I read a lot of books and I have this thing called The 20% Rule which means if I don’t find myself drawn into a book by the time I’ve read 20%, I will start to think about abandoning it. If I still feel the same when I get to 30%, then that book is tossed. It doesn’t happen very often, but this morning, it happened.

Blood Meridian is a 1985 book by Cormac McCarthy set in the mid 1800s and follows the travels of a character only referred to as “the kid”. We meet him as he leaves his family and carry on with him as he falls in with The Glanton Gang and crisscrosses the desert as they hunt Native American scalps and massacre villages.

When I first started reading this I liked it, it had a dreamy wistful feeling similar to that which I felt when reading The Gunslinger by Stephen King. But as I went on I just found myself less and less into to. There are things going on, but McCarthy does a poor job of describing what exactly is going on, and it felt boring, there’s no flourish. It’s more “Johnny did this, and then Johnny did that” than “a cool wind kissed Johnny’s brow as he walked slowly over to the horse. He nervously reached up and touched the neck of the straining beast, feeling the wiry muscles and raw strength invisibly present”. Maybe it’s the cold narration that had made this book somewhat of a cult hit, but it didn’t catch my brain.

Then there is the extremely annoying writing style of not using speech marks when characters are talking. He did this in The Road too (and from what I understand in all his books) and it just serves no purpose. It is worse than Tim Smith using italics to indicate speech in Child 44 and completely changes the way you read the words in your head. It’s dumb.

So, in conclusion, I hated McCarthy’s The Road, fell asleep during No Country for Old Men (a movie adaptation of another one of his books), and now, with Blood Meridian I think I have read my last book by Cormac McCarthy.

https://sierrakilobravo.wordpress.com/2019/08/10/book-review-blood-meridian/