BLOOD MERIDIAN

Corman McCarthy, American novelist

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Or, The Evening Redness In The West, is a brutal novel that traces the journeys of a band of marauding scalp-hunters in the Old West who viciously murder Indians and Mexicans, armed and unarmed alike. The book is a dark masterpiece and a meditation on violence and the American psyche that owes much to Melville and Faulkner, as well as the King James Bible and Paradise Lost. McCarthy has written a number of excellent books, including the Border trilogy (which includes the National Book Award-winning All the Pretty Horses), and his most recent novel The Road is being made into a film, but he is probably best known to the general public as the writer of the book that became the Coen Brothers' film No Country for Old Men, which won four Oscars including Best Picture of the Year (2007).


Wheezing literary eminence Harold Bloom (pictured here guarding the canon) hailed Blood Meridian as one of the best books of the last century and placed it firmly in the Western canon, as well as his own "canon of the American Sublime." Bloom spoke recently to AV Club:

"I went straight through it and was exhilarated. I said, 'My God! This reminds me of Thomas Pynchon at his best, or Nathanael West.' It was the greatest single book since Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. In fact, I taught it for several years...I don’t think McCarthy will ever match it, but still… He has attained genius with that book."

Read the entire Harold Bloom interview here.


Professor Amy Hungerford teaches The American Novel Since 1945 at Yale, and she devoted two lectures in the course to Blood Meridian. This is the first lecture, and the second can be found here:


In a rare interview, the reclusive McCarthy speaks with Oprah. Perhaps not as insightful an interviewer as one would hope, her teatime chat at the Santa Fe Institute will give you some idea of McCarthy the man--and surprisingly enough he does not carry a six-shooter or wear a scapular of dried human ears. In fact, he seems like a perfectly pleasant gentleman--but looks can deceive.

The latest film based on McCarthy's work, The Road, is a harrowing post-apocalyptic story about a father and son (played by Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee) traveling through a burnt out wasteland in search of safety while evading predators. The film will be released October 16th.

Read a great on-set story from the New York Times here.

ATTACK OF THE KILLER ZOMBIES

If you're like me, you love zombies. We're talking crazed, hungry undead reanimated corpses that roam the earth in search of human flesh--not the numb dullards you may see on a daily basis. Those are co-workers. We're talking actual zombies with their flesh rotting off. Zombies are the rage. They're hot! There are plenty of zombies movies out there, a zombie survival guide, and --believe it or not--a rewrite of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" replete with zombies. Yawn. For my money, the original zombies are the best. Kudos to George Romero who spent about twelve bucks to produce the definitive zombie classic--the brilliant low budget 1968 masterpiece "Night of the Living Dead."


You can't beat these reanimated corpses, that's for sure. These slow moving creeps amble along after you while you try to escape...but the car won't start, or you break a heel, or you slip in the muddy graveyard. It's excruciating. They keep coming.

Along with the Austen parody, there are plenty of other attempts to breath life into the tired old zombie genre, including "serious literature" such as "World War Z," a tale of surviving an all-out zombie war, and "The Zombie Survival Guide," a how-to book with the same idea. There are new and improved zombies, such as the fast running bloodhounds of "28 Days Later," and the hilariously slow-moving ghouls of "Shaun of the Dead," but for my money the best zombie flick is the black and white gore-fest shown above. This is the bomb. Watch it with the lights down low.

Enough revisionist zombies! Why update, morph, and remix the original unless you can improve it? Zombies are in vogue, and while they may never be as popular and sexy as vampires--witness the "Twilight" phenomenon of teen bloodsuckers--they have a certain dignified stature among the undead. Let's keep it that way. Help the zombies survive the hacks.

OSCAR MEET DIABLO

Diablo Cody won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Juno, a witty little movie and my favorite coming of age/teen pregnancy film of the year. You know, cool soundtrack, sassy dialog -- snarky with a heart. The story behind the story is Diablo Cody's meteoric rise from stripper and phone sex partner to Oscar winner, and sure she's sexy, but she's also whip-smart, and wrote a screenplay that didn't follow the tired old formulas that insist on a bump every ten minutes, and "plot points" that you can set your watch to. I got a kick watching this quirky oddball in a leopard skin mu-mu snake her way through the gowns and opulence of Hollywood and grab the gold. Or brass, or whatever it is.

This interview is a year old, when she was flogging "Candy Girl," a book she'd written about her experiences "stripping for Joe Sixpack," as she puts it. The other screenwriting award went to the Coen Brothers for their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men," which also won an Oscar for Best Picture. If you haven't read McCarthy, read the Border Trilogy (starting with "All The Pretty Horses") or dive in to the darkly brilliant "Blood Meridian."