I really tried to give Blood Meridian a good chance. Taking a very basic and general view, it seemed like the type of novel that I would like: set in the mid 1800s and involving journeying out West on horseback. Unfortunately, I could not bring myself to endure more than a few chapters, as it was ghastly, gruesome, grisly, and entirely unpleasant.
The characters all seem to be essentially bad people who enjoy violence and pursue it, if not for its own sake, for the sake of pillaging and looting. In the story, pretty much everyone is evil or dead or both, and it’s not confined to the United States, so I’m struggling to find the distinctly American themes, and really, I don’t know why such a negative novel would contend for the title of “Great American Novel.” Perhaps I would’ve been enlightened had I persevered in reading, but from my internet search, it appears that the grotesque pattern continues throughout the book.
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