SOURCE: Twomey, Jay. “Tempting the Child: The Lyrical Madness of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.” Southern Quarterly 37, nos. 3-4 (spring-summer 1999): 255-65.

In the following essay, Twomey characterizes Blood Meridian as a battle between the madness of Judge Holden, who converts the Glanton Gang to his irrational mindset, and the resistant kid—a battle in which the judge finally triumphs.

I walked in a desert. And I cried, “Ah, God, take me from this place!” A voice said, “It is no desert.” I cried, “Well, but— The sand, the heart, the vacant horizon.” A voice said, “It is no desert.” 

—Stephen Crane

Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian is an epic of violence stark and calamitous, set in the liminal desert. But its depiction of bloodshed is not, as some would have it, a commemoration of “slaughter in all its sumptuousness and splendor” (Shaviro 144) despite McCarthy's testamental lyricism. Violence here is...