I really wanted to dislike this disturbing meditation on violence as I see no inherent artistic value in portraying suffering, especially when cloaked in such offensive language. This haunting work bears no "message", safe for the powerful assertion of war as an animalistic spirit sleeping inside men (and truly Men), transcending time and space. Set in the beautifully nightmarish territories of the USA's late colonial conquests, Blood Meridian shows Americans, native Americans, Mexicans and others thrown into a maelstrom of mutual abuse that spirals on itself and is fuelled both by the demonic figure Judge Holden (whose supernatural aura moves this work closer to the genre of magical realism) as well as an unexplainably inevitable bloodthirst inside the murderers. Unfortunately, the sheer power of the prose forces all readers to become impressed with McCarthy's skill and vision. Every word is purposeful, the atmosphere seeps into the reader's bones, images burn themselves into our inner retinae. Regarding literary craft alone, this novel is a masterclass. 

Nevertheless, one must forcefully reject the content of Blood Meridian's reflection on violence and especially on "war". Because real war has never been random, or driven by an unexplainable need for carnage, resting on a vaguely defined "human nature". On the contrary, war, as all historical events, has REASONS. History is real and especially organised violence is a function and corrolary of strucutre, i.e., the socio-economic and physical make-up of the people involved. People make decisions, albeit not under circumstances of their own choosing, yet they decide for peace much more regularly than they decide for violence. If war breaks out, it is a specific, particular event, not one painted in broad strokes of metaphysics. 
By seeing war as transcendent of history, Blood Meridian ends up equating the Americans, natives, and Mexicans as essentially differently-dressed avatars of the war god, merely appearing in essentially random costumes. In this, the novel also ends up brushing aside categories of oppressor, victim, class and coloniality. It all just becomes a Wild Western, men thrown into an arena of animalistic but equal competition. That is not what the world is, and definitely not what the history of the mid-19th century in North America is. The Western conquests were deeply steeped into imperialist expansion, industrial production, land grabbing, genocide of native peoples, and thus, a stark inequality of actors. But there is no space for such dimensions in Blood Meridian, making this work a favourite of naive American conservatives who see the conquest of America as an esentially apolitical process that "just happened".