5.20.2011

Blood Bath

I'm not even sure what I have to say so far about Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy...

I guess the best thing I have been able to come up with is - it's intense.



I like it. I really do.... but there is so much gore, so much violence, so many disturbing images flashing through my brain, that I'm getting dizzy. 
I've never been a very sensitive person. I can see blood and guts and just be like "eh." But, when an author makes me see such horrific things in my own head [that I would never have come up with on my own], it makes me feel all funny.

Take for instance this little gem of a mental picture:

Scene: "The Kid", a ruffian teenager who has joined an army in the 1840s to kill Mexicans, has just been ransacked by a group of Comanche Indians. His army is basically slaughtered, save for a few people. The Kid and this other guy, Sproule, are walking through the desert.

"The way narrowed through rocks and by and by they came to a bush that was hung with dead babies. They stopped side by side, reeling in the heat. These small victims, seven, eight of them, had holes punched in their underjaws and were hung so by their throats from the broken stobs of a mesquite to stare eyeless at the naked sky. bald and pale and bloated, larval to some unreckonable being."

Brutal, huh? There has been a lot of that so far.

I really have enjoyed myself though. McCarthy has a way of writing that absorbs you into the book and stylistically he is always very interesting. I like how in this novel he gives a little synopsis at the very beginning of each chapter. I don't read them until AFTER the chapter though, because they often contain spoilers.

Here is an interesting little YouTube clip I found, just for fun:


Anyway, on to reading!




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