>>232672
It's popularity among Redditors and other faggots has exploded because of a 5-hour summary of it by a YouTuber but this is easily one of the greatest novels ever made, I recommend reading it or even listening to it as the audiobook is excellently narrated. McCarthy's virtual disregard for punctuation and the barebones impersonal frank style imposes that you read it on its terms and sucking you in giving every line its own character, and gives off a quasi mythological or ancient quality for that. The near disregard for what happens throughout in the way he wrote it leaves the morality of the Judge and everything else in the book open to judgement and pondering through multiple views of philosophy, morality, and context. From what I've read of McCarthy's life up to early 90s his books don't contain full if any reflections of himself but thoughts and stories he had his head while he lived his life in "being alive" and other hobbies, writing is not his main profession but did it to affirm his outlook, ideas, and finding it important enough to put to book or for the sake of itself. Even if the themes aren't appealing to you it is a beautifully written book through its syntax, prose, and detail. My only complaint is a petty one in that the Judge is a prototype to the edgy nihilistic imposing character trope down to his appearance which in the time it was written wasn't a caricature yet. These were basically my impressions throughout it.
From what little I've read of Suttree it's as evocative and monumental as Blood Meridian, and what little I've read of Child of God gives off that his first three novels really are William Faulkner but Irish and Appalachian instead of English and southern. I've hardly dipped my toes into any Irish media but I believe their creative idiosyncrasy (true Irish not plastic Boston paddies) is predisposed to quaintness and dark themes.
The book Blood Meridian is based on, My Confession, was republished in 2023 and gives observer insight to the times and events from someone who fought in the Mexican-American War and the Civil War, the latter being why the book ends abruptly, with paintings he made included throughout. The drawbacks to this publishing is that incorrectly-spelled words are corrected, a chapter where he hallucinates is cut out, and there are no historical footnotes as in previous versions. And similar to My Confession is the Captive Dreamer, the account of a soldier in the French SS which was one of the units to partake in the Battle of Berlin and one of the key divisions defending the Fuhrerbunker and central Berlin to the end. They're my favorite unit in the Wehrmacht-Waffen SS for it and the shit they went through.