No spoilers, but yeah Blood Meridian is a strange book. It felt like a sort of apocalyptic fever dream or something. I pretty quickly stopped trying to apply the logic of our world to it and just went wherever it was taking me lol. It's a story from some other place I think.
All I remember about Blood Meridian is that Cormac really hated punctuation.
"The writer hated commas and semi colons and full stops and anything that would let a man take rest and contemplate both the novel and his station in life and often to the extent that every paragraph was actually just one endless sentence doing violence to that man's ability to parse and consider all those elements and often something about bush craft and coffee and something about horses."
TBF I can appreciate what he's going for. The lack of quotes makes it less like you're an omniscient being hearing dialogue, more like the narrator's just repeating what someone said. I'm in the middle of Alan Wake 2 and I can't help but read the book in Alan's VA's voice because the way "Alan" writes is superficially similar.
It also cranks up the impression that you're stuck on a nonstop violence train that doesn't really have any rhyme or reason to it. Just a series of events that occur.
It's violence escalating over time over and over again, but it seemed to me like McCarthy didn't want to "condemn" the glorification of it. The book is based on an actual posse of scalphunters, and to me the tone of it all seems to be on par with his other books where the main message you have to get out of it is "the world is a flaming giant turd filled to the brim with violence and hatred and it's painful to tell you the kind ones aren't coming out on top". I hope I made it clear enough.
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