hit too close to home as the Indian scalpers roam through Tucson, Tubac, Santa Cruz river bed, San Xavier del Bac, Tumacacori, creating and witnessing hideous acts of violence and mayhem in a place I call home. What price was paid for that?

Here’s a short description of the gang’s arrival into Tucson:

“Where in this pukehole can a man get a drink, he said. It was the first words any of them had spoken. Couts looked them over. Haggard and haunted and blackened by the sun. The lines and pores of their skin deeply grimed with gunblack where they’d washed the bores of their weapons. Even the horses looked alien to any he had ever seen before, decked as they were in human, hair and teeth and skin. Save for their guns and buckles and a few pieces of metal in the harness of the animals, there was nothing about these arrivals to suggest even the discovery of the wheel.�

And there is purpose spilling forth in the pages. That leads to its philosophical, cultural and religious meanings which I will refer you back to the internet for more of that.