Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy (2.5 stars)

I was ready to love this book. The Road and No Country for Old Men are both fantastic books, and many reviewers on Amazon claim this is McCarthy's best work. I don't agree.

Like most McCarthy books, it is often difficult to tell who is speaking and what is going on, but I was ready for that. What I wasn't ready for was the rambling dense prose, often waxing philosophical, so different from the punchy and intense dialogue of The Road and No Country:

Whether his history should run concomitant with men and nations, whether it should cease. He'd long forsworn all weighing of consequence and allowing as he did that men's destinies are given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so and he'd drive the remorseless sun on to its final endarkenment as if he'd ordered it all ages since, before there were paths anywhere, before there were men or suns to go upon them.

BUH??  I feel like one day McCarthy is going to say "Surprise! I wrote that with a computer program that looks up random words in a thesaurus!". A reviewer on Amazon summed it up perfectly with:

It's the kind of book everybody wants to have read, but few enjoy reading. As such, it naturally elicits a certain kind of intellectual pretension in those who have slogged through it.

Unlike other McCarthy books I can't even say the characters were great. The judge is a horrible character that commits seemingly random acts of violence, a sort of wild west version of Mark 'Chopper' Read. But we never really know him deeply, or indeed at all, and instead are left to wonder at the horror of his actions. The Kid, notionally the central character, is also bereft of any deep development.

The story McCarthy tells is of a band of American misfits on the wild west frontier. They become killers tasked with collecting scalps of Apaches and other Indians, before turning their hand to collecting scalps of pretty much anyone: Mexicans, settlers, and their own. All of this happens in a dream-like landscape alternating between gore, complex descriptions of the desert, and philosophy.

2.5 stars.