I already have a dry sense of humor, but when I found myself laughing at sections of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian--mostly at the characters' mean-spirited quips, and sometimes at the casual way in which McCarthy writes the book's depraved violence--I wondered if it was a defense mechanism, or if it was time to see a psychiatrist. In any case, just looking at that book makes me want to hyperventilate. Then giggle.

Jackson fired. He simply passed his left hand over the top of the revolver he was holding in a gesture brief as flintspark and tripped the hammer. The big pistol jumped and a double handful of Owens's brains went out the back of his skull and plopped in the floor behind him. He sank without a sound and lay crumpled up with his face in the floor and one eye open and the blood welling up out of the destruction at the back of his head. Jackson sat down. Brown rose and retrieved his pistol and let the hammer back down and put it in his belt. Most terrible nigger I ever seen, he said. Find some plates, Charlie. I doubt the old lady is out there any more.

Let me blow this guy's brains out first. Then we can have dinner.

Seconds? This scene, early in the novel, when a company of scalp-hunters is attacked by Comanches, will be forever burned in my memory:

... Everywhere there were horses down and men scrambling and he saw a man who sat charging his rifle while blood ran from his ears and he saw men with their revolvers disassembled trying to fit the spare loaded cylinders they carried and he saw men kneeling who tilted and clasped their shadows on the ground and he saw men lanced and caught up by the hair and scalped standing and he saw the horses of war trample down the fallen and a little whitefaced pony with a clouded eye leaned out of the murk and snapped at him like a dog and was gone. Among the wounded some seemed dumb and without understanding and some were pale through the masks of dust and some had fouled themselves and tottered brokenly onto the spears of the savages. Now driving in a wild frieze of headlong horses with wild eyes walled and teeth cropped and naked riders with clusters of arrows clenched in their jaws and their shields winking in the dust and up the far side of the ruined ranks in a piping of boneflutes and dropping down off the sides of their mounts with one heel hung in the withers strap and their short bows flexing beneath the outstretched necks of the ponies until they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and then rising up again like funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their breasts, riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows. ...

And you thought The Road was hard to stomach? Blood Meridian is populated with the most loveable troop of psychopaths you'll ever find. Of course, this being a Cormac McCarthy novel, you'll want to keep your therapist on speed-dial.

Comments

[Care]

Which is why I'm taking The Road with me to the in-laws for the holiday. When they ask me what it is about, I can tell them. They'll whince and hopefully, leave me alone to read in peace.

[Citizen Reader]

Hmm. I'd heard Blood Meridian was violent but didn't know it was so, you know...casually violent. Having just watched the latest (also violent) James Bond, I may have to avoid for a while.

I wouldn't call the psychiatrist just yet. I have a friend who giggles whenever he watches the movie "American Psycho"...THAT's when you call the psychiatrist.

p.s. Care, great plan about reading at the in-laws. I've started doing that and it really works out, except for the part where they think I'm an anti-social prig. I can deal with that, though.

[Brandon]

I giggle when I watch "American Psycho." I love that movie. It's hilarious.

...

[Courtney]

I think one of the most overlooked aspects of McCarthy's writing is his humor. It is slipped in between moments of such violence and horror that it is completely surprising.

[Brandon]

Care: Good idea. If I ever pick up some in-laws (highly unlikely, in my case), I'd read the "Inferno" around them.

Courtney: I agree. And I felt a little better when I read one of the critical blurbs on my copy of "Blood Meridian," where "The New Republic" said that he's "capable of black, reasonable comedy at the heart of his tragedy." I actually sighed with relief and thought, "Okay, so I'm not the only person who thinks this book is absolutely hilarious."

And Sarah, one more thing: I'm pretty jaded when it comes to violence, but let me say that this is the most violent book I've ever read. Let me count the ways: beheadings, rape, gunfights, crucifixion, and people burned alive. But McCarthy writes about it as if he's writing scenery. It's just very ... calmly-written, if that makes sense. And his characters rarely have any good reason to commit these acts of violence. It reminds me a lot of the Bible. The Bible is freaky when you really think about it, because God is pretty casual about such things too, but it's not overly graphic. "Blood Meridian" is the same way.