I read Blood Meridian in graduate school (it wasn’t assigned, but I was the type of student who failed at grad school because I was always reading things that weren’t assigned). I loved it. McCarthy’s language was so intense. The prose was so lush and gorgeous and High Modernist, like something from Faulkner. The Southwestern vistas and desert imagery were so vivid. The violence was genuinely shocking. The novel’s setting seemed to drift back and forth between the Mexican-American border and some kind of weird, cosmic, post-historical space. I even enjoyed little details, like how McCarthy’s chapter titles summarized the content of the chapters, which made the novel feel like a “found” object, like something archaic, like something from the nineteenth century. The whole novel was so self-consciously ambitious and “important.” I absolutely loved it.

At that time (the mid-2000s), it wasn’t common to hear people frame the political and cultural inception of the U.S. in terms of the genocide of Native peoples (even the use of the term “genocide” to describe U.S. policy toward Natives wasn’t super common back then). So everything about Blood Meridian felt bold and innovative and true.

After enough time passed, I decided to reread Blood Meridian. And while the prose was as gorgeous as I remember and the violence was as shocking and brutal, the whole nihilistic tone just…wore me down. After a while, the tone began to ruin even the most beautiful moments of McCarthy's prose. And after about fifty pages, I was just like, “I get it. I get it. I get it. Red in tooth and claw. God is dead. The cosmos is cruel. I. GET. IT.”

Unlike the novels it aspires to imitate ("Moby-Dick" above all), Blood Meridian has one or two big ideas, and there’s very little else to enjoy about it. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t require that a novel have multiple compelling ideas, but Blood Meridian is so thoroughly an “ideas” novel—not a “plot” novel or a “character” novel—that after you’ve enjoyed the imagery and the prose, you’re not really left with much else. It’s all just McCarthy beating his nihilism over your head for hundreds of pages. He keeps going and going, beating your head until it’s reduced to a pulp of blood, brain, and bits of skull.

No thanks.

Still, I’ve got to give it three stars for the imagery and for the prose. Read it once for that, if you can handle the violence.