Hi, I've become a huge fan of Cormac McCarthy lately. I read "The Road" a few months ago and it blew me away as one of the best books I've read. Now I'm reading "Blood Meridian" and am about halfway through, but I do know the entire plot as I've read discussions threads with analysis of the ending. People say that Blood Meridian is darker and scarier than The Road, and I so far disagree. When it comes to books and movies, I'm extremely hard to scare. I don't get disturbed by concepts involving supernatural events (like Stephen King's most famous works), because it's obvious they aren't real. I also don't get disturbed by books about serial killers and gore, because the deaths are relatively quick and we know that murder happens (I'm not dismissing it in real life in any way, but I mean in terms of what freaks me out in a novel). But the book scene that really DID disturb me right down to the core was that scene in "The Road" where they find the basement with the half-eaten captives, who are being kept alive for days/weeks at a time while their legs, arms, etc. get dismembered and cauterized and eaten one by one. I have a very vivid and "evil" imagination, and I cannot think of anything worse than that. The sheer hell of what it would be like to be trapped in a fate where you're being slowly dismembered and consumed, piece by piece, knowing you'll just become a torso, is just....so terrifying it shocked me. Plus, "The Road" also implies that the road gangs are capturing women to impregnate and then eat the babies as a food source, which involves eating their own children and taking the babies from the captive mothers to be eaten. This is profoundly disturbing on a whole new level. In "Blood Meridian," yes the violence is much more grossly-described. There are the scenes with the gruesome scalpings in full detail, the "pudding-like blood" in the church, the infamous dead baby tree, etc. But those deaths all happened relatively quickly, compared to the prolonged hellish worse-than-death fates that the victims in "The Road" suffered. Also, I get that The Judge is implied to be supernatural/demonic and the representation of humans giving into their evil natures and whatnot, but this to me feels very philosophical and abstract, almost too far removed from possibility to be truly scary to me. But in "The Road," if we were to imagine such a world as being believable, the cannibals running the system are far more terrifying than The Judge in terms of what would happen to you if caught by them. And yet, everywhere I read, people say that Blood Meridian is far scarier without contest, makes The Road seem light by comparison, etc. I simply don't get this. Can someone explain what I'm missing here?
Disclaimer: I've not read either novel but I have watched 'The Road' (and I've also got a good imagination). I can only comment on what I find disturbing, and that's realism. If I get the sense that something can/will/has happen(ed), I can relate to it on a personal level. I can imagine that it's me who's there and who experiences these things. I can slip in the skin of this person. I can't comment on why people find gory details more disturbing. I suppose if the feeling of realism and a really well done description match, that the impact would harden.
For me, Blood Meridian was much more realistic, and therefore possibly more disturbing. I mean, I appreciate The Road as a metaphor, but the eating of people doesn't really make sense in terms of trophic levels, right? If you're okay with cannibalism, it's WAY more efficient to eat the woman herself rather than to waste all the calories of impregnating her, keeping her alive while she gestates, then eating the baby. It's way more efficient to kill ONE person and eat all of that person at one time than to waste the calories that go toward healing multiple people and keeping them all in a state of gradual amputation. Most efficient to kill them all at once and dry the meat, I'd imagine. (We keep livestock over the winter because they eat food we can't digest ourselves. If they were the same species as us and eating the same foods as us, there'd be absolutely no benefit to keeping them alive, other than avoiding spoilage of the meat.) I see why the author would make these choices for their metaphorical weight, but I'm not scared or disturbed by metaphors. As I recall Blood Meridian, the violence and nastiness of it felt more realistic. So that's more disturbing to me.
IDK there is some Torture Porn (AKA Extreme Horror), that takes a particular taste if you want messed up and sadistic (also graphic violence). Never read or seen either. Though I think things that play on your mind can be disturbing. Though realism can also be disturbing, and even true crime can be a tad disturbing depending on what you read about. Basically things that are more Psych/Horror are pretty good on the disturbing.
I want to ask about something. You mention not being scared/whatever by killings and whatnot in novels/movies. You then post- Can you explain the change of sense(?) with this? You speak rationally before this, but then I got confused. This is the most inefficient food source I have ever seen theorized. Can you not imagine the scale this would need to be to feed even one person and how much food would have to go into feeding the captive vs. gaining food after months of waiting? Not to mention space requirements for keeping, waste disposal, etc. I can see if it were for the occasional dessert... I would imagine there are other things going on with using the captives for this or that, but is still massively inefficient even for any of that. It is the little things that always throw me for a loop the hardest.
I wouldn't describe either as particularly "scary," more as disturbing. I would agree that I found Blood Meridian as darker, though. For one, in The Road, even though it was all dark and horrific and ended with the death of the Father, it still ended on a note of hope. The kid was found by another family that apparently had food and other kids his age to go play with and all that. While it's the entire book pretty much says that the kid's going to be killed and eaten as soon as he get's to the village, it's never explicitly stated and us as the reader is left with the slightest glimmer that there is hope for humanity and these people are honest and good. Blood Meridian ends with the death of The Kid at the hands of The Judge in an outhouse, basically reinforcing the whole life is shit, full of violence and meaningless and the past will always catch up with you and you will leave this world without even the option of dignity. Plus, Blood Meridian is at least partly based on actual events in history, so kinda boosts its dark value some, too.
I agree. The thing to keep in mind when reading Blood Meridian is that many of the horrific events in the book likely happened at one point or another in our history. There were definitely bounties on Indians and you can imagine that the people seeking those bounties were not very nice. Anyway, the realism of the book really brought it home for me. When you finish, go read 'Suttree'. It's excellent.
The Road features a definite antagonist (not so much a villain, but a situation), whereas in Blood Meridian there is strangely no real plot arc to follow. The cast of characters wander around taking scalps, until the last 1/4 of the book. What makes it more profound, in my opinion, than The Road, is the outright personification of evil and destruction (Judge Holden). In contrast, The Road's opposition is in the environment and the situation. Two different approaches, yet equally disturbing and expertly constructed. I've read all of McCarthy's works and those two are far and away his masterpieces. No Country for Old Men is close, though.
