EX LIBRIS

Blood Meridian, McCarthy’s seminal (anti-)western, has the tone of scripture, but the feel of a nightmare. It is a paradoxical read. The book tells of a world so utterly disturbed that even its atoms seem cruel: ”[…] 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.” The text is pregnant with symbolism; burning trees, dormant volcanoes, and dying horses. Landscapes are so evocatively described that one might wonder whether some information theoretical limit has been broken; how does one’s mind see so much, having read so little?

“Malignantly useless”—that is what life is, Ligotti would have you believe, with his beautiful and disturbing treatise on the tragedy of human consciousness. However, in the best Gödelian fashion, the work fails to address its own beauty, thereby leaving those of us inappropriately fond of life with a way out of woe. Indeed, why would such an ugly thesis read so beautifully? Perhaps the meaning lies not in what the text says, but in what it feels like to read it … or perhaps this very notion is but a desperate mental concoction of a person unwilling to fully accept Ligotti’s bleak truths.