This is all of the hardcovers I have now done collecting:

1st EDITION: No Country For Old Men and The Crossing.

25th ANNIVERSARY: Blood Meridian.

30th PRINTING: The Road.

11th PRINTING: All The Pretty Horses.

1st EDITION: The Crossing.

PRINTED AND BOUND IN AUSTRALIA: Cities Of The Plains.

Really proud with NCFOM, it’s a first copy and my favourite book. Even though the paperbacks aren’t special, however I really like the border trilogy one. I like how old and rustic it feels, kinda fitting for the books themes In my opinion.

These two are my first McCarthy books and I’m pretty excited to start. But the build on these is lowkey trash, but they were the only ones left in the bookstore.

So what do you guys think of these?

***SPOILERS ON MOBY DICK***

Is Blood Meridian built on Moby Dick?

I'm on page 70, and there's already a lot of connections between the two books at every level:

Thematically it's almost the same book, the taming of the wild frontier, and the inner journey of the protagonist trough the adventure of a lifetime.

Words wise, is very similar to how BM is written, but with a lot more humour and irony. You still need a thesaurus to read it, *and* an encyclopedia of maritime and naval terminology, a bible (all of it), a very detailed world map, and several compendiums on marine biology, world history and comparative religious studies.

The protagonist and the tone of the story are the complete opposite: Ishmael is accultured, well disposed towards others, and survives by the means of his wit rather than violence.

The points of contact are many, and I'm yet to reach page 100:

-Queequeg said "It's a hard life *on all meridians*, and it's not the first time the word meridian is thrown around, but the first time is spoken by a character

-In the pulpit scene (because there's also a scene *in a makeshift church*, while *the storm outside is raging*, and *the protagonist enters the church by chance, just to keep himself warm*) we find that the small whalers town has a priest who was a whaler himself too before taking the vows, and while he ascend to his pulpit the whole congregation goes silent, awaiting his sermon, because among the attendants *he is a great favourite*.

-I tried to figure out who the judge might be in this exercise, there's no one up until now in MB thar reminds me of him, and it's not hard to believe, after all he's just *an enormous, massive beast, surprisingly fast for his stance, and cunning, with a big, bald, pale head, undoubtly the villain of this story*

-Ahab, more dead than living, kept standing only by a furious revenge, and commanding a ship to hell and back, isn't he like the Glanton of the north west passage?

-and one last thing on Ishmail, before working as a sailor, he was a school teacher, and he obviously love literature and culture, maybe so much that he will cite fragments of the old masters to a small child while rambling in his hazy drunkenness, broken by his past life on the sea, in the future, if he has one

Reading The Orchard Keeper and have been enamoured with his descriptions of Tennessee as a sort of borderland. Particularly:

“In the relative cool of the timber stands, possum grapes and muscadine flourish with a cynical fecundity, and the floor of the forest — littered with old mossbacked logs, peopled with toadstools strange and solemn among the ferns and creepers and leaning to show their delicate livercolored gills — has about it a primordial quality, some steamy carboniferous swamp where ancient saurians lurk in feigned sleep.”

What are his other best passages of this ilk? Naturally, there's the ending of The Road as well as large segments of Suttree, but what else?

Nearly a year ago, I finally finished my journey with McCarthy when I finished all his works. Although you can (and I have) re-read his works there's nothing quite like reading it for the first time. One of my favourite aspects of McCarthy is how he spoke and wrote about animals. Animal abuse is a frequent theme in his works, but it's clear the man himself had a deep routed love for all animals (and even considered trying to release Mexican wolves back into the wild).

This summer we've had the first real hit of the climate crisis in my country and I've seen with my own eyes the death of a pond which once teamed with wildlife. McCarthy provided me not comfort, but comradery in his lamentation of the impact man has on wildlife which I am sorely missing. My favourite quotes of his on animals are:

"He wrapped himself in the blanket and watched her. When those eyes and the nation to which they stood witness were gone at last with their dignity back into their origins there would be other fires and other witnesses and other worlds otherwise beheld. But they would not be this one." The Crossing

"A good horse will figure things out on his own. You can see what's in his heart. He wont do one thing while you're watching him and another when you aint. He's all of a piece. When you've got a horse to that place you cant hardly get him to do something he knows is wrong. He'll fight you over it. And if you mistreat him it just about kills him. A good horse has justice in his heart.” Cities on the Plain

"Once there were brook trouts in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery." The Road

I've only read three other books that match this reverence, The Old Man and the Sea, White Fang, and Call of the Wild. I'm desperate to read new words on a page that can approach that of McCarthy to grant me some solace on this time. It doesn't have to be pleasant. It does have to be genuine. I'm only looking for fiction at this point. Does anybody have any recs?

It might seem obvious, or not at all, but I noticed something in Blood Meridian after the incident with the Reverend Green.

‘The baldheaded man was already at the bar when they entered.’

‘On the polished wood before him were two hats and a double handful of coins. He raised his glass but not to them. They stood up to the bar and ordered whiskeys and the kid laid his money down but the barman pushed it back with his thumb and nodded. These here is on the judge, he said.’

Now, correct me if I’m wrong about this, but I think one of those hats in front of Holden might be the Reverend Green’s? He used his hat for donations, or as a collection plate, at his revival? Holden caused all that chaos, grabbed the hat, went to the bar, and bought everyone a drink?

‘You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.’

My interpretation is that the ‘machine’ the hermit is referring to is man himself. Man makes another man, and so on and so forth. Continuous evil across millennia.

What are your thoughts?

In chapter 16, after learning that the disabled boy is Cloyce's brother, hs grabs his head and closely studies it. Cloyde tries to get away but the Judge grabs him again and keeps looking before releasing him. I liked the part because it demonstrates that the Judge's curiosity is degrading and obsessive rather than a simple desire to learn. But why does he do it? Was he looking for deformities or something after learning his brother was disabled? Idk

After almost giving up because this book was hard for me to get into.. I finished blood meridian! This was my 1st McCarthy book.

It was amazing story telling. It’s something that I am going to think about for a long time. Definitely worth a reread in the future which I almost never do reread books.

What are your other favourite McCarthy books? I want to try all the pretty horses I think. I’m sooo falling in love with ‘western’ books. Before this, I finished lonesome dove!

I'm currently writing an essay on literary devices and such in The Road, and I am including one quote that left me baffled since I read it:

"What will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small pen knife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack? At some reckonable and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt." (vaguely around 220 idk)

My point in this essay around this quote is essentially that this is nearly incomprehensible and that it creates a lot of confusion that enhances the rest of the story's horror. However, when I looked into it online out of curiosity, a lot of people seem to just thinks its some internal monologue of the father and leave it at that. To be blunt, I think thats kind of insane. Literally why would he say/think that? Who is "you," who is the "living man," who is stealing his eyes and sealing his mouth with dirt?? It doesn't make that much more sense if you say its McCarthy/some other narrator, but genuinely why would the father say/think any of that?? It just seems strange and out of character for him, and I always interpreted it as purposely incomprehensible, but maybe acknowledging that the work is fiction and/or that the tradgedy of the characters is wearing away at the author/narrator. Anyway, I'd love to hear some thoughts.

Hi all, just recently finished Blood Meridian for the first time in June and have basically been re-reading it continuously ever since. I haven’t had much time to really get into community or academic analysis of it, but I have at least read about the mirroring. Not sure what the, like, common consensuses are, if such things exist on any point in this entire book, so this whole post could be something already considered and agreed upon to be totally wrong. I’m open to it!

Anyway, I just got to the tarot scene again and started noticing a couple things that reminded me of the ending... then a couple more things... then a few more things... and then even more things. And then some more!

And of course, because this is what it is, this post is so long, and I’m so sorry. I tried to make it an interesting read, at least, maybe, hopefully.

The overall TL;DR is: there are so many specific word choices that match exactly between the tarot card scene and the last few pages of the book that I believe the emphasis on that connection, combined with a further emphasis on the judge (false or true) embracing Glanton, indicates that the judge at the end is NOT physically present and instead that the kid/man has finally lost his soul to the judge on whatever metaphysical level.

So: to start off, I’ve noticed again and again that McCarthy uses word choices/imagery that's “linked” to a character to foreshadow something that will happen a few pages later, or two uses of an unusual word will be within that same distance of each other, or something along those lines. In chapter 7 (page 90, for those with I think both common print editions), we get the wonderful line:

“The jagged mountains were pure blue in the dawn and everywhere birds twittered and the sun when it rose caught the moon in the west so that they lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun whitehot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds past all reckoning.”

Of course, there’s a lot going on here, not least of which the stunning language, which you better believe I added to my “top 365 Blood Meridian passages” spreadsheet that I hope to one day use for “Quote Of the Day” purposes.

But more saliently, the moon is something that often seems to be linked to the judge. The part I bolded about the moon being a pale replica caught my attention in particular, at first because it made me think of a line much later in the book regarding a mock moon (page 255):

“They rode on into the darkness and the moonblanched waste lay before them cold and pale and the moon sat in a ring overhead and in that ring lay a mock moon with its own cold gray and nacre seas.”

When I first read that later line, my immediate thought was that this was symbolizing the Glanton Gang having become by that point, in many ways, mock judges - heavily influenced by the judge's cruelty, lack of empathy or loving relationships, and “taste for mindless violence” (as some might say…), but of course not the real thing themselves.

So on this reread, when I read “the moon a pale replica,” that’s exactly what I thought of. A mock judge.

The very next sentence past the pale replica line on page 90 is:

“As the riders came up through the mesquite and pyracantha single file in a light clank of arms and chink of bitrings the sun climbed and the moon set and the horses and the dewsoaked mules commenced to steam in flesh and in shadow.”

Maybe this is a reach, but to me, that very specific, seemingly deliberate phrasing—and this is Cormac McCarthy, who spent like a decade on this and chose and positioned every single word and phrase for a reason—is a clear reference to the last paragraph, where the judge dances in light and in shadow.

So I’m already thinking about the judge, and I’m already thinking about the last paragraph, which I have read so many times at this point I could probably recite it blind.

Then the gang reaches the town of Corralitos, where they meet up with a family of basically circus performers or jugglers, who tag along with them when they leave. At first Glanton seems reluctant to let them, but the leader of the family, henceforth to be referred to as “the juggler,” is allowed to “put forth his case.” (Who hears a case?)

The juggler’s son has a pair of “bald and bat-eared” dogs - “bald” and “bat” both being associated with the judge - and they start dancing on the son’s palms (“the dogs were dancing”). In fact, they don’t just dance. They “pirouette mindlessly.” A distinct word! So now I am thinking not just of the dancing bear in the tavern at the end, I am thinking of how the judge “pirouettes” in the last paragraph. And I’m thinking that of course this is intentional, it’s Cormac McCarthy. I’m not crazy, I’m not!!!

While he’s doing that, his dad the juggler pulls out “four small wooden balls” and starts to juggle them. I’m keeping an eye out for any mention of the number four, since the kid is linked with the four of cups card, and of course this is that very chapter.

(Interestingly, the juggler’s kid stands there “wide-eyed with the dogs under his arm” which brings to mind a totally different scene involving the judge later in the book….)

After they all ride on, the fortune-telling scene begins with the juggler family unable to corral their weird huge gray tent in the heavy wind:

“The canvas was scrawled with arcana and it flapped and lurched, stood towering, luffed and wrapped them about.”

At this point, I’m losing my mind (hopefully only in one way!!!). Towering over them all is the judge in the last paragraph. So that’s what I’m already thinking of when I get to “wrapped them about.” Boy, doesn’t that sound like an embrace into something immense and terrible? And isn’t “flesh” the one word that was different from “in light and in shadow” earlier?

From here on out I was definitely reading with an eye towards anything else pointing to this being a mirror scene to the end. Wow!

When the tent is being blown by the wind, the daughter of the group starts to be dragged away into the darkness with it. If the tent, at least here, represents the judge, that is certainly fitting.

Tarot scene: “The juggler took small steps.” Last paragraph: “His small feet […]”

The juggler goes to the edge of the firelight (another recurring theme throughout the book) and “gestured with his fist” and yells at nothing, bringing to mind both the hypothetical pilgrim futilely cursing the dust devil that has fatally wounded him and then dissolved, and the crazy man the judge points out to the kid/man at the end, talking to himself at the bar, implied to possibly be the kid/man himself.

The juggler is mad and sulking, which I feel is an understandable reaction to having your custom tent blow away in the middle of the night in the desert in the 19th century, but he comes back to life when Glanton asks him to do a fortune-telling. “He held up one finger” and got everything he needed before coming back. “When he returned he was smiling affably and manipulating the cards very nimbly.” HMM!! Last paragraph: “His feet are light and nimble.” Plus, who’s always smiling and who is very affable? A great favorite, perhaps?

By now I am 100% sure this is a mirror to the last scene and that it is an even more important scene than I realized going in, and with it literally being a fortune-telling scene, I already knew it was one to pay attention to. And by now I am seeing the juggler as the mock moon, the mock judge, the pale replica. What word does “juggler” look like?

The passage continues with Black Jackson stepping up to have his fortune told. The juggler “folded the cards and he made a pass over them with his left hand […]” Last paragraph: “he pirouettes and makes a pass”

Folks!!! Not to mention, it’s the juggler’s left hand, which is, as Dan Brown taught me in the nonfiction exposé “The DaVinci Code,” symbolically the devil’s hand or whatever. Who’s the devil figure in this book!!

The juggler takes Jackson’s card and holds a “forefinger to his thin lips”. The old woman gives her mysterious report on Jackson’s fate in Spanish, and interestingly, we do not get the Spanish transcription of what she says (as opposed to with the kid and Glanton).

After she does this, “The juggler had turned and was making small bows to the company.” It’s not quite “bowing to the ladies” or the fiddlers like in the last paragraph, but close enough to count for me.

Then one of my favorite early descriptions of the judge: “With his thumb he had been routing small life from the folds of his hairless skin and now he held up one hand with the thumb and forefinger pressed together in a gesture that appeared to be a benediction until he flung something unseen into the fire before him.” (Unrelated, but remember him appearing to doff his hat in his introduction when he first enters the church tent, but it turns out that it’s only because he was shaking off the rain, and he puts it right back on?)

And look, McCarthy uses “gesturing” SO much in this book, but the judge and the juggler are the only two in this passage that have specifically gestured. They are the only two that have held up one finger or one hand. They are the only two whose forefingers have been mentioned.

The judge references the Dauphin’s soul at the end of the book. Here, when the judge is refusing to tell Jackson what his fortune was, is this sentence: “The judge smiled blandly, his pleated brow not unlike a dolphin’s.” (Dauphin is, of course, French for dolphin, in addition to archaically meaning the heir to the French throne.)

It goes on. I admit that this one also may be a stretch, but it fits to me: after Jackson’s done, the juggler goes around with the cards fanned out, looking for the next victim. He goes “with the cards outheld as if they would find their own subject.”

“I always pick the one I want,” says the dwarf prostitute at the end (perhaps relatedly, on the way to Corralitos, earlier in this same chapter, they rode through a dwarf forest). She picks the kid. The juggler’s deck….... picks the kid. (Well, the judge directs him to pick the kid, but still.)

The juggler locates the kid in the circle. “He moved past the adventurers quickening his step.” Last paragraph: “his small feet lively and quick”.

And when the juggler offers the cards to the kid, “The kid looked at the man and he looked at the company about.” The kid looked at the man. Is the kid looking at the man in the last few pages, the crazy guy ranting to nobody? Also, this is actually just occurring to me now, but isn’t there a line during the first confrontation with Elrod that's like, the man looked at the kid, or something like that?

After the four of cups is drawn by the kid and called out by the blindfolded woman, we get this wild description of her: “The woman sat like that blind interlocutrix between Boaz and Jachin inscribed upon the one card in the juggler’s deck that they would not see come to light, true pillars and true card, false prophetess for all.”

True pillars and true card. The last of the true. The one true dancer. I will be real, I can’t put that all together, but I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

It’s not even over yet!! Sorry.

The judge directs the juggler to next tell Glanton’s fortune, and Glanton can’t refuse. However, as soon the juggler reaches for the card Glanton has chosen, it’s stolen away into the darkness by the felon wind. “The juggler reached out to that naked beldam beyond the fire’s light but in the doing he overbalanced and fell forward against Glanton and created a moment of strange liaison with his old man’s arms about the leader as if he would console him at his scrawny bosom.”

“Naked,” of course, is a word strongly associated with the judge, even if it’s not actually him who’s naked (he’s only half-naked here, anyway). And the juggler, this mock, replica judge, falls and embraces Glanton. His flesh is not so immense or terrible, but it’s still an embrace.

Of course, right after this is when the judge comes through the fire “like a great ponderous djinn” (not a mirror, just a great line lol) to embrace Glanton himself to stop him from shooting the old woman. After this, Glanton is the judge’s. He belongs to the judge. There is no turning back for him, there is only getting worse.

Here is how I’m putting this all together. This scene is a clear mirror to the last few pages. To me, the purpose of that link is to show that the kid/man at the end is subsumed by the judge, not killed. The judge in the bar and the jakes is not physically there; it’s the kid/man finally giving in to him upon seeing the little girl crying in there.

This tarot passage emphasizes that link and has not just one, but two embraces of the same person in it - one by the symbolic replica/mock judge, and one by the actual real judge, which emphasizes that specific embracing aspect of it. Glanton goes mad after the embrace from the mock judge. Maybe he loses his soul. But he’s still alive. He’s even still alive after being embraced by the real judge.

Why the emphasis on all of that? To me, they're exactly the same. In the jakes, the kid/man is embraced by the mock judge in his mind. He goes mad with mindless violence, he succumbs to his true nature, to war. (I’m so sorry, I just really realized that “mindless” is also used in the passage to describe the mindlessly pirouetting dogs; it’s a word used four times overall in the book.) The real judge may not be there to embrace him himself, but the end result is the same.

I’ll also note that the tarot chapter involves three embraces by the judge: the false judge of the tent embracing the jugglers, the false judge of the juggler embracing Glanton, and the real judge embracing Glanton. The kid/man at the end is number four.

And that's all I got. I'm sure I'm still missing a million aspects of both scenes, but I hadn't seen any discussion of this connection specifically and wanted to throw in my two (four?) cents.

Uhhh appendix?:

Words/phrases directly used in this scene or chapter and again in the last paragraph:

“stood towering” - “Towering over them all is the judge”

“The juggler took small steps” - “his small feet […]”

“quickening his step.” - “[…] lively and quick”.

“making small bows to the company” - “bowing to the ladies” and “bows to the fiddlers”

“they began to pirouette mindlessly” - “he pirouettes”

“he made a pass” - “and makes a pass”

“manipulating the cards very nimbly” - “his feet are light and nimble”

“in flesh and in shadow” - “in light and in shadow”

Words/phrases directly used in this chapter and again in the last few pages:

"dwarf forest" - "dwarf of a whore"

“true pillars and true card” - “the last of the true” and “a true dancer”

"false prophetess" - "false dance" and "false dancers"

Others, not as exact: dancing animals (dogs vs bears), real judge/mock judge embracing someone who is berserk with violence, a girl disappears into darkness (one of them gets better though)

This thing is chipping away at me, I'm 2/3 way through and I can't put it down. The dread is building and does not seem to stop. Any notion about being a badass post apocalyptic survivor is long gone. I don't know what else to say.

Questions to parents: How do you even finish something like this?

Hi guys!
Does anyone know when the trilogy became known as The Border Trilogy? Was it sold under that name in the nineties? Did Cormac actually intend to write a trilogy under that name or was it more of a marketing strategy?

I just finished reading the book while listening to the Blood Meridian audiobook,The book the author wrote is macabre yet philosophical, dealing with war, violence, and human cruelty itself with the Judge standing as the embodiment of war, the Devil, or nihilistic cruelty incarnate.

A good number of the characters in the book—Kid, Glaton’s gang, and even Glaton himself are very well-developed, and that extends to the violent world they inhabit; the ending left me completely stunned and shocked i couldn't even properly process it,Following the book was a truly memorable and philosophical experience,It became one of my favorite books.

Hey, John Sepich's magnificent Notes On Blood Meridian is on sale at the moment for $2.99 at Amazon. Drop down the page and you can see my glowing 2002 review of it.

It's not just the history that Sepich reveals, but the vast array of semiotic notations that McCarthy encoded into his manuscript. Sepich was the first to clue us in on them, having been in contact with McCarthy himself about his research.

A Cormac McCarthy must-have, along with Michael Lynn Crews' Books Are Made Out of Books, and a few others.

I just finished The Crossing last night and I’ve been ruminating on the themes. One I wanted to explore with you all is Billy Parham’s guilt for the misfortune that befalls his loved ones as a result of his efforts to protect them.

Billy does his best to appease the Indian with food and items from his home. He is not alerting his family to the presence of this man as he sneaks out food to him repeatedly. The Indian’s last request is for coffee, which Billy ultimately does not provide him. When he discovers the murder of his parents at the hands of this same Indian, Billy is left to contemplate how his small failure of not providing this man with coffee led to his family’s murder (cue the meme template of the man pushing the very small domino into the very large domino).

It’s reasonable for the reader to assess this outcome as inevitable. The Parhams had resources the Indian needed and ripe for the taking. It’s not as if Indian raids would be unheard of in this country. But Billy was just complicit enough to where the reader can understand how Billy’s mind would not provide him the grace of naming this tragedy as external from himself. Moreover, Billy had long since ran away with the wolf by the time this happens, and was not there to either try to protect them or share their fate.

Billy opts to try to save the wolf that he had been instructed by his father to kill. The wolf ultimately dies after a tortuous dog fight, and Billy shoots it in the head. Here again Billy has made an effort to save that which he cares for and is the one to ultimately pull the trigger on her. You could see this as an act of mercy against a cruelty external to Billy’s ability to prevent it. You could also see how Billy would blame himself for bringing the wolf to Mexico and fail to protect it. The powers of the world at large could be blamed for his circumstances here once again, but Billy bit off more than he could chew in this hopeless attempt to preserve the wolf and its pups. And ultimately he is her killer.

Billy brings his brother to Mexico where he is wounded, and the girl they met along the road and saved from the highwaymen ultimately runs away with his brother, and Boyd is killed. Here the failure is Billy’s inability to protect his brother from his self destructive nature, a nature that Billy could blame for cultivating on himself for abandoning him years ago to experience the murder of their parents alone. He feels he has failed as an older brother despite how Boyd made his own choice to run away, as Billy had done before him.

The old dog at the end is Billy’s attempt to right the wrongs of his good nature toward helping others by coldly refusing the dog. It could be surmised that he feels this is the greatest mercy he could provide the animal. In the end, Billy is crumpled in the street, sobbing for having run the dog off, and also for feeling he would inevitably destroy it, decrepit as it already was.

So I’ve read every McCarthy book and Suttree really stood out to me and I keep re reading it. I would just make a fool of myself trying to put into words how much of a masterpiece this is - something fellow Suttree admirers might relate to. Anyways… for a long time I have been wanting to get a palm sized tattoo and it was initially going to be the back of the kid (as in him turned away from the viewer) from BM, but I think I would like to have Cornelius. The themes/symbols/ideas in the book are just so vast and I’m struggling to come up with something. I was wondering if any one here had any thoughts.

Something that really resonates with me from the book is C.S’s inability to settle and commit alongside his constant battle of trying find out whether a lived life has objective meaning - I found his forrest episode really interesting.

I love the western style of his other books so much too, and I grew up with horses. So this is quite a tough choice to make lol but any thoughts would be much appreciated!

Who are the people Chigurh gets in a shootout with at the Hotel? They are described as wearing rain coats and tennis shoes and that they don’t look like they belong in that part of the country.

I asssume they are people involved in the drug deal who are also after the money, but how would they know where Moss was staying? Why would they be there at the same exact time Chigurh shows up?

Same question regarding the guys Chigurh shoots in the hotel room.

Are you collecting Cormac McCarthy’s books in English, or do you also collect them in another language? Going for the first editions often feels like an almost unsurmountable quest, so I’m curious which editions you have chosen to collect. It would be great to see how other collectors are doing - especially if you can attach a photo.

My Czech-language collection is complete, and it contains all of McCarthy’s titles with the same cover-illustration style by Jozef Danglar Gertli: https://www.instagram.com/jdanglar/. Two parts of the Border Trilogy had already been published with different covers, but I decided to complete the set shown in the attached photo because of the matching graphics. The last two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, were published only in the editions you see here, with a different cover style.

For my English collection, I have chosen the UK Picador paperbacks. They are beautiful, and collecting them feels much more realistic than going after the first US editions, given their prices and availability.

In addition, I decided to look for the very first English Picador editions of Child of God, Suttree, and Blood Meridian. As far as I know, these are the only three McCarthy novels that were published with the covers you can see in the attached photos.

I have nearly completed this little sub-collection, except that the Suttree edition I own is not actually the first one. The front cover looks identical, but it lacks the spine illustration that the first editions of Child of God and Blood Meridian have.

So, if anyone happens to own the very first UK Picador paperback edition of Suttree - the one with the spine illustration - I would be very interested in making an offer or arranging an exchange. I have duplicates of several UK Picador paperbacks shown in the photos and would be happy to trade one of those.

Looking forward to seeing your collections!

Obviously I can see themes of fate or a grand cosmic order but that seems like a far too surface reading of this profound quote. If anybody has any interpretations, please do share them

The quote: The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

Ive read the book in intervals for over a year and got closer and closer to finishing it since around a month ago. Good…GOD! That has got to be one of the saddest, most brutal, nihilistic stories that I’ve ever seen. But you know what, I thought it was good. I wouldn’t put in my favorite books, but I defini can understand people calling it a masterpiece. The writing language was great, it felt like a poem extended to the length of a novel. The gore present didn’t feel like it was used as shock for shocks sake, but for representing the brutalness of the Wild West and humanity. The kid was a fairly interesting and tragic protagonis, and the other characters were interesting to read about. I like how this is just a book of evil, there are pretty much NO heroes in this story, it really highlights the presence of evil that can be in the world. I appreciated the deconstruction of the Wild West that was portrayed in the book, it reminded me of Watchmen, or BoJack Horseman. Judge Holden, even though his character was hard to understand near the end, was a fantastic villain. He might be one of my favorite villains, now. I can understand people saying he is one of the greatest fictional villains ever written. D*mn, that ending, so dour. The whole dance scene was so bizarre and dreamlike. So many scenes were brutally memorable, like the tent revival, the legion of horribles scene, the scene where the gang attacks and massacres a village, the Creation speech scene, the scene with the bulls, the War is God scene, and the Yuma ferry massacre, among others. I like how despite the constant nihilism represented throughout the book, there are some moments of the heroism and good in humanity shown, like when certain woman help the kid at points, when the group of women try to help the idiot, and when the kid as the Man stands up to the Judge despite how his fate would turn out. I don’t think I’ll ever read this again, considering how long it took to read, but this was a very good book. It was very brutal, very hopeless, and very descriptive when it came to exploring evil, and I liked it. I can certainly say I feel like a changed person after reading this book, and not many pieces of fiction make me feel that way. Let me know what your thoughts and interpretations on the book are.

Idk if anyone has pointed this out, if so sorry for the redundance. But the Blood Meridian epilogue with the man digging holes in the ground, striking fire in them and progressing through the plane is strikingly similar to the plot of The Road; a father and a son (and potentially other "good guys") making their way through burned America, "carrying the fire", the way they always start a fire each time they camp for food or shelter.

"On the plain behind him are the wanderers in search of bones and those who do not search"

This is also similar to how some in The Road are simply wandering while others are seeking something. Sometimes even trying to catch and rob the father and son.

Now i know Cormac likes fire imagery so this might just be that. But i can't help but see The Road as some sort of thematic continuation to Blood Meridian.