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Blood Meridian
- Or the Evening Redness in the West
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 13 hrs and 6 mins
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No Country for Old Men
- Written by: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Cormac McCarthy, best-selling author of National Book Award winner All the Pretty Horses, delivers his first new novel in seven years. Written in muscular prose, No Country for Old Men is a powerful tale of the West that moves at a blistering pace.
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Dark and nihilistic, deserving of the America’s it depicts
- By Anonymous User on 2022-02-13
Written by: Cormac McCarthy
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All the Pretty Horses
- The Border Trilogy, Book One
- Written by: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Frank Muller
- Length: 10 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole's grandfather has just died, his parents have permanently separated, and the family ranch, upon which he had placed so many boyish hopes, has been sold. Rootless and increasingly restive, Cole leaves Texas, accompanied by his friend Lacey Rawlins, and begins a journey across the vaquero frontier into the badlands of northern Mexico.
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A tour de force!
- By Sean E. Kearney on 2020-12-06
Written by: Cormac McCarthy
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The Road
- Written by: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 6 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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America is a barren landscape of smoldering ashes, devoid of life except for those people still struggling to scratch out some type of existence. Amidst this destruction, a father and his young son walk, always toward the coast, but with no real understanding that circumstances will improve once they arrive. Still, they persevere, and their relationship comes to represent goodness in a world of utter devastation.
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My first, only, audible review.
- By OL on 2019-04-03
Written by: Cormac McCarthy
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Child of God
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- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 3 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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In this taut, chilling audiobook, Lester Ballard - a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape - haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail. While telling his story, Cormac McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance.
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McCarthy dares you to accept his vision
- By MoBo on 2023-01-25
Written by: Cormac McCarthy
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Suttree
- Written by: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 20 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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No discussion of great modern authors is complete without mention of Cormac McCarthy, whose rare and blazing talent makes his every work a true literary event. A grand addition to the American literary canon, Suttree introduces readers to Cornelius Suttree, a man who abandons his affluent family to live among a dissolute array of vagabonds along the Tennessee river.
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Excellent.
- By Anonymous User on 2021-11-10
Written by: Cormac McCarthy
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Outer Dark
- Written by: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Ed Sala
- Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Outer Dark is a novel at once fabular and starkly evocative, set is an unspecified place in Appalachia, sometime around the turn of the century. A woman bears her brother's child, a boy; he leaves the baby in the woods and tells her he died of natural causes. Discovering her brother's lie, she sets forth alone to find her son. Both brother and sister wander separately through a countryside being scourged by three terrifying and elusive strangers, headlong toward an eerie, apocalyptic resolution.
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Misery loves company
- By Anonymous User on 2021-11-20
Written by: Cormac McCarthy
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No Country for Old Men
- Written by: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Cormac McCarthy, best-selling author of National Book Award winner All the Pretty Horses, delivers his first new novel in seven years. Written in muscular prose, No Country for Old Men is a powerful tale of the West that moves at a blistering pace.
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Dark and nihilistic, deserving of the America’s it depicts
- By Anonymous User on 2022-02-13
Written by: Cormac McCarthy
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All the Pretty Horses
- The Border Trilogy, Book One
- Written by: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Frank Muller
- Length: 10 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole's grandfather has just died, his parents have permanently separated, and the family ranch, upon which he had placed so many boyish hopes, has been sold. Rootless and increasingly restive, Cole leaves Texas, accompanied by his friend Lacey Rawlins, and begins a journey across the vaquero frontier into the badlands of northern Mexico.
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A tour de force!
- By Sean E. Kearney on 2020-12-06
Written by: Cormac McCarthy
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The Road
- Written by: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 6 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
America is a barren landscape of smoldering ashes, devoid of life except for those people still struggling to scratch out some type of existence. Amidst this destruction, a father and his young son walk, always toward the coast, but with no real understanding that circumstances will improve once they arrive. Still, they persevere, and their relationship comes to represent goodness in a world of utter devastation.
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My first, only, audible review.
- By OL on 2019-04-03
Written by: Cormac McCarthy
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Child of God
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- Length: 3 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In this taut, chilling audiobook, Lester Ballard - a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape - haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail. While telling his story, Cormac McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance.
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McCarthy dares you to accept his vision
- By MoBo on 2023-01-25
Written by: Cormac McCarthy
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Suttree
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- Length: 20 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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No discussion of great modern authors is complete without mention of Cormac McCarthy, whose rare and blazing talent makes his every work a true literary event. A grand addition to the American literary canon, Suttree introduces readers to Cornelius Suttree, a man who abandons his affluent family to live among a dissolute array of vagabonds along the Tennessee river.
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Excellent.
- By Anonymous User on 2021-11-10
Written by: Cormac McCarthy
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Outer Dark
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Outer Dark is a novel at once fabular and starkly evocative, set is an unspecified place in Appalachia, sometime around the turn of the century. A woman bears her brother's child, a boy; he leaves the baby in the woods and tells her he died of natural causes. Discovering her brother's lie, she sets forth alone to find her son. Both brother and sister wander separately through a countryside being scourged by three terrifying and elusive strangers, headlong toward an eerie, apocalyptic resolution.
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Misery loves company
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Written by: Cormac McCarthy
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The Passenger
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It is three in the morning when Bobby Western plunges from the Coast Guard tender into darkness. His dive light illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the site are the pilot’s bag, the plane’s black box, and the tenth passenger. A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit—by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul.
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Cormac McCarthy is poetic
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In the 18th and early 19th centuries, a Native American empire rose to dominate the fiercely contested lands of the American Southwest, the southern Great Plains, and northern Mexico. This powerful empire, built by the Comanche Indians, eclipsed its various European rivals in military prowess, political prestige, economic power, commercial reach, and cultural influence. Yet, until now, the Comanche empire has gone unrecognized in American history. This compelling and original book uncovers the lost story of the Comanches.
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Journey to the dusty little Texas town of Lonesome Dove and meet an unforgettable assortment of heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settlers. Richly authentic, beautifully written, always dramatic, Lonesome Dove will make listeners laugh, weep, dream, and remember.
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A Classic
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Butcher’s Crossing
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In the 1870s, Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek "an original relation to nature," drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher's Crossing, a small Kansas town full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. One of these men regales Will with tales of the immense buffalo herds hidden away in the Colorado Rockies and convinces him to join an expedition to track them down.
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Great story...strange writing style.
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Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, Bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront.
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Did not like the book at first. Now I can’t stop thinking about it.
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The men onboard HMS Terror have every expectation of finding the Northwest Passage. When the expedition's leader, Sir John Franklin, meets a terrible death, Captain Francis Crozier takes command and leads his surviving crewmen on a last, desperate attempt to flee south across the ice. But as another winter approaches, as scurvy and starvation grow more terrible, and as the Terror on the ice stalks them southward, Crozier and his men begin to fear there is no escape.
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Fantastic!
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Slaughterhouse-Five
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Traumatized by the bombing of Dresden at the time he had been imprisoned, Pilgrim drifts through all events and history, sometimes deeply implicated, sometimes a witness. He is surrounded by Vonnegut's usual large cast of continuing characters (notably here the hack science fiction writer Kilgore Trout and the alien Tralfamadorians, who oversee his life and remind him constantly that there is no causation, no order, no motive to existence).
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Weird But Enjoyable. Bad Narration
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Empire of the Summer Moon
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Empire of the Summer Moon spans two astonishing stories. The first traces the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history. The second entails one of the most remarkable narratives ever to come out of the Old West: the epic saga of the pioneer woman Cynthia Ann Parker and her mixed-blood son, Quanah, who became the last and greatest chief of the Comanches.
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Worthy of its reputation
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True Grit
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Great dialogue
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Absalom, Absalom!
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What listeners say about Blood Meridian
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Amazon Customer
- 2019-04-28
Do not hesitate to listen to this recording of BM.
Having read Blood Meridian twice, this reading brought the book alive.
McCarthy is a genius.
Richard Poe, who performs the novel, is so amazing that I would listen to a book performed by him even if I had little interest in the book.
4 people found this helpful
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- J.P. Boileau
- 2021-10-30
Seriously flawed
Wow what a in depth look at American history. Not a nice look I assure you. But informative especially if near true.
But in the end the pursuit of a boy by a seriously flawed man.
Not pretty but very good in my opinion.
1 person found this helpful
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- Rich Mayo
- 2021-06-29
Dark, violent, and subversive
the story of an unnamed protagonist against the land and the formidable character of the judge. one part story, one part dark morality play. excellent writing, bleak themes
1 person found this helpful
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- Literary Lover
- 2020-08-26
the book you are looking for
join the kid on his adventure to manhood. he walks a path along side the hardest meanest men you could ever imagine. the Glanton gang cuts a bloody path across Mexico culminating in it's own destruction. the Judge preaching the merits of violence rape and war all the while.
1 person found this helpful
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- Tony
- 2017-12-21
Well written, but too dry
I think this could be a great book for someone interested in this time and place. I bought it for the same reason I bought neverwhere; Because it is "one of the greatest ever written", but it just didn't grab me. To me the narrator felt more like narrating the book rather than evoking it, and when you pay a premium just to love the listen, I didn't find that here.
1 person found this helpful
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- MoBo
- 2023-01-25
McCarthy dares you to accept his vision
It took me a while to suspend my revulsion at the brutality and unstinting harshness of the world these people inhabit, but the truth is often hard to accept, and by not sparing the reader any of the nitty gritty he does a service to the history of the west, which should be taught in schools. The production values are more than adequate for the task. Not for the squeamish.
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- Claudia
- 2023-01-04
Slightly Dissapointing
Adjective use was amazing, the speeches very well written, but if you don't like gore, brutality or murder this is not the book for you.
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- Kai Cohan
- 2021-11-19
the great and bloody American West
absolutely loved it and look forward to reading it again with knowledge of where the characters go. it takes a while for the book to find its characters and direction, but when it does its a relentless dive into what it means to be human.
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- Amazon Customer
- 2021-04-07
They Rode On...
Well... it was bloody, that much can be said about the story. The narrator was fantastic and the authors descriptive talent was outstanding. The only thing lacking was purpose, maybe I desired something that was besides the point, but whatever the point may be it went over my head. I have never read a more violent book, and that much could have been the point.
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- Michael V. Lucas
- 2021-02-25
Richard Poe is the man
Obviously the story is great. It is Cormac McCarthy after all. Richard Poe is definitely a legend of a narrator though!
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- Ryan
- 2011-07-11
A beautiful nightmare
Brutally violent, Blood Meridian turns the 19th century American West into a kind of hellish but hauntingly beautiful dreamscape, through which a gang of mercenaries wanders, killing without aim or reason. There is no comfort to be found anywhere in this novel, which overturns all Old West Myths, leaving only a stark, maddening world in which man exists on the edge of nihilism, "civilization" an illusion. The characters are almost opaque, reduced to actions in minimal dialogue. Even the language seems intended to confound and discomfit the reader, mixing arcane, half-forgotten scientific and philosophical terms with passages that sound almost like something from the Bible.
Yet, McCarthy is the definition of a powerful writer. His prose is hypnotic, the book's scenes affecting the reader as much by their eerie beauty and lyricism as by the horror and violence contained within. Their images will stick around in your head for days. The Judge, a monstrous, demihuman prodigy at the center of novel, whose amused, philosophical queries about whether or not the scenes around him represent man in man's natural state, is one of the more memorable characters I've come across in fiction.
Make no mistake, Blood Meridian is filled with powerful questions, about morality, about evil, about humanity's need for violence and dominance, about the nature of God, and so forth. Sometimes these questions are expressed explicitly, usually by the Judge, but mostly, they swirl just beneath the surface of the nightmare, challenging the reader to peer into the abyss and examine them. Though we don't live in such lawless times anymore, the distance from our safe doorsteps to the modern equivalent of a gang of roving, murderous scalpers may be shorter than we think.
McCarthy will certainly never be an author to everyone's taste, and not with this work, but Blood Meridian has made a few critics' "Best of the 20th Century" lists for a good reason. This is a first-rate work of modern literature.
191 people found this helpful
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- Jordan
- 2008-11-25
Perhaps not meant to be listened to.
I should start by saying, I really love Cormac McCarthy's works.
In fact, I think that I would really 'enjoy' Blood Meridian, if I were to have the words in front of me. And I recommend to everyone, All the Pretty Horses, The Road, No Country for Old Men, etc.
The poetic lilt of his prose, his unique approach to storytelling, and the uncompromising spectrum of issues that he gets the reader to confront, make him author with few (if any) superiors in the English language.
The narrator is actually quite good, but the problem with Blood Meridian as an audiobook is actually due to the very qualities that make his books so great. This is a book that demands 100% of your attention at all times, and perhaps to read over a paragraph a few times or relate it to some small passage somewhere earlier in the book.
This is hard to do when listening to a book, and at times I feel frustrated and pulled along faster than I want to be, and losing the narrative line, and subsequently my connection to the story.
I think I will get this book in print and then listen to the book and reference it when needed.
177 people found this helpful
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- Colin
- 2008-03-22
Existential leavings
A friend of mine mentioned that Cormac McCarthy described his Pulitzer Prize winning 'The Road' book as his most optimistic. Having found it bleak and spare and a slice of the dystopia that seems to await us, I thought what are his non-optimistic books like. "Blood Meridian" answers this question with a punch to the consciousness that left me reeling. Brilliantly written and conceived Cormac uses starkly defined characters, almost archetypal in their construct, to drag the latent depravity and soulless nihilism embedded in the human condition. It's not easy reading. The casual descriptions of brutality are at times shocking and that, I think, is the point.
So, yes, by contrast, "The Road" is brim full of hope and optimism.
Highly recommended.
163 people found this helpful
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- Andrew
- 2007-06-20
Approach at your own risk!
Through the mid to late 1850’s, a gang of men ride the western frontier indulging in an orgy of violence and depravity. The landscape is bleak and hellish, their wandering, aimless and seemingly endless, the vistas deeply symbolic and portentous. On the course of our journey through McCarthy’s dense and vivid prose we are confronted by many questions and themes which are beyond the ability of this particular reader to understand fully.
Rather than attempt any examination of this work instead I direct the potential reader to the internet where may be found a rich vein of critical analysis on this novel. This an astonishing vision, a rare work. It is not “The Road”, but rather its darker and more complex, older sibling. At almost 14 hours it is a remorseless and demanding undertaking. Approach at your own risk.
103 people found this helpful
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- Ross
- 2016-05-07
Long, brutal, and mostly aimless
I decided to read this book after finishing Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which was perhaps the most profound novel I have read for years. When I saw that Blood Meridian, not The Road, is widely considered to be McCarthy's masterpiece, I had to check it out.
I'm sad to say that I was very disappointed. In true McCarthy style, the book is written in vivid prose that relies heavily on similes. Some of the scenes--the Indian attack on the dry lake, for instance--are among the most skillfully illustrated scenes I've ever encountered, and their breathtaking imagery will remain with me for a long time.
Unfortunately, McCarthy's unique talent with words and cadence is not enough to overcome the book's failings. Perhaps because of the history upon which it is based, the book's plot is threadbare. There is no readily discernible arc or story or conflict. The book's main character disappears for hours at a time, removing all feelings of investment on the part of the reader. The book is, with only a few exceptions, comprised of repeated and verbose descriptions of wandering in a desert waste punctuated by scenes of perhaps the most grotesque violence in modern fiction. There were scenes in Blood Meridian that were so horrific and depraved that I nearly abandoned the book.
But unlike the violence in The Road, which serves to convey an important statement about the nature of men and to create a contrasting background against which McCarthy paints the goodness of the man and the boy, Blood Meridian's violence strikes me as gratuitous revelry. McCarthy seems to bask in the blood and cruelty, lingering for far too long on scenes of terrible evil without ever offering a balance. There are no good men in Blood Meridian, only oppressive, repeated, unspeakable evil. There are no real protagonists or characters with whom readers can identify or connect. There are just bad men who offer varying degrees of evil, and who ride around the desert committing atrocities.
The book suffers immensely for this lack of moral grounding. It becomes a lacerating, demoralizing slog toward no particular goal or closure. Perhaps McCarthy wished to make a statement by writing the book this way, but I found that it greatly diminished my ability to become connected with the story or the characters in any meaningful way.
The sole saving grace on the character front is the Judge. Preternaturally intelligent and entirely amoral, he is perhaps the most enigmatic character I've ever encountered. Literature classes all over the country have puzzled over the Judge and his role. Is he God? Is he the devil? Is he simply the incarnation of the entirety of man? Is he even real? The character McCarthy created in Holden is simply brilliant, and I found myself simultaneously intrigued and repulsed by him. The book's closing chapters focus heavily on the Judge, and are arguably the best portion of the entire novel.
I will give the story two stars because of McCarthy's raw prowess with language, the fascinating case study in evil and knowledge offered by the Judge, and the strength of the final chapters. Overall, though, I struggled to enjoy the book. And given its length, that is a real problem.
One final point: The narrator did an outstanding job interpreting, coloring, and bringing to life McCarthy's often impenetrable prose. Five stars for narration.
54 people found this helpful
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Overall

- C.S.
- 2007-11-07
Masterpiece
The definitive portrait of the American West. The definitive novel by the most important writer of his generation. The writing is stunningly beautiful, and Richard Poe's reading is spot-on. A flawless masterpiece on paper and, equally remarkably, in this recorded format. So be a major thinker and put down that Dan Brown: count yourself among the few of your generation who have experienced BLOOD MERIDIAN, the MOBY DICK of its century, before it's too late.
46 people found this helpful
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Overall

- Chris
- 2007-10-19
Bleak but Fascinating
This book presents many of the same themes and works in similar tones found in "The Road". In fact, were dates not used during the tale, you would be hard pressed to differentiate the world of Blood Meridian from McCarthy's other apocalyptic wasteland.
This is not a simple cowboy story. It is a harsh tale of cruel characters in an unforgiving land. It is a challenging tale to listen to. But it is also masterfully told (and rather well narrated). If you liked "The Road", this is highly recommended.
41 people found this helpful
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- Jefferson
- 2011-12-23
A Violent, Apocalyptic, Beautiful Western
Blood Meridian thrusts us into the deserts of 1849 Mexico, a pumice-floored, dust-coated, sun-blasted, blood-soaked, bone-punctuated wasteland of the soul. This "hallucinatory void" is home to snarling flies, demonic swine, vampire bats, ghostly wolves, spitting basilisks, harpy eagles, muttering ducks, and buzzards like black bishops. But the horrifying creatures are the wandering bands of Indians and Americans, performers of creative torture, casual murder, and orgiastic massacre, including eye-gouging, tongue-skewering, skull-crushing, intestine-spilling, scalp-hacking, ear-collecting, genital-lopping, skin-flaying, girl-raping, and baby-hanging. And the "calamitous" and "boiling" sun rises to meridian "like the eye of God," bookended by bloody skies bookended by starry darkness.
Through it all wanders "the kid," a 16-year-old blessed or cursed "pilgrim." He may be the moral center of the novel, though his trajectory is warped by his amoral father figure, "the judge," a giant, hairless, devil-idol-polyglot-polymath-philosopher who wants to become the "suzerain" of the world by cataloguing or killing everything in it. The judge, white as Moby-Dick and charismatic as the Confidence-Man, says that "war is God," and who may gainsay him?
Unlike Virginia Woolf, McCarthy reveals the souls of his characters through speech, action, and landscape rather than through stream of consciousness thought. A grim beauty flares in his biblical style, vivid descriptions, and dramatic similes (though at times he may stretch too far for portent): "in the night bats came from some nether part of the world to stand on leather wings like dark satanic hummingbirds and feed at the mouths of those flowers."
Reader Richard Poe relates all with a compelling hint of morbid fascination or appalled excitement behind his gravelly, hard-boiled voice.
If you like unromantic, unpredictable, violent, apocalyptic, and beautiful westerns that expose the hellish pit in the human heart, listen to this book.
40 people found this helpful
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Overall

- Susan Hayden
- 2008-02-09
Faulkner of the Frontier West.
When I started reading I couldn't find the thread in this stream of consciousness narrative. But after a couple of chapters I understood that there was no traditional "storyline" per se. Instead, from the very first paragraph, the reader simply materializes beside a young man who is trying to survive in an incredibly hostile environment. We watch as he randomly encounters various threats and opportunities. The images are horrific, but feel authentic. The writer uses archaic language, the kind one finds in letters and journals of the period. That and the graphic descriptions of atrocities committed paints a vivid and shocking picture for the reader. Not unlike the shock viewers of Deadwood (HBO series) first experienced at that depiction of the Old West, so in stark contrast with our shared cultural myths (ala Gunsmoke). We don't often talk about the atrocities perpetrated against the native population here, and when we do we don't talk about what those atrocities really were. We more often talk about the atrocities committed by natives against settlers. Here we see clearly it was a tit for tat escalation, an apocalyptic era with no limits on cruelty and brutality.
I think it's brilliant. But it's certainly not for everyone.
30 people found this helpful
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Overall

- James C. Maddox
- 2009-09-25
High lit, well-read.
Never before have I encountered a book that went so far over my head the first time I read through it, but Blood Meridian passed by so high, it's taken me quite some time to reach a point that I could appreciate the work for all its accomplishments. This book is a chore, plainly stated, but - like so many difficult yet great books that are out there - it will be worthwhile for those who decided to take up the task.
As for the reading, Poe did a fantastic job in his narration. Not over-the-top but not a monotonous drone, his choices in the voicing of these characters allowed for the text to really speak out.
29 people found this helpful