I just finished reading the Cormac MccArthy novel Blood Meridian. This post is about my inital thoughts and will contain spoilers. For those who want to avoid spoilers or a TL;DR I do recommend the book, but it's not for the faint of heart. It's a captivating story overflowing with bloodshed and evil.

(Spoilers Ahead)

Blood Meridian is fantastic. The story follows a charatcer named the kid. In the late 1840's, a 14-year old kid goes on an expedition in Mexico with a band of mercenaries on a mission to kill Apaches and take their scalps. The novel is unflinching in it's portral of violence. One instance has the mercinaries slaughter and entire village, with one memeber taking an infant by the ankles in each of his hands and smashing their skulls against rocks. That moment sickened me and made me put the book down... for all of five minutes. The novel's content is horrific and bloody, put it's used for artistics purpose and not just being edgy and violent for the sake of it. The journey the kid takes through Mexico is so surreal and horrendous. A moment that stuck with me was when the kid is seeking warmth underneath a burning tree at night along with a bunch of other creepy-crawley desert creatures. Another part the sticks out to me is when the mercs came across a dried lava flow with hoove marks in it. The book talks about how places like these are where vile sinners manged to escape Hell and demons with their hooved feet walk the Earth to bring them back. McCarthy's descriptions of the landscape and time of day makes it feel like some sort of dream that is equal parts horrific and gripping. The novel depicts grave evils and the darkest parts of the human condition. Speaking of evil, I want to focus on Judge Holden. The Judge is an omnipresent force in the story. From the begining when the judge sends a tent revival the kid is attending into a riotous frenzy, to the entirety of the expedition, to the end when the kid is now the man, Judge Holden is always there. He's this hairless pale thing. As I was reading, I was wondering what exactly the Judge was. There are plenty of vile people in this story, like Glanton, the judge's right-hand-man on the expeiditon. But none quite like the Judge. Is he merely human? Is he some sort of demon? The novel doesn't say but the judge's actions, mentality, and physical description makes me wonder who or what exaclty he is. At one point in the book, the Judge speak of war as this holy thing. During the expedition, he's making sketches in his note book of everything he comes across, and he says "Whatever exists without my knowledge exists without my consent." Something about that quote speaks to me as to how the Judge's evil goes down to depths that can only be described as abyssal. While the kid is the protagonist, there's an argument Judge Holden is the main character. He casts such a wide shadown over the whole story. He's a phenomenal villian. And swining back to the kid, the bulk of the horror and violence he experiences and participates in occurs when he's 14-16 years old. It's a little tragic to me that the kid is twisted by this violence, because he's so young. I remember being that age and not going through the bleak and evil he did. He's not entirely just a sweet child who stumbles into this ordeal. The novel starts out with saying the kid was born of violence when his mother dies giving birth to him. He also is described as to getting into fist fights before the meat of the story kicks off. Before he embarks on the expedition, he kills a man by stabbing him in the eye with a broken bottle. In conclusion, if your stomach can take it, you owe it to yourself to read this book. Blood Meridian in an unflinching depiciton of the absolute worst of the human condition and broods on the nature of evil. It's grisly and dark, but it's deeply compelling because of how McCarthy wields those aspects of the story so deftly as to seem effortless. I finished it up about an hour ago, and I have a small itch to read it again right here right now. If that's not a testament to the book's quality, I don't know what else to tell you. Except that you should read it.