SOURCE: Sepich, John Emil. “A ‘Bloody Dark Pastryman’: Cormac McCarthy's Recipe for Gunpowder and Historical Fiction in Blood Meridian.” Mississippi Quarterly 46, no. 4 (fall 1993): 547-63.

In the following essay, Sepich argues that Blood Meridian's Judge Holden is in many ways a metaphor for Satan, and that the eventual death of “the kid” is the inevitable result of his association with Holden.

Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy's tale of a rough gang bounty-hunting scalps in the mid-nineteenth-century American Southwest, contains a remarkable character named Judge Holden. Judge Holden's importance in the novel is far greater than his actual position as one of this band of renegades and desperadoes under the command of the historical “Captain” John Joel Glanton.¹ The gang's first meeting with Holden, in a story told by an ex-priest turned scalper named Ben Tobin, is fascinating.² Tobin opens with Glanton's decimated gang in flight, retreating ahead of several...