Blood Meridian: The best book it’s impossible to recommend.

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Westerns. I grew up watching everything from Unforgiven to the Dollars trilogy and The Searchers. It’s a setting and period in history that still holds a timeless allure that characters in such stories often embody. In a classic western, the white hatted hero rides into town and guns down the irredeemable black hat before he rides off into the sunset to do it all over again, even the more anti-heroic figures such as Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name follow their own internal moral code that more often than not aligns with societal and audience expectations. There have been many attempts to subvert the formula of the Western to varying degrees of success, but there is one story that strips the Western to its bones and exposes something far darker than anyone could be prepared for.

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

I have to confess that my introduction to McCarthy’s writing wasn’t the greatest. I was in university at the time and as part of the English Literature course I had to read The Road and frankly I just wasn’t in the frame of mind to read such a dark and depressing story. Back then, I had not long recovered from a significant period of anxiety and depression and the post-apocalyptic story of a man and his son trying to survive wasn’t something I wanted to engage with. As a…