Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is available on Audible as a 13 hrs 6 mins unabridged audiobook, narrated by Richard Poe.
Publisher’s Summary
Author of the National Book Award-winning All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy is one of the most provocative American stylists to emerge in the last century. The striking novel Blood Meridian offers an unflinching narrative of the brutality that accompanied the push west on the 1850s Texas frontier.
Audiobook Details
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 13 hrs 6 mins
- Publisher: Recorded Books
- Release year: 2007
- Audible category: Literature & Fiction / Genre Fiction / Literary Fiction
Listener Ratings
Blood Meridian holds an average listener rating of 4.4/5 from 12623 Audible ratings.
On Audible, ratings for this title break down into narration performance and story separately:
- Performance (narration): 4.6/5
- Story: 4.3/5
- 5-star ratings: 66% of all ratings
What Audible Listeners Are Saying
3/5 stars — “Perhaps not meant to be listened to.”
I should start by saying, I really love Cormac McCarthy’s works.In fact, I think that I would really ‘enjoy’ Blood Meridian, if I were to have the words in front of me. And I recommend to everyone, All the Pretty Horses, The Road, No Country for Old Men, etc.
The poetic lilt of his prose, his unique approach to storytelling, and the uncompromising spectrum of issues that he gets the reader to confront, make him author with few (if any) superiors in the English language.
The narrator is actually quite good, but the problem with Blood Meridian as an audiobook is actually due to the very qualities that make his books so great. This is a book that demands 100% of your attention at all times, and perhaps to read over a paragraph a few times or relate it to some small passage somewhere earlier in the book.
This is hard to do when listening to a book, and at times I feel frustrated and pulled along faster than I want to be, and losing the narrative line, and subsequently my connection to the story.
I think I will get this book in print and then listen to the book and reference it when needed.
— Jordan, Audible listener
3/5 stars — “Long, brutal, and mostly aimless”
I decided to read this book after finishing Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which was perhaps the most profound novel I have read for years. When I saw that Blood Meridian, not The Road, is widely considered to be McCarthy’s masterpiece, I had to check it out.I’m sad to say that I was very disappointed. In true McCarthy style, the book is written in vivid prose that relies heavily on similes. Some of the scenes–the Indian attack on the dry lake, for instance–are among the most skillfully illustrated scenes I’ve ever encountered, and their breathtaking imagery will remain with me for a long time.
Unfortunately, McCarthy’s unique talent with words and cadence is not enough to overcome the book’s failings. Perhaps because of the history upon which it is based, the book’s plot is threadbare. There is no readily discernible arc or story or conflict. The book’s main character disappears for hours at a time, removing all feelings of investment on the part of the reader. The book is, with only a few exceptions, comprised of repeated and verbose descriptions of wandering in a desert waste punctuated by scenes of perhaps the most grotesque violence in modern fiction. There were scenes in Blood Meridian that were so horrific and depraved that I nearly abandoned the book.
But unlike the violence in The Road, which serves to convey an important statement about the nature of men and to create a contrasting background against which McCarthy paints the goodness of the man and the boy, Blood Meridian’s violence strikes me as gratuitous revelry. McCarthy seems to bask in the blood and cruelty, lingering for far too long on scenes of terrible evil without ever offering a balance. There are no good men in Blood Meridian, only oppressive, repeated, unspeakable evil. There are no real protagonists or characters with whom readers can identify or connect. There are just bad men who offer varying degrees of evil, and who ride around the desert committing atrocities.
The book suffers immensely for this lack of moral grounding. It becomes a lacerating, demoralizing slog toward no particular goal or closure. Perhaps McCarthy wished to make a statement by writing the book this way, but I found that it greatly diminished my ability to become connected with the story or the characters in any meaningful way.
The sole saving grace on the character front is the Judge. Preternaturally intelligent and entirely amoral, he is perhaps the most enigmatic character I’ve ever encountered. Literature classes all over the country have puzzled over the Judge and his role. Is he God? Is he the devil? Is he simply the incarnation of the entirety of man? Is he even real? The character McCarthy created in Holden is simply brilliant, and I found myself simultaneously intrigued and repulsed by him. The book’s closing chapters focus heavily on the Judge, and are arguably the best portion of the entire novel.
I will give the story two stars because of McCarthy’s raw prowess with language, the fascinating case study in evil and knowledge offered by the Judge, and the strength of the final chapters. Overall, though, I struggled to enjoy the book. And given its length, that is a real problem.
One final point: The narrator did an outstanding job interpreting, coloring, and bringing to life McCarthy’s often impenetrable prose. Five stars for narration.
— Ross, Audible listener
5/5 stars — “A Violent, Apocalyptic, Beautiful Western”
Blood Meridian thrusts us into the deserts of 1849 Mexico, a pumice-floored, dust-coated, sun-blasted, blood-soaked, bone-punctuated wasteland of the soul. This "hallucinatory void" is home to snarling flies, demonic swine, vampire bats, ghostly wolves, spitting basilisks, harpy eagles, muttering ducks, and buzzards like black bishops. But the horrifying creatures are the wandering bands of Indians and Americans, performers of creative torture, casual murder, and orgiastic massacre, including eye-gouging, tongue-skewering, skull-crushing, intestine-spilling, scalp-hacking, ear-collecting, genital-lopping, skin-flaying, girl-raping, and baby-hanging. And the "calamitous" and "boiling" sun rises to meridian "like the eye of God," bookended by bloody skies bookended by starry darkness.Through it all wanders "the kid," a 16-year-old blessed or cursed "pilgrim." He may be the moral center of the novel, though his trajectory is warped by his amoral father figure, "the judge," a giant, hairless, devil-idol-polyglot-polymath-philosopher who wants to become the "suzerain" of the world by cataloguing or killing everything in it. The judge, white as Moby-Dick and charismatic as the Confidence-Man, says that "war is God," and who may gainsay him?
Unlike Virginia Woolf, McCarthy reveals the souls of his characters through speech, action, and landscape rather than through stream of consciousness thought. A grim beauty flares in his biblical style, vivid descriptions, and dramatic similes (though at times he may stretch too far for portent): "in the night bats came from some nether part of the world to stand on leather wings like dark satanic hummingbirds and feed at the mouths of those flowers."
Reader Richard Poe relates all with a compelling hint of morbid fascination or appalled excitement behind his gravelly, hard-boiled voice.
If you like unromantic, unpredictable, violent, apocalyptic, and beautiful westerns that expose the hellish pit in the human heart, listen to this book.
— Jefferson, Audible listener
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