Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian **

I appreciate what McCarthy is trying to do here. He wants to create a counter-legend about the Old West that puts pitiless violence at the center. As Marlon James says in his introduction, "It's the rare novel where violence is neither distraction nor consequence of characters' actions but the driving force of the novel itself." Apropos of his allegorical purpose, McCarthy uses mythopoetic language to paint brutal tableaux. 

Unfortunately, the story lacks narrative development, character development, or thematic development.

The plot, such as it is, has the Glanton gang criss-crossing northern Mexico collecting the scalps of Native Americans and pretty much anyone else they encounter. Their peripatetic journey feels aimless, the towns they terrorize indistinguishable. Many passages are lurid descriptions of the aftermath of violence: blood, smoking ruins, dismembered bodies, static depictions of hell. Lots of lightning and redness in the western sky.

Theoretically our protagonist is "the kid" who joins the gang, but outside of the first and last chapters he is not the point of view character. McCarthy mostly adopts a wide perspective, describing what "they" (the gang) do or eschewing any subject at all. We get no sense of individual characters.

They rode on into the mountains and their way took them through high pine forests, wind in the trees, lonely birdcalls. The shoeless mules slaloming through the dry grass and pine needles. In the blue coulees on the north slopes narrow tailings of old snow.

The fancy language regularly drifts from vivid imagery to meaningless abstraction. 

Under a gibbous moon horse and rider spanceled to their shadows on the snow blue ground and in each flare of lightning as the storm advanced those selfsame forms rearing with a terrible redundancy behind them like some third aspect of their presence hammered out black and wild upon the naked ground. They rode on. They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote.

The villain of the piece (Judge Holden) provides something of a mission statement in the final 10 pages, about dark human impulses, destiny, and the dance of history. It sure is a long sanguinary slog to get there.