The devil has never been represented so well. Cormac McCarthy must have been having lunch dates with Satan himself to craft the character of Judge Holden in “Blood Meridian.” The book’s premise is the annihilation of humanity and the immersion of bloodlust. This is a wild-west journey that goes from war of bounty to war for pleasure. A gang of mercenaries fall in and out of grim adventures, contorting traditional morality for vulgar indoctrinations. The main character, “the Kid,” is a largely passive absorber and narrator of these stories, a doodled stick figure in comparison to the megalomaniac writing of the Judge, the antagonist of “Blood Meridian.”
The Judge leads the Kid with his mercenary scalp hunters through a rampage of the west, his seven foot stature dominating his Glanton Gang. Yes, Native American scalp hunters. It is as demented as it sounds. In the beginning, Holden leads with a level of camaraderie, showing himself as a gentleman, curious about geography and the arts. For most of the book, he is hairless, nude and pale while he murders, scalps and abuses animals and humans alike. Evil is not something that treads lightly in “Blood Meridian.” It is shouted at and spit on the reader. It is overt and demanding. If the gore does not make the reader queasy, the philosophies will. The Judge has nuances within his psychopathy, but all of his ‘good’ traits somehow still add to his malignancy.
In this book, men are playthings in war, and war is everywhere. The scalp hunters do not fight for their nation, they fight for the craft of bloodlust. Alongside the Judge, they wander the desert following this law, not in acceptance of its violence but in idolatrous worship. There is a mysterious supernatural element to this book as well. In the end, the Kid (now the Man) meets the Judge again to which the ambiguous writing assumes the godlike nature of the antagonist: “He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.”
The way it is written also feels like an assemblage of Grimms Brothers-like stories. This is because there is not a dominant overarching plot, more a collection of evils with the Judge lingering nearby. The intensity of this book is not to be underestimated. The incredible prose and poetry of McCarthy highlights every heinous scene, showing each wrinkle and curve.
McCarthy’s writing deserves all of the praise. He wrote the war to be second hand to the abstraction of brutality. Every line, besides its well-written flow, feels symbolic of something else. The overtness of the evil is backdropped by this insatiability of something more that must be there. Reading the book felt like becoming dehydrated, desperately clawing onto the pages in hope for water. McCarthy is an extremely tantalizing writer, and the Kid is not the only plaything along for the ride.
