I just finished reading a book by Cormac McCarthy, the author best know for writing the novel No Country For Old Men,which was made into a Coen Brothers movie. The novel Blood Meridian Was written in 1985, & is praised by critics as some of the best recent novel writing. It may be problematic for some people. McCarthy doesn't use much punctuation,and doesn't separate dialogue from other sentences by using quotation marks. But once you get used to it, the story flows along.
Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West is about the adventures of The Kid, who runs away from his home in Tennessee to New Orleans, where he hops a ship to Texas, ending up in Nacogdoches at a tent containing a religious revival run by a Reverend Green. The reverend is interrupted by a tall big hairless and bald man, who claims he is an impostor wanted in Ft. Smith Arkansas for child-molestation & bestiality. A teamster draws a pistol from his boot, intent on shooting the reverend, another muleskinner slices open the tent with his knife, and the kid runs after him thru the rain to a hotel porch. He watches the tent collapse to the sounds of gunfire & women's screams, then goes to the bar, where the bald hairless man is. A man addresses him as judge, & questions him about his statements. The judge states flatly he never saw Rev. Green before that night. The man & his friends gape at the judge & then burst out laughing.
Later, the kid gets in a knife fight with a man who would not step out of his way into the mud from the planks that lead to the outhouse. He wakes up in the morning smeared in mud next to the man near the planks. They retrieve their boots stuck in the mud, and the kid follows his new companion Threadvine to a hotel, which Threadvine sets on fire after he kills a companion in the hotel. The kid flees Nacogdoches, ending up in San Antonio, where he ends up joining a band of filibusters (a private army) lead by a Capt. White who intend on going to Mexico & seizing land for the US. They meet a giant herd of cattle & horses, & all except the kid and a few others are slaughtered by the Comanches who are driving the herd.
The kid flees the massacre into the hills of Mexico, until he is captured by the Mexican army & taken to the city of Chihuahua. There he sees the pickled head of Capt. White, and is thrown into the city jail, where he discovers Threadvine. Later, the hairless Judge Holden spots him & Threadvine as the soldiers make the prisoners clean the gutters. The next day the kid, Threadvine, & a friend of theirs are released to Judge Holden & Capt. Glanton's gang of scalp-hunters. The gang of 40 to 50 Americans, Delaware scouts, an Australian, & a Mexican are hired by the State of Chihuahua to hunt Apaches & turn in their scalps for a bounty. Which the Glanton gang does in gory detail. They are all armed with a brace of Dragoon Colt revolvers, the most advanced weapons in Mexico. Like Xe(Blackwater), they start to abuse this fact, especially after getting liquored up. They are greeted like conquering heroes on entering Chihuahua City after their first foray, but no one turns out when they leave weeks later. They start killing Mexicans as well as peaceful Indians, taking their scalps, & then kill a Mexican cavalry detachment in a running battle that ends nine miles outside of Chihuahua City. The gang then rides over to the State of Sonora to offer their services. Sonora accepts, & they ride after Apaches again, but massacre a mule-train carrying terracotta jars of mercury by pushing them off over the ledge of the mountain trail they are descending. They flee the pursuing Mexican cavalry into the US. They end up in Arizona at a ferry on the Gila River operated by a white businessman & the local Indians. The gang seizes the ferry, & starts to rob wagon trains that try to use the ferry. They abduct & rape women, & steal anything they take a fancy to. A rough justice happens when the Yuma Indians attack & kill Glanton & all of his gang, except for the kid, the judge, Threadvine, an ex-priest, and two others off getting supplies in San Diego. They flee to a well in the desert. They get frightened when the judge shows up.
Throughout the book, the judge or Judge Holden is presented as a set of contradictions. He saved the gang when they first met him & they were fleeing Apaches because they were out of gunpowder. The judge gathered up saltpeter from the bat guano in a cave, charcoal from an abandoned kiln, & then lead them up the slopes of a volcano where he found sulfur. He mixed the elements together, urged everyone to urinate on the mess, and then dried it on the rocks. By the time the Indians found them, they had gunpowder, & so slaughtered the Apaches. The judge would never appear in a book by Louis L'Amour or Elmore Leonard, except as the badman gunned down by the hero. He is a polymath, multilingual, erudite, & ready to strip naked at a moment's notice. He murders a little Apache boy he rescues from a massacre. Wherever the judge goes & there are children, they suddenly disappear & the local villagers start up parties to search for them.
The gang takes this all in stride, though the kid & the ex-priest view Judge Holden with suspicion. He is one of them, & his knowledge of Spanish & a silver tongue helps them out of many scraps with the Mexicans, who the gang refers to, along with Indians, as 'niggers.' Which is strange, since one of their number is a black man named Jack Johnson. In the middle of the book, he beheads a white member of the gang named the same, & the gang just goes about their business. They don't interfere either when Jackson kills a white chophouse owner when the man insists he sit at the table for 'colored.' They even lie when the US Army comes to investigate. They operate all for one, and one for all, as long as you can still shoot people.
The kid makes it across the desert to Los Angeles, where he is briefly jailed,& then released. He sees a public hanging & later learns it was Threadvine & Brown, another member of the gang. He moves off to the goldfields, where he works at different jobs. The book picks up with the kid in 1878 on the plains of north Texas, where all the buffalo have been killed & bone gatherers are collecting towers of bones for button making. The kid ends up in a town called Griffin, & enters a salon for a drink of whiskey. He spots the judge at a table, & the judge sees him.
He comes over to the kid, & talks. The kid rejects everything the judge, the owner of the salon, says. While they are talking, a dancing bear is shot dead by a drunk, & the little girl who was turning the hurdygurdy weeps on the bear's head. The judge tells the kid to go to the dance in the back & dance with the whores. The kid does after the judge leaves, & is grabbed by a midget harlot. They have sex, & the kid goes out to the outhouses. He opens the door. The judge is inside, naked, & grabs the kid in his arms and shuts the door. Apparently he rapes him. The kid's fate is not revealed. The judge goes back to the dance hall & dances naked among the whores & johns, while townsfolk get up a search-party for the now missing little girl.
The epilogue is strange. It describes someone digging holes with a post-hole digger, while people walk around him searching for bones. At first, I thought this was set in the modern age, and the digger & bone finders where part of an archeological dig. But no. This describes a cowboy, that year or several years off, digging holes for the new barbed wire fences. Cormac McCarthy declares the Old West over.