As an avowed fan of McCarthy for decades and who spent the last few years adapting this novel into screenplay format as a personal challenge, I am so glad to have come across this substack. There's always so much to glean from "Blood Meridian" no matter how many times you've revisited those bleak and bloody plains.
nice one - again!
THANK YOU!
This is my favorite passage of wildly beautiful writing in Blood Meridian:
Suddenly Bathcat and one of the Delawares turned their horses and quirted them and
called out and the company turned and milled and began to line out down the lake bed
toward the thin line of scrub that marked the shore. Men were leaping from their
horses and hobbling them instantly with loops of rope ready made. By the time the
animals were secured and they had thrown themselves on the ground under the creosote
bushes with their weapons readied the riders were beginning to appear far out on the
lake bed, a thin frieze of mounted archers that trembled and veered in the rising heat.
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 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 antiwarriors pendant from 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.
As an avowed fan of McCarthy for decades and who spent the last few years adapting this novel into screenplay format as a personal challenge, I am so glad to have come across this substack. There's always so much to glean from "Blood Meridian" no matter how many times you've revisited those bleak and bloody plains.
Excellent, thank you
This is a great catalogue to (try to) draw from.