I felt like I needed a shower after finishing Cormac McCarthy’s blood-soaked western. This book is fucking BRUTAL. No other words. Well actually there are other words - haunting, beautifully written, harrowing - but brilliant and brutal encapsulate it the best. Brilliantly brutal, if you will.
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Blood Meridian is set in the 1800s, as a violent gang traverse the great American desert, ruthlessly slaughtering and being slaughtered in return. I really don’t recommend this book blindly. Know your limits, and if you can’t handle violence then do not pick it up. There’s scalping, gratuitous murder, torture, slaughter, gruesome injuries, animal abuse, and a little more butchering.

This is not a book to be picked up lightly when you have a spare 10 minutes. I struggled reading it on my commute because it takes at least 5 minutes to settle into the style and then once I did it was time to get off. But at the same time, once I had the time come the weekend to dedicate myself to it, I couldn’t read it for long stretches of time because of the graphic violence. It was a fine line to walk.
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When I did finish it, I just sat and thought. It seemed impossible to rate, this 350-page book that took me 5 days to read because I just could not handle it at some points. Every kind of horror you could imagine probably resides within these pages, and yet I can’t stop thinking about the prose, the character of the Judge and everything he represents, the senseless violence that defined the lives of the men this book was based on... It was not a book that I always enjoyed, if at all, but it certainly is a book that I admire, and will never forget reading.