I know this is talked about a lot, but I just finished it and

>>9705347
Also, if a movie was made, I'd cast Jeff Bridges as the judge probably, but maybe doctor it so he was larger and had a slightly deeper, more booming voice.

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171KB, 614x1036px

>>9705347
Well I'm going to bump this one more time but I'll still offer another discussion point.

Has anybody ever read Perelandra? It's the second book in a sci-fi trilogy by C.S. Lewis. The books are only loosely related from what I remember, you can basically read them independent of one another. But Perelandra actually has a very similar thing going for it, the main character arrives at a planet that's essentially in it's own garden of eden stage, and there no sin or evil. But a second character arrives who starts exhibiting vast intelligence, and also creepy demonic brutality. Honestly the antagonist is a lot like the judge. Highly recommend the book if my memory can be trusted, I loved it when I read it but it was like a decade ago. My point being that it's kind of similar in a couple ways to Blood Meridian.

>>9705347
Go away Mr Humphreys

>>9705347
I gotta check this out at some point.

Blood Meridian (1985) seems to me the authentic American apocalyptic novel, more relevant even in 2000 than it was fifteen years ago. The fulfilled renown of Moby-Dick and of As I Lay Dying is augmented by Blood Meridian, since Cormac McCarthy is the worthy disciple both of Melville and of Faulkner. I venture that no other living American novelist, not even Pynchon, has given us a book as strong and memorable as Blood Meridian, much as I appreciate Don DeLillo's Underworld, Philip Roth's Zuckerman Bound, Sabbath's Theater, and American Pastoral, and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon. McCarthy himself, in his recent Border trilogy, commencing with the superb All the Pretty Horses, has not matched Blood Meridian, but it is the ultimate Western, not to be surpassed. My concern being the reader, I will begin by confessing that my first two attempts to read through Blood Meridian failed, because I flinched from the overwhelming carnage that McCarthy portrays... Nevertheless, I urge the reader to persevere, because Blood Meridian is a canonical imaginative achievement, both an American and a universal tragedy of blood. Judge Holden is a villain worthy of Shakespeare, Iago-like and demoniac, a theoretician of war everlasting. And the book's magnificence-its language, landscape, persons, conceptions-at last transcends the violence, and converts goriness into terrifying art, an art comparable to Melville's and to Faulkner's... What is the reader to make of the Judge? He is immortal as principle, as War Everlasting, but is he a person, or something other? McCarthy will not tell us, which is all the better, since the ambiguity is most stimulating. Melville's Captain Ahab, though a Promethean demigod, is necessarily mortal, and perishes with the Pequod and all its crew, except for Ishmael. After he has killed the Kid, Blood Meridian's Ishmael, Judge Holden is the last survivor of Glanton's scalping crusade. Destroying the Native American nations of the Southwest is hardly analogous to the hunt to slay Moby-Dick, and yet McCarthy gives us some curious parallels between the two quests. The most striking is between Melville's chapter 19, where a ragged prophet, who calls himself Elijah, warns Ishmael and Queequeg against sailing on the Pequod, and McCarthy's chapter 4, where "an old disordered Mennonite" warns the Kid and his comrades... I think that McCarthy is warning his reader that the Judge is Moby-Dick rather than Ahab. As another white enigma, the albino Judge, like the albino whale, cannot be slain. Melville, a professed Gnostic, gives us a Manichean quester in Ahab. McCarthy gives Judge Holden the powers and purposes of the bad angels or demiurges that the Gnostics called archons, but he tells us not to make such an identification. What can the reader do with the haunting and terrifying Judge?

>>9705515
It's very good. But like I said, I struggled with the middle because I felt like I didn't know the characters or in what direction the plot was going, or what it was even really about other than a gang of scalpers. But yea, once I finished it I immediately wanted to start it back up again.

>>9705363
Philip Seymour Hoffman would've been perfect desu