Blood Meridian (1985) - Cormac McCarthy - Overrated?

 

Cormac McCarthy is said to be one of the best authors ever produced in America, and Blood Meridian is said to be his finest novel. The man’s prose has been compared to that of  both Faulkner and  Hemingway, as different as those two styles are. The influence of both men on McCarthy is readily evident in Blood Meridian, as is the prose style utilized in the Old Testament and in Melville’s Moby Dick. It’s all there, and that’s what made Blood Meridian such a difficult read for me.

The back cover of this 25th Anniversary Edition  describes the novel this way:

“Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian is an epic novel that traces he fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennessean who stumbles into a nightmarish world in which the market for Indian scalps is thriving."

And that does pretty much sum up this rather plotless novel. 

Once the Kid throws in with the Glanton gang, he rides from massacre to massacre gathering scalps to be sold for the bounty offered by the Mexican governors of Chihuahua and Sonora. At first only hostile Indians are attacked, but when no more hostiles are to be found, the gang wipes out a peaceful village populated by the peaceful Tigua Indian tribe. Even that doesn’t satisfy the bloodlust and greed of the gang, so they turn to wiping out small Mexican villages and mining camps - and passing off the scalps of their victims as having been taken from hostile Indians. Any encounter with the Glanton gang is guaranteed to be a violent one, and no one south of the border is safe from them.

There are a few notable characters in the gang, including its leader John Glanton and the Kid, but the most memorable of them all is a huge, hairless philosopher simply called the Judge. The Judge starts out as Glanton’s right-hand man but soon develops such a powerful influence and hold on Glanton, that it is really the Judge who dictates the gang’s downward spiral. Without his presence, it is likely enough that the gang would never have devolved into the nightmarish death machine that it became. The Judge is all-powerful, and McCarthy by making all characters so secondary to him, emphasizes his dominance. 

It was for stylistic reasons - not for the abundance of extreme violence and cruelty on display - that I found Blood Meridian to be such a difficult book to finish. Cleverly, McCarthy surrounds the sudden flashes of violence and bloodletting with much longer sections of mind-numbing travel and terrain descriptions. This gives the reader a feeling very similar to what the gang experiences between its murderous raids. Much of that prose reads like a cross between Faulkner and the authors of the Old Testament, and as beautiful as it probably is, it is still quite a chore to read a dozen or so straight pages of it before something else finally “happens.”

This one sentence is typical of that kind of writing:

“They crossed before the sun and vanished one by one and reappeared again and they were black in the sun and they rode out of that vanished sea like burnt phantoms with the legs of the animals kicking up the spume that was not real and they were lost in the sun and lost in the lake and they shimmered and and slurred together and separated again and they augmented by planes in lurid avatars and began to coalesce and there began to appear above them in the dawn-broached sky a hellish likeness of their ranks riding huge and inverted and the horses’ legs incredibly elongate trampling down the high thin cirrus and the howling antiwariors pendant form their mounts immense and chimeric and the high wild cries carrying that flat and barren pan like the cries of souls broke through some misweave in the weft of things into the world below.” 

So do I personally think Blood Meridian is one of the best American novels of all time? No, not by a long shot. For such a violent book, it feels very repetitive. Even the violence, which is at first is so shocking, loses its punch after a while, and the story really is just one of a gang riding around committing one atrocity after another. None of the characters, including the Judge and the Kid, are developed well enough to make them seem particularly real, and there is no big payoff at the end of the novel to make me feel that it was all worth the effort of working my way through McCarthy’s almost impenetrable prose.

(From what I understand, Blood Meridian rates high on the list of “novels started but not finished,” so I do get a tiny sense of satisfaction for having finished it on my first attempt - unlike the half-dozen or so tries it took me to get through Moby Dick. So there’s that.)

A Rip Through Time (2022) - Kelley Armstrong

 

Back when I was eleven years old, the 1960 movie version of The Time Machine was my first real exposure to time travel stories. I knew I wanted more, but time travel movies don’t come along every day, so I reluctantly turned to the movie’s source material, the 1895 novel of the same name by H.G. Wells. That’s how a whole new fiction subgenre was introduced to me, and I’ve been a sucker for time travel novels ever since. Over the years, I’ve read some great ones, some mediocre ones, and some pretty bad ones.

Kelley Armstrong’s A Rip Through Time is one of the good ones.

For me, time travel novels come in two general types: thoughtful stories that explore the ethics and dangers of being able to change the future by changing the past vs. the, usually simpler but thrilling, adventures time travelers experience by going backward or forward in time.  Even though Armstrong's time traveler, Mallory Atkinson, is aware that her meddling in the past might change the future to some degree, A Rip Through Time falls more squarely in the second  category.

Mallory, a homicide detective with the Vancouver police department, is in Scotland to visit her dying grandmother for the last time when she crosses paths with a serial killer who tries to strangle her. The last thing she remembers, before waking up in a strangely antiquated room, is fighting for her life. Now she has to figure out why she’s trapped inside the body of a teenage housemaid in 1869 Edinburgh -  and why everyone seems to dislike her so much. And all the while, Mallory is desperately looking for a way back to her own world and time.

A Rip Through Time is a solid murder mystery in which Mallory and the local police work together to identify and stop whoever is strangling young women (Mallory believes that finding the killer is the key to her being able to return to her own time), but the real fun comes from watching her try to adapt to the period in which she’s trapped. Mallory’s police detective experience gives her crime scene insights and skills that 1869 policemen can only dream about, but she has to keep reminding herself that to them she is only a teenage housemaid - and a supposedly reformed thief, at that. On a lighter note, Mallory struggles not to use contemporary words and phrases that have completely different meanings in 1869 Scotland than they have in twenty-first century Canada - even though some in the household appreciate them enough to begin using the new words and phrases themselves.

A Rip Through Time has two sequels, The Poisoner’s Ring and The Music of Time that I hope to explore later. I’ve already read the first chapter of The Poisoner’s Ring and see that it takes up exactly where A Rip Through Time ends, so I decided to take a break from that world before reading on into the series. If you like more lighthearted (despite the numerous murders in this one) time travel fiction, I think you will enjoy A Rip Through Time.

Bookish (2025) - Lucy Mangan

 

Lucy Mangan’s Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives is Mangan's follow-up to 2018’s Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading, which covers the author’s childhood reading influences and experiences. Bookish picks up with Mangan’s teenage reading years and concludes in what the author calls her middle-age ones (she is 52). 

“If we stop reading, if we stop putting ourselves in other people’s shoes, if we stop considering their situations, relationships, reactions, choices and morals, if we stop exercising ourselves imaginatively, if we stop asking ourselves, ‘What if…?’ and ‘What would I …?’, then we cut ourselves off from inward avenues of growth, exploration, adventure."

 Lucy Mangan is a dedicated reader whose relationship with books goes far deeper than all but the most dedicated of readers can imagine, so Bookish is as much a love letter to books, authors, bookstores, libraries, and publishers as it is a memoir. I get the impression that when Mangan is not reading, she’s thinking about reading as she anxiously makes her way through the day’s assigned tasks. 

It is not surprising that Mangan depended heavily upon her reading to prepare and guide her through the stages of adulthood: falling in love and finding a life partner, beginning a career, motherhood, and the ultimate grief that accompanies so much of anyone's lifetime. In addition, the book explores topics such as “formative novels,” genre fiction, “reading the canon,” dystopias, “studying the classics,” guilty pleasures, romance novels, crime fiction, and creating "a library of one’s own.” 

My own favorite chapter of Bookish is its tenth, entitled: “A Library of Ones Own: Curating a Book Collection.” It is great fun to experience Mangan’s joy and “all is right with the world” feeling as she turns a small outbuilding behind the family’s second home into a personal library and hideaway all her own. The amount of physical labor involved in sorting and shelving 10,000 books, much less all the labor that preceded the shelving, was staggering, but I can easily imagine the grin on Mangan’s face as she worked and envisioned what the finished space would become. 

But even the most avowed of book collectors, sooner or later, has to face the fact that enough is enough, and that there will never be enough space to keep every book that comes into their lives. So with a goal of culling at least five percent of the books she moved to her new library, Mangan approaches the purge this way:

“So the great culling of my mid-forties began. It was a long job and it couldn’t be subcontracted out, because the decisions could only be taken by one individual- me, hi! - one individual book at a time…I held each book in my hand and wordlessly communicated with it…If we still had something to say to each other, if we still had a connection, the book stayed. If there was silence, I thanked it for its service, wondered who the killer had turned out to be after all and pitched it into the charity box."

 If the above paragraph is a little bit like an arrow to your heart, Bookish is for you. You will get Lucy Mangan and consider her a kindred spirit, a friend you haven’t met yet. 

Future Boy (2025) - Michael J. Fox & Nelle Fortenberry

 Michael J. Fox was only 23 years old in 1985 when he pulled off one of the craziest Hollywood stunts of all time. For about three months, beginning on January 15, 1985, Fox worked simultaneously on two major projects: completing the third season of Family Ties during the day while shooting his scenes in the first Back to the Future movie at night. He managed this by working five days a week from roughly 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Family Ties before being hustled over to the movie set for several more hours of work. It didn’t hurt that Michael was only 23 years old and fearless.  

In Future Boy, Michael tells us how he managed to pull it off.

Michael J. Fox (the “J” was added to his name because another Michael Fox was already registered with the Screen Actors Guild) caught the acting bug in Canada during junior high school, and by age 15 he had landed a major role in a Canadian sitcom called Leo and Me. By age 18, he had dropped out of school for good and moved south to the U.S. with about $3,000 in his pocket. Michael was not exactly an overnight success although he did manage to pick up guest shots on a few television shows like Lou Grant and Palmerstown U.S.A. 

But still, a few years later Fox was near penniless, had sold his furniture to buy food, and even sometimes used dumpster diving as a way to find free food. He finally caught his big break with Family Ties, but memories of those early days were still fresh enough that Fox was determined to take advantage of every opportunity that presented itself. So, feeling young and invincible, he jumped with both feet into the work schedule that would ultimately turn him into a superstar. 

And he did it.

Future Boy is particular fun for fans of  Back to the Future or Family Ties, but even those who only know Fox because of his more recent pubic struggles with Parkinson’s will respond to the actor’s likable and heartfelt approach to the memoir. Reading Future Boy is akin to sitting across the table from Fox while he tells you stories about those three months - and that he uses an often-humorous, self-deprecating approach to his casual storytelling makes it all the better. In addition to Fox’s stories, the memoir includes some fresh interviews with cast and crew members, including an account of Fox’s remarkable relationship with Eric Stoltz, the actor he replaced in the role of Marty McFly after Stoltz had already completed five or six weeks work in the role. 

Michael J. Fox is an easy guy to pull for, and this glimpse into his behind the scenes life makes for fun reading. Now, though, I wish he would give us a similar look at how he has managed to deal with Parkinson’s for the last thirty-five years. 

Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox (11-19-22)

What I’m Reading This Week (6-8-26)

 During the past two weeks (since I’ve done one of these “what I’m reading” posts), I’ve finished up four very different books:

• The Things We Never Say - Elizabeth Strout’s latest literary novel,
• Future Boy - Michael J. Fox’s memoir about working simultaneously on the third season of Family Ties and the first Back to the Future movie,
• Bookish - Lucy Mangan’s account of her evolution as a reader from childhood to middle age, and
• A Rip Through Time- Kelly Armstrong’s time travel novel about a young female Canadian detective who gets trapped inside the body of an 1850s Scottish woman who almost became the victim of a serial killer. 

I enjoyed each of the four to one degree or another, but I’m still looking for what will be only my third five-star book of 2026. Either I’m grading harder than ever this year or I’ve been unlucky in my choices. Either way, the search goes on.

I’m at various stages of completion in Chernow’s Mark Twain, McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail. The only possible five-star book I see there is Mark Twain, but the jury is still out on that one. I have, in the meantime, started a few others:

John D. MacDonald is an author I loved reading in my late teens and early twenties, but I don’t think I’ve read him since. And it’s been so long ago now, that even if I accidentally re-read something of his, there’s almost no chance that I’ll even notice it. A Purple Place for Dying has already been an eye-opener in the sense that Travis McGee, MacDonald’s fictional P.I., is so blatantly sexist a character. I hadn’t realized just how different the ‘60s were from today in that way. 

The Dying Light, the fourth book in Ann Cleeves’s Detective Matthew Venn series, will be published at the end of September. I’ve read the first three books in the series - and I’m a longtime fan of Ann Cleeves - so I have high hopes for this one. It certainly gets off to a rousing start as the first chapter opens with the discovery of the drowned body of a 17-year old girl at the summer home of her missing friend.

I first read this Jules Verne classic when I was 13 or 14 years old, so I imagine that this reading will impress me a lot differently than that first reading did. Back then, it was all about the adventure. This time around, in this George Makepeace Towle translation, I’m most enjoying the humor and the characters themselves as Fogg and Passepartout scurry around the world with Detective Fix in constant pursuit. I have vague memories of seeing a movie version of Around the World in 80 Days during my childhood, too, something else I want to look into further. 

I fell in love with Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s four-book The Cemetery of Forgotten Books series a few years ago, but I’ve never read any of his short stories. The City of Mist is a collection of ten of those stories, and they all sound very similar in theme and tone to the novels, so I’m anxious to get to them. I’m kind of afraid that I’ll be re-reading all four novels if these stories turn out to be as good as I suspect they are.

We read Animal Farm in junior high school, as I recall, and I remember being fascinated by it, especially once I figured out what Orwell was actually doing here. The teacher didn’t do a lot of prep work, allowing us instead to read the book on our own for most of the first week. It was fun to see the “light bulbs” turning on one by one around the classroom as the week came to a close. Then, the real fun began.

I’m especially looking forward to finishing Blood Meridian this week. I can’t remember when I’ve worked as hard understanding a novel as I have on this one - probably when I finally managed to read all of Moby Dick a few years ago. It’s really been a chore, and I’m wondering why I’m not reacting to Blood Meridian the way all the critics keep telling me I should be reacting. 

Have a great week, everyone.

The Things We Never Say (2026) - Elizabeth Strout

 

The Things We Never Say is Elizabeth Strout’s first standalone novel since The Burgess Boys was published in 2013. Going back to 1998, the year in which her first novel was published, this is Stout's eleventh novel overall, and just her fourth standalone.

“For Artie it was as though he had lived these many years looking at things from one angle, and now it was as though someone had turned him partly in a different direction and everything - everything - looked different."

Artie Dam is the kind of high school history teacher who is remembered by former students for decades. Artie has everything going for him. On the surface at least, Artie has settled down into the kind of steady life that others can only aspire to. He’s been married to the same woman for decades, loves his teaching job and his students, has a grown son who seems to be doing well, and is often found solo-sailing his own boat out on the bay near his home. 

But Artie Dam, surrounded by friends and family though he might be, is a deeply lonely man who feels that he really doesn’t know even the people closest to him, and truth be known, Artie even feels a little bit suicidal at times. Then even that uncomfortable world gets turned upside down on Artie after he learns a deeply buried family secret that further convinces him that no one ever really knows anyone else. The final straw for Artie comes with the 2024 election. He dreads the election as it approaches, and when it’s over he’s left with the feeling that everything familiar to him is slipping away.

In the end, Artie figures out that being alive is a “private thing” for all of us, that our real pains, truths, and thoughts are things that no one else will ever fully be able to understand or even have access to. This is a novel about loneliness, communication, and connection, and Strout leaves the reader with a lot to think about despite how short, at only 220 pages, The Things We Never Say is. 

This is another beautifully written Elizabeth Strout novel, but it is not destined to be one of my favorites of hers mainly, I suppose, because the way that Artie and, with one exception, everyone around him reacts to the 2024 election does not feel realistic to me. I found it hard to believe how deeply obsessed and self-destructive the people in Artie’s life allowed themselves to become immediately upon announcement of the official results. For me, it feels a little heavy handed even as a literary device. That said, The Things We Never Say is an Elizabeth Strout novel, and Elizabeth Strout proved a long time ago that she is incapable of writing a bad novel.