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Comment by mcbutterbunz | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a strong reader and Blood Meridian took me a few times to read and appreciate. I just remember thinking how crazy it was that almost the entire page was a single run-on sentence. I really liked the book but it was difficult for me to read and understand.

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Some say it's more like approaching poetry than prose with his work. There is certainly causality and narrative development in his writing, but he often uses his magisterial command of language to impart a cosmic dimension to the simplest of instances or utterances.

It’s not all like that. Just the things that can’t suitably be explained as events. The native assault on the brigade comes to mind. How could you adequately describe such an event with words. It’s a horror poem in the way he writes it and if you haven’t read it, it is as chilling as it sounds.

It's a great book, but it was depressing enough the first time I read it. I can't imagine reading it several times :(

My reaction to McCarthy has been similar. After trying a couple of his works, my reaction was that he was primarily focussed on the nasty side of humanity. We people can be nasty, but - like much of today's news - he fails to balance that with our positives. There are a lot of grays between black and white. Great authors manage to show them all.

I am actually not sure. I used to agree, but I've found that the best stories I've read use the good and beautiful moments primarily to make the bad moments hit that much harder. That doesn't mean there aren't good stories focussing on balance, but I'd be surprised if there is as much to explore there as there is in the depths of both good and bad.

My foremost example here would be Berserk.

Suttree is your best bet if that's what you're after.

bizarrely reductive take. You think every piece of art should try to represent the entire spectrum of human emotion?

If you like that kind of writing, you would enjoy “Autumn of the Patriarch”. Probably Marquez’s best prose work.

Samuel Delany also has that fever dream wandering style of prose for me.

Or Wyndham Lewis’s ‘The Childermass’, which is 300 pages odd without chapters, just one continuous chunk of prose.

Stephen had a great quote - which I cannot find tonight - that Cormac McCarthy was like some pop music. It was ok to like it even if you couldn’t make out every lyric.

I'm right there with you. It was definitely a difficult read and I often found myself going back a few pages and re-reading sections. Many times.

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