Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy - A Short Summary & Review
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy - A Short Summary & Review
By: a.d. elliott | Take the Back Roads - Art and Other Odd Adventures
A Rite of Fancy Book Recommendation and Review
A short summary:
In Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy follows a teenage runaway, known only as “the kid,” into the brutal borderlands of the American West in the mid-19th century. What begins as restless flight quickly becomes immersion in a world governed by violence, conquest, and moral collapse.
Traveling with the infamous Glanton gang, the kid witnesses a landscape soaked in blood and stripped of sentimentality. McCarthy renders the West not as myth or frontier romance, but as a place where survival and savagery are often indistinguishable, and where violence appears less an aberration than a governing principle.
My favorite quote from the book:
Questions to ponder while reading:
My review of Blood Meridian:
Blood Meridian is one of the darkest novels I have ever read, and it earns that distinction without exaggeration. This is not violence as spectacle; it is violence as atmosphere, inescapable, relentless, and philosophically unsettling. Even knowing McCarthy’s reputation (and having read The Road, which is also devastating), this book feels almost too much at times.
The characters are snarly, haunting, and unforgettable, none more so than Judge Holden, one of the most terrifying figures in American literature. McCarthy refuses to soften them, explain them away, or offer redemption arcs. Instead, he forces the reader to sit with cruelty as a constant, not a deviation.
What makes Blood Meridian endure is not just its brutality, but its confrontation with uncomfortable ideas: the nature of evil, the silence of God, and the possibility that violence is woven into human history more deeply than we care to admit. This is a masterwork, beautifully written, morally exhausting, and impossible to forget.
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About the Author
a.d. elliott is a wanderer, photographer, and storyteller traveling through life
She shares her journeys at Take the Back Roads, explores new reads at Rite of Fancy, and highlights U.S. military biographies at Everyday Patriot.
You can also browse her online photography gallery at shop.takethebackroads.com.
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