I honestly can't decide whether or not the writing in this is good or terrible

I personally enjoy Cormac's style. It is similar to Faulkner's, however, Cormac perfected the art and leaves Falukner looking like an adolescent

damn son you got meme'd too?
fucking /lit
tricking people into reading this here genre trash garbanzo.

It's called style OP

If you can't decide whether it's good or terrible, and instead rely on others to judge the books quality for you, you are the one who is terrible.

Writing like an inept idiot isn't a style.

When you reuse the same narrative voice over and over again in each of your books, it no longer becomes a style: more of a mental condition.

Was writing a book with a thesaurus combined with the intelligence of an American 6th grader on purpose?

Yes, only because it couldn't be helped. McCarthy is shit.

>mfw plebs don't understand the vast web of historical, religious, and occult references that permeate Blood Meridian, perfectly capturing the bloody history of the southwest and establishing it as one of the great novels of American literature

My favorite is

>In a night so beclamored with the jackal-yapping of coyotes and the cries of owls the howl of that old dog wolf was the one sound they knew to issue from its right form, a solitary lobo, perhaps gray at the muzzle, hung like a marionette from the moon with his long mouth gibbering.

It also comes right after the Judge's lecture on geology, which is my favorite scene.

>tee hee hee what am i referencing now??? xDDD

Method of the pseud.

weak bait

Stay mad, pseud

gimme an alternative moron

ah, blood meridian, monsieur? that novel is the sark and chaparral of literature, the filament whereon rode the remuda of highbrow, corraled out of some destitute hacienda upon the arroya, quirting and splurting with main and with pyrolatrous coagulate of lobated grandiloquence. our eyes rode over the pages, monsieur, of that slatribed azotea like argonauts of suttee, juzgados of swole, bights and systoles of walleyed and tyrolean and carbolic and tectite and scurvid and querent and creosote and scapular malpais and shellalagh. we scalped, monsieur, the gantlet of its esker and led our naked bodies into the rebozos of its mennonite and siliceous fauna, wallowing in the jasper and the carnelian like archimandrites, teamsters, combers of cassinette scoria, centroids of holothurian chancre, with pizzles of enfiladed indigo panic grass in the saltbush of our vigas, true commodores of the written page, rebuses, monsieur, we were the mygale spiders too and the devonian and debouched pulque that settled on the frizzen studebakers, listening the wolves howling in the desert while we saw the judge rise out of a thicket of corbelled arches, whinstone, cairn, cholla, lemurs, femurs, leantos, moonblanched nacre, uncottered fistulas of groaning osnaburg and kelp, isomers of fluepipe and halms awap of griddle, guisado, pelancillo.

Clearly you've only ever browsed shit boards if you think spoonfeeding is acceptable here.

your insinuation that "pleb"ness, if it even has meaning as a distinction, is marked primarily by an unfamiliarity with the author's referenced facts, factoids, and sociohistorical structures and currents is one I reject on principle, and as part of a vain attempt to appear exclusive and "in-the-know" without having demonstrated any such knowledge beyond posturing summary

>all this fucking punctuation

i dont know who wrote this but I do know he sucks his own penis dry every night

>Being this new

>At dusk they halted and built a fire and roasted the deer. The night was much enclosed about them and there were no stars. To the north they could see other fires that burned red and sullen along the invisible ridges. They ate and moved on, leaving the fire on the ground behind them, and as they rode up into the mountains this fire seemed to become altered of its location, now here, now there, drawing away, or shifting unaccountably along the flank of their movement. Like some ignis fatuus belated upon the road behind them which all could see and of which none spoke. For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies.

I'm reading it right now and this part was really striking to me, too

what's a bool?

>those few times he uses geological eras as adjectives

Most of the words I was unfamiliar with were geologic terms. I liked the description, but I think Faulkner's leagues better than him in terms of description.

I'm currently reading Light in August and while Faulkner still uses complex words at times I admire how he's able to describe character so effectively.

Blood Meridian's still good, though.

I adore his writing, I don't think the story could have been written in any other prose style

says the person who cannot understand the "inept idiots" words

classic example of projecting, my friends

It is beyond me how readers can take this kind of writing seriously. Is it meant to sound caricatural, a parody of itself? Perhaps it is and I'm missing the point entirely. Because if it's not, I'm certainly not feeling the pathos and awe I figure it is supposed to be infused with.

I think McCarthy meant to propel his sublime asimptotically towards where it slips into the ridicule, but not quite touching that line, and it certainly is brave of him to have tried. I think he falls short though; or perhaps falls long. He slips beyond the ridge and there's no coming back for him, not easily at least.

But then again I haven't read the book, so what do I know? My shallow judgement is based on such quotes encountered here and there. I'll get to this book one of these days (read: these years). Meanwhile, feel free to set me right.

>Judge is meant to look like a giant baby
>This thing

>They rode for days through the rain and they rode through rain and hail and rain again. In that gray storm light they crossed a flooded plain with the footed shapes of the horses reflected in the water among clouds and mountains and the riders slumped forward and rightly skeptic of the shimmering cities on the distant shore of that sea whereon they trod miraculous. They climbed up through rolling grasslands where small birds shied away chittering down the wind and a buzzard labored up from among bones with wings that went whoop whoop whoop like a child's toy swung on a string and in the long red sunset the sheets of water on the plain below them lay like tidepools of primal blood.
Yes. It's very good

you can't be serious

You're new here, but have been lurking intensely those 7 days.

It's because you're a numb retard, user.

>across the earth, the sun whitehot

Is that a comma I see there boy

>muh sentence structure
>muh conventions

That's some seriously good writing, pleb. Just because the sentences are long and don't use commas doesn't mean its bad.

wew laddy

...

You cannot even write an internet post clearly. What the fuck are you even saying? You havent read the book either. Why did you bother posting this?

>a sentence disregarding all of the rules that makes it a sentence doesn't make it a bad sentence

???

Wait, this isn't parody?

This is beautiful.

Your writing is not good but not really terrible.

My guess is it's somewhat on purpose but you probably couldn't do much better.

You'd think Veeky Forums would like Blood Meridian more, being full of devils who spend their time making sure nobody else understands or learns anything.

Yours is just shit.

It's words on top of shit. Camouflage makes a difference.

Would now be a good time to remind everyone that taste is subjective, or do we need to pretend to have some level of objectivity about this business for a little while longer?

>le everyone is equal xDDD

Kill yourself

>LE I AM LE BEST OPINION BECAUSE I KEN GREENTEXT

How ironic.

What should I read to prep myself for BM? Just finished The Road and Child of God to familiarize myself with his prose and dry humor.

>prep myself for BM?

Have you tried Metamucil?

I mean if you want to study the novel seriously the bible, paradise lost, moby dick, the inferno, all of the greeks, enlightment philosophy, mystic texts (idk any of the top of my head) and gnostic texts. But you don't need to do any of that you're good. Mccarthy writes subtle encyclopedic books.

>surrealist painters should follow anatomy and perspective

It's referencing The Bible and Paradise Lost for a lot of its language.

This too.

>surrealist painters are good

Yea haha I forgot maybe the most important one

By reading those two you're going in with a better foundation than most. There are some references to other canon shit that you'll inevitably miss, but all meme books do that.

you should read backwards into suttree, he's done a lot less refining there, I don't think it's nearly as good Blood Meridian, but some people like it, some people compare it to Joyce I guess

His baby look comes from being Bald, like a giant baby. I always pictured him as pic related, mostly muscle as well, with a slight bit of pudge.

This is a perfect depiction I think.

I kept thinking, "okay this is pretty funny, but these words have to be made up"

then I'd read another sentence, looking up the words

"hahah, okay, but he can't keep this up for as long as this goes on, at some point this just disintegrates into a greater nonsense than it already is"

then I'd read another sentence, looking up the words

"hahah, okay, but he can't keep this up for as long as this goes on, at some point this just disintegrates into a greater nonsense than it already is"

then I'd read another sentence, looking up the words

"hahah, okay, but he can't keep this up for as long as this goes on, at some point this just disintegrates into a greater nonsense than it already is"

then I'd read another sentence, looking up the words

"hahah, okay, but he can't keep this up for as long as this goes on, at some point this just disintegrates into a greater nonsense than it already is"

I really ccan't imagine people being this estranged by Blood Meridian, I mean that was funny, but come on, I mean come on, I MEAN come on...

>“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”

Fucking terrifying and visceral. If I could draw I would make a big painting of that scene.

All that imagery.

The book is considered a masterpiece by top literary minds like Bloom, Donoghue, Steiner, Banville, Lish. Not to mention countless authors. You are surely entitled to your opinion but really when it's you vs the collective sharps, maybe the problem rests on your hunched forward shoulders?

one. fucking. sentence.

>They wandered the borderland for weeks seeking some sign of the Apache. Deployed upon that plain they moved in a constant elision, ordained agents of the actual dividing out the world which they encountered and leaving what had been and what would never be alike extinguished on the ground behind them. Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat. Above all else they appeared wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all.

Appeal to authority -----> discarded.

Not an argument.

>This fallacy is committed when the person in question is not a legitimate authority on the subject

If you want to be so contrairian as to say that this is is bad writing I don't think you'll find very many readers agreeing with you

Show us your qualifications then, buddy.

what an ugly, digital drawing. but yeah, that's him.

Nah man I'm saying that's really fucking good.

if you think blood meridian reads like it was written by an inept idiot

just go for it
once you get through the first 50 pages, the rest will fly by
save all that other stuff for your second reading

know what's even more amazing about that sentence
motherfucker wrote that shit in one draft
no edits, no revisions, the copy is completely clean
anyone who says mccarthy lacks talent can suck on that

Too many commas and what's with the short sentences? What is this, fucking Hemingway?

Is there a better Wild West book?
>Those constant points about how the very place is violent and dangerous to man to the point of destroying him
>Between the horrible dust and dryness there are countless areas of beautiful flowers and even forest.

It's done so well though, to emphasise the horde descending upon them and how fucked they are in that instant.

It's prose used effectively. If it was chock full of punctuation and chopped into separate sentences it'd lose it's exigence.

I don't really like this that much