Blood Meridian: Cormac McCarthy (Vintage International)

Author Cormac McCarthy has received quite a bit of attention over this past decade, and for good reason. Beginning in 2000, the film adaptation of his 1992 New York Times best-selling novel All The Pretty Horses catapulted him into the mainstream, garnering more press than even McCarthy himself may have been comfortable with. Though the film version, directed by the multi-faceted Billy Bob Thornton, didn't perform well at the box office, much of Hollywood took notice (including film veteran Tommy Lee Jones) and there emerged a certain renaissance for McCarthy's brand of bleak, gritty tales of the soft-spoken cowboys and brutal outlaws that once crisscrossed the deserts of the Southwestern United States.

 In 2007, the Coen Brothers' masterful retelling and subsequent Academy Award for No Country For Old Men solidified McCarthy's status as a virtually untapped literary superstar and several more of his pictures were immediately optioned, including the recently released The Road, his third novel in his "Border Trilogy",1998's Cities of the Plain, his 2006 novel The Sunset Limited, and 1985's Blood Meridian, currently in development with actor/screenwriter/director Todd Field said to be adapting the screenplay and scheduled to direct. (Since the acquisition of the film rights, both Jones, [once rumored to have himself purchased the rights to Blood Meridian] and director Ridley Scott have, at times, also been listed as possible directors.)

Unlike many of McCarthy's novels, Blood Meridian is a dense, hypnotic epic, relying greatly on thoroughly detailed descriptions of threatening landscapes, forbidding weather conditions and amoral characters that litter the plains among the sun bleached skulls of long since stranded animals and the struggling scrub oak of the mesas and surrounding foothills. McCarthy again succeeds in painting a desolate, unforgiving backdrop for his characters to inhabit with the same stark, emotionless textures that have become the mark of his craft. Yet the language he uses here is more lyric and masterful. Through McCarthy's poetic architecture, the reader can feel the assault of wind driven sand, the scorching desert heat, the sorrowful sting of an unrelenting rainstorm and the frigid grip of a flooded river. The sheer number of words he employs to frame the surroundings and the unflinching evil at the core of the story is far more prolific than the simple but deliberate descriptions he generally relies upon. The result is the literary equivalent of Francis Ford Coppola's historic film Apocalypse Now, both rivaling and running parallel to the work in it's ambitious scope and it's harsh depiction of physical and psychological violence. Much like McCarthy's novels No Country For Old Men and 2006's post-apocalyptic survival story The Road, Blood Meridian is not for the squeamish or the casual reader. The journey is vicious and foreboding, and the dark nature of the unflinching cruelty contained within it's pages is often horrifying and, as is customary in most of McCarthy's work, foreshadows an outcome unyielding of redemptive results for his central protagonists. Nonetheless, Blood Meridian is not to be missed for fans of McCarthy's writing  and the western genre as a whole. But set out into the material with your guns at the ready and with all of the extra water you can carry.