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Blood meridian12/28/2022 ![]() ![]() I'm stretching my metaphors here because I don't actually know shit about painting. At first it may look like a muddy blob, but if you look at it long enough, it starts to take on form and texture and a sort of alien beauty. He plays with words and sentence structure and punctuation the way a painter swirls a paintbrush through globs of paint and smears it onto a canvas. (And jeebus it's been a long time since I've read a book that actually made me wish for a dictionary, repeatedly.) He just treats writing like art. But I realized after reading Blood Meridian that McCarthy isn't trying to be pretentious or show off his vocabulary. ![]() I still don't always like his prose, mind. McCarthy is an author whose prose stylings I used to make fun of as being emblematic of "pretentious" literary authors who use lots of fancy writing to express threadbare stories with pretty words. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning. The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. A universe without light or hope, where humans exist by accident and death is as incidental as it is inevitable, and the only "happy ending" is not dying today. You'd get something dark and frightening, unsettling, something brilliantly written with sentences that sometimes make your eyes cross, violence and gore all the more disturbing because it's not the fictional ichor of Mi-go but with an equally unhinging effect on mankind's fragile grasp of sanity. Lovecraft were a literary author, and instead of writing pulp novels about Elder Gods, he wrote Westerns. Ye carry war of a madman's making onto a foreign land. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. The Mennonite watches the enshadowed dark before them as it is reflected to him in the mirror over the bar. An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west." Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennessean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. ![]()
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