Thanks for this. I have yet to read Blood Meridian. I have read The Road and NCFOM. Both were great and absorbing reads. But I have one major gripe with CM (if I am allowed to do so). It's not his style - in fact it's his unique and great style of writing that would make anyone forget about what I'm going to say.
My problem with CM: his themes of post-apocalyptic, desperate humanity at war with itself and the singular savagery of ONE man against all - takes the assumed position that humans by nature (generally, of course) will almost always reduce to selfish savagery even to the point of normalising cannibalism. Of course, he needed to create this assumed backdrop for many of his stories (eg The Road needed this literally visceral danger for a father to demonstrate his instinctive protection for his only son) but CM's imagined scenario of a society that's eating itself is far from real evidence we have seen of humans. Real evidence shows that during catastrophic moments like earthquakes and prolonged famine and even war, human societies have shown remarkable strength to save and to protect and to help one another, sometimes at great individual sacrifice.
I know you can't criticise a work of fiction this way, an author is entitled his artistic philosophy and outlook. But when the writing is so masterful, when the rest of the philosophies of the stories are so elevated and cerebrally engaging, one can't help but find the story of humans cultivating others for food jarring and out of place.
(This is my first "criticism" of any work of literature.)