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Notes on Blood Meridian: Revised and Expanded Edition
John Sepich. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008.
In 1985 Cormac McCarthy published what many believe to be his best novel, though it is arguably his most brutal, titled Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West. The novelist had moved to El Paso during the 1970s in order to familiarize himself with the terrain of this historical Western, set mainly in 1849-50 on the Texas frontier, from Chihuahua and Senora, to Arizona and California. Critic Harold Bloom called McCarthy the "disciple" of Melville and Faulkner and considered Blood Meridian "the authentic American apocalyptic novel." Readers of this ghastly narrative might readily agree, on all counts.
In 1989 John Sepich began compiling his "Notes Toward an Explication of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian" as a master's thesis for the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, presumably as a source study, tracing influences to Samuel Chamberlain's memoir, My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue (1956), George F. Ruxton's Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains (1874), Mayne Reid's The ScalpHunters (1852), and other works from the frontier that might provide "historical footing" for such characters as John Joel Glanton and his gang and the Yuma-ferry massacre, or "the mortal and moral slipperiness of Judge Holden," McCarthy's most remarkable creation. Over time these revised and updated "Notes" became more...