Yuman Belief Systems and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian

Abstract

When New York Times reporter Richard Woodward called Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian the bloodiest book since the Iliad, he was probably right (36). Rarely does one find a novel so full of maimings, murders, massacres, and general mayhem as this one, and upon first reading it can seem like nothing so much as one long uninterrupted bloodbath. Readers who fell in love with McCarthy's subsequent and much better-known novel All the Pretty Horses, who read that novel and then the whole of the Border Trilogy before deciding to track backward through the author's oeuvre, are often particularly put off. Certainly McCarthy's other novels have their share of violence, and a few moments that are especially eyecatching for their graphic nature, but Blood Meridian has them very easily beat. Upon closing the book, the reader's first quandary is what to do with all this blood.

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