But unlike, say, the movie 300, the violence serves a purpose – in fact the gratuitousness itself serves a purpose.
It’s both mentally and emotionally exhausting, even in a day and age where television and movies have numbed us to such things. It’s also one of the best.įor those who would consider that a turn-off, I offer this caveat:įor the overwhelming majority of fiction that involves a lot of violence, the violence itself is an act of masturbation representing either the author’s dark impulse or, perhaps worse, pandering to the reader’s similar revenge fantasies (this might explain why the majority of Blood Meridian fans I know personally are men, where as the majority of those who’ve told me they were unable to finish it are women).ĭon’t get me wrong, the violence in Blood Meridian is gratuitous. In 2009, Cormac McCarthy won the PEN/Saul Bellow Award, a lifetime achievement award given by the PEN American Center.Ĭormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is unquestionably the most violent novel I’ve ever read. He is frequently compared by modern reviewers to William Faulkner. Literary critic Harold Bloom named him one of the four major American novelists of his time, along with Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Philip Roth. His earlier Blood Meridian (1985) was among Time Magazine's poll of 100 best English-language books published between 19, and he placed joint runner-up for a similar title in a poll taken in 2006 by The New York Times of the best American fiction published in the last 25 years.
He received the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for The Road, and his 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. He has written twelve novels in the Southern Gothic, western, and post-apocalyptic genres and has also written plays and screenplays. Cormac McCarthy is an American novelist and playwright.
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