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The rifle the kid carried had been sawed down and rebored till it weighed very light indeed and the mold for it was so small he had to patch the balls with buckskin. He had fired it a few times and it carried much where it chose.

An account of a kind of men who do not exist anymore. Their savagery still persists in colder forms. Set in alien landscapes that suggests the presence of the supernatural. They have now been swallowed by civilization. Told in a luxuriant prose I have never come across before, that foregrounds the terrifying natural world while also detailing the chilling endeavors of mankind.

From an interview with Cormac McCarthy:
"We tended to agree that it seemed 'probable' that Holden, out of the novel’s last chapter, could live forever. He said there were, he thought, 'certain indications of the supernatural' in the book."

Blood Meridian might be seen as a coming of age tale. It follows the savage adventures of the kid most of which happens after he joins the Glanton gang. A ŷ������ friend said it was about the Darwinian struggle between the whites, native Indians and Mexicans in mid-nineteenth century America. I could not have put it better. A casual google search revealed to me that most of the characters and events in the book were based on real life ones. Which makes it all the more chilling.

McCarthy's descriptions of the natural world are stunning.

They rode that night through the mission of San Xavier del Bac, the church solemn and stark in the starlight. Not a dog barked. The clusters of Papago huts seemed without tenant. The air was cold and clear and the country there and beyond lay in a darkness unclaimed by so much as an owl. A pale green meteor came up the valley floor behind them and passed overhead and vanished silently in the void.

Nature left untouched by the civilizing imperative can have a dangerous other worldly beauty. Raided villages and towns laid to waste. Entrails of butchered animals and humans. The aftermath of random acts of violence.

Some of the descriptions conjure up images out of a sci-fi or fantasy novel.

That night they rode through a region electric and wild where strange shapes of soft blue fire ran over the metal of the horses' trappings and the wagonwheels rolled in hoops of fire and little shapes of pale blue light came to perch in the ears of the horses and in the beards of the men. All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunder-heads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear. The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightning lit the desert all about them, blue and barren, great clanging reaches ordered out of the absolute night like some demon kingdom summoned up or changeling land that come the day would leave them neither trace nor smoke nor ruin more than any troubling dream.

It is not an easy novel. It is one of those novels where you never really feel comfortable as a reader. I never got the measure of Blood Meridian. Almost as if Cormac McCarthy does not want you to like it. The detailed, beautiful descriptions of grotesque and ghoulish landscapes, are adorned with similies and obscure references. You miss a line and you suddenly don't know what's going on. My social media addled brain got a real workout.