This email is a departure from my normal fare—although it does say on the tin that this newsletter will contain “enthusiasms (often STEAM-related, sometimes not).” Consider this a “sometimes not.” Hope you enjoy, but rest assured I will resume normal programming with the next one (a big AI story I’m proud of, coming out next month).

Hi there,

I’m far from the first middle-aged male to have his mind blown by Blood Meridian, McCarthy’s legendary western novel about a blank-eyed teen who falls in with a gang of scalp-hunting outlaws ranging through the Southwest in the 1850s. But since I did just finish it, and am now experiencing the stereotyped effects firsthand, I wanted to get some of my thoughts down before they start to dim and blur.

First, some quick service journalism. This book has an intimidating reputation that probably puts a lot of people off who might otherwise be willing to give it a try. (I was once one of them.) Here are some considerations to help lower the energy barrier:

• Try to preview it somehow. Doing this usually kills a motivation to actually read something, but with this particular book, it ended up being really helpful to know what to expect. (I even knew the ending in advance, and it didn’t diminish the experience at all.) My preview came on accident, when one of my favorite podcasts happened to spend a few episodes discussing the novel. There were spoilers, but the book is so light on plot that they didn’t matter. Instead, the podcast “set me up for success” by previewing the book’s unique atmosphere (I’ll get to that below), which might have been difficult to surrender to if I’d just went in cold. Maybe this post will do the same for you.

• It’s shorter than you’d think. Discovering this was what finally made me pick up the book: “Huh, I always assumed it was like War and Peace, but it’s not!” Just a normal-length paperback, 300ish pages. The chapters aren’t long either, and while the going gets a little tough in the middle, overall the book has a surprisingly easy momentum. Just about every time you feel like you might want to look at your watch, the chapter ends.

• The violence won’t scar you (probably). Famous literary types like David Foster Wallace and Harold Bloom have made public comments implying that the violence in Blood Meridian is so off-the-charts that it’ll put your soul at risk, like watching a snuff film or something. Don’t worry. This isn’t American Psycho with cowboys: it’s not rubbing your nose in obscenity just to make a point. Is it unlike anything you’ve ever encountered on the page? Yes. (I will never un-see the word “thrapple” as McCarthy uses it.) But that’s definitely more about vibe than gore, and the flashes of mayhem are actually pretty spaced apart. If you could handle The Road, you’ll be fine.

OK, back to the show.

First, I have to say (and again—I’m about the zillionth person to do so, but it is different to be able to say it than to just hear it): the hype is real. This is definitely among the top five, maybe top three most affecting reading experiences I’ve ever had. Which is distinct from “favorite.” I’m not sure I’m ever going to read this book again. But to have had its spell work upon me is a profound feeling. Profound as in: I’m definitely glad I’ll someday die having read this book, rather than having not-read it.

“Good” or “important” or “meaningful” are kind of puny and inappropriate terms for it. Those words are for describing “content,” something you consume. Finishing Blood Meridian feels more like apprehending or witnessing something bigger than you, like a canyon or an animal migration. Obviously, the word “like” is doing a lot of work in that sentence: it’s still just a book. But I can’t deny that it has a similar quality of having-to-be-seen-to-be-believed.

So, yeah, I recommend it.

To me, two words capture the book’s essence (and they are both overused to the point of hollowness, but to me their precise meanings snap back to life when applied to Blood Meridian): pitiless and visionary.

Pitiless. As distinct from “indifferent.” There is much indifference on display in the book: to death, to violence, to all kinds of depraved and unsavory things. But indifference suggests that “there’s nobody home.” Blood Meridian isn’t like that at all: there is a thick presence felt all the time. But it’s more like a cosmic lidless eye staring and bearing down on everything that occurs, not balefully or in outright malice, just with a gaze as heartless as a black hole. Cruelty, kindness, beauty, horror—it’s all the same stuff within the novel’s event horizon, inexorably encircled and stripped of any sentimental dimension, literally leveled. McCarthy’s own phrase for this effect in the novel is “optical democracy”, which sounds vaguely benign. But really it’s much more like “the abyss stares back”—except downward, in some kind of stern and implacable and ultimately unknowable accounting.

There’s apparently been a lot written about how Blood Meridian evokes a Gnostic worldview, i.e. that the universe is essentially evil. I don’t know anything about Gnosticism, but that’s not how the book felt to me. Its worldview was at once bigger and purer than that: pitiless.

What makes me choose that word is that it has a flavor of inevitability. Evil sounds too contingent, like things could have been otherwise. The pitilessness of Blood Meridian’s worldview feels fixed. There’s a concept in physics called the “block universe,” which posits that time is an illusion and the whole universe (three dimensions of space plus one of time) is actually just sitting there inert, as a 4-D “block.” What we experience as evolving events in a flow of time is just our inability to directly perceive this wholeness. It’s kind of like determinism except that things aren’t even determined (with pasts evolving into fixed futures), they just are.

Blood Meridian’s narration makes direct reference to a similar kind of fixed, eternal, amoral wholeness-of-things, which everyone and everything in the book is embedded in like bugs in amber. Things in the novel (usually bad things) often seem to happen for no reason, but they also feel like they couldn’t have been any other way. There is a pitiless order (if not logic) to Blood Meridian that is terribly compelling—in both senses of “terribly.”

Visionary. I can’t remember the last time I saw this word used as anything other than a synonym for “cool” when talking about a film director, but I just looked it up and Oxford says: “‌relating to or able to see visions in a dream or trance, or as a supernatural apparition.”

That’s pretty on the money for Blood Meridian. Its narration sounds like the Book of Revelation crossed with a Sam Elliot voiceover. In fact, “apocalyptic” (in its original meaning) might be even closer: “an unveiling or unfolding of things not previously known and which could not be known apart from the unveiling.” That literally sounds like a line from Blood Meridian! And it’s spot-on for how the book feels. I just wrote and deleted three sentences trying to capture what I mean more specifically, before giving up. It would be better to just quote random lines from the novel, but then you might as well just take my word and read it.

The point is: the book comes on like a vision—something received and possessing. (The first sentence: “See the child.”) The language is both leathery and simple (the period-accurate dialogue especially) and “biblical” in its incantatory rhythms and limbic, primeval imagery. Wolves. Flames. Bones. Coins. Even its depiction of the southwestern landscape sounds like something outside of time, describing salt pans and mountain passes as if no one had ever set eyes on them before and wished not to look for too long, for fear of being maddened by their intensity. (A blurb on the back of my copy compares Blood Meridian to the Inferno; there’s something Lovecraftian about it too, as if features of the natural world were The Old Ones.)

And then there’s the judge, Blood Meridian’s most “visionary”/“apocalyptic” element. He’s a villain, but also a shadow-protagonist, a symbol out of Revelation (again) come to life, but also flesh and blood (based on a historical figure, to some degree). The subcortical, unconscious-rattling power of this character is hard to overstate. Think Moby Dick, Satan, Thanos, Lex Luthor, Dr. Manhattan, Max Cady, Al Swearengen, and Cthulhu rolled into one. And I’m still leaving things out. People smarter than me interpret the judge as an “archon,” but don’t try too hard to figure him out—just let him happen. If there’s one reason to read this book, the judge is it.

So now you know what you’d be getting into and why. The ending, after having spent several hundred pages in the grip of these effects, was literally stunning: as in, I just kind of stared into space for a while, as if my psychic OS had hung. The only other ending in fiction I can compare it to is James Joyce’s “The Dead”.

Like I said: I recommend it. If you’ve read it too, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Take it easy,

J