Seven stars out of five. 
 The best American novel I've ever read and one I don't see being dethroned by any of the current lot. 
 Those who have read the book should skip the first two sections of this review. 
 Introduction (no spoilers here) 
 The year is 1848-49. A band of White Americans have been commissioned by the Mexican city of Chihuahua to get Indian scalps (yes, the skin on the top of the head). The payment is 100$ for each scalp. Everything happens in what is today's North Mexico and South-Western US. 
 The main characters 
 The kid - teenager from Tennessee, arguably the protagonist (partly based on the real life character of Samuel Chamberlain whose late 19th century Confessions were the genesis of this book), who joins this gang among rather weird circumstances 
 John Joel Glanton - leader of the pack; an infamous figure in the US; he is said to have collected 500+ scalps in 1849, the year the book describes 
 Judge Holden - the most ingenious and most intelligent and most talkative of the pack; seven feet tall with no hair on his body and none either on his head; the philosopher in the book; a pedophile, a taxinomist, an artist, a chemist, an interlocutor. 
 Toadvine - The kid's friend 
 The expriest - the priest in the pack; terrorized by the presence of the Judge, and often egging the Kid to discount the judge or act against him 
 Review 
 McCarthy writes in a third person voice, rendering distance and 'otherness' to the narrative. His narrator does describe the band of marauders from up close, but there are equally numerous occasions when he is looking at them from faraway, from a precipice somewhere in the desert or in the mountains. Contructs like "They looked like..." are abundant. 
 This third person voice, wherever it localizes to one or more characters, reminds one of Coetzee. In technique McCarthy is as deft as Coetzee, if not slightly more entrepreneurial. But unlike Coetzee he does not provide an inner life to his characters. He is not interested in inner lives at all. McCarthy's characters are loath to think, they act. One can see this both as an adherence to the Western aesthetic and to the unique aesthetic decisions in this novel. His characters don't even speak too much (with the exception of the judge and the expriest) and whenever they do (speak or spit), it goes only to further highlight, rather assert, the hermetic nature of their emotions and feelings. Devoid of its characters inner lives, depleted of their words, McCarthy's narrator wanders through the Western landscape, seemingly bumping into the features and the flora and the fauna, trying to locate in these surroundings some aspects of the humans who have simply refused to allow him any passage into themselves. 
 Here McCarthy enters his zone. His vocabulary is as vast as the landscape he describes. With no punches pulled, he lets us into an orgy of descriptions - sentence after sentence of immaculately crafted presentation of elements. He never strays too much though - his adjectives are almost always tending to blood and there is always a Biblical metaphor lurking somewhere. And this orgy of beatific description continues even when the narrator is describing the violence. Gore is poeticised without any punctuations. 
 One could argue that it is by denying an inner life to his marauding, merciless characters that McCarthy saves them. Isn't an exploration of inner life also a granting of certain moral understanding from the reader (recall the case of Nabokov's Humbert, which, I agree, is a bad example here). After all, tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner. McCarthy violent men are, simply, violent men. And because their violence is girt in a harsh environment and faced with the unrelenting violence of others, they are naturally understood as tough men in a tough time in a tough space. Really, what better chance can violent men get? Wouldn't a peek at their inner lives, their streams of consciousnesses, their individual motives and desires, lead us to ascribe to them (or a few of them) some humane character which their actions (some of which are as gory as smashing infant heads on a stone (McCarthy is explicit here - the stew of the brains has to gush from the fontanels). By violent excess and excess of violence without a proper 'individual' justification, McCarthy has perhaps devised an aesthetic of excess. The conjecture (by many) that the novel was conceived due to the excesses of the Vietnam war makes one believe that what McCarthy is trying to point at is the fact that power produces its extraordinary carnivelsque excess, and that the excess of power and power are one and the same thing. 
 Enter the judge 
 In the Lacanian sense, the judge here is the big Other - one who defines the symbolic system for the band of scalphunters. It is difficult not to agree with the judge. And it is difficult not to feel some relief when he explains the mayhem around as inevitable (not politically inevitable but humanly inevitable). Quite conveniently, his is an articulation of the Nietzschean will to power - (1) War as ever enduring (2) Morality as a construct of the weak to fetter the strong (3) A rational understanding of everything with the motive of achieving suzerainty over everything. 
 The judge is not very far from being the Nietzschean Superman. 
 It is to be assumed (even read between the lines, though the conversation between the judge and the kid near the end of the novel do suggest this more concretely) that most in Glanton's band took the judge's words as relieving them of any compunctions. Violence thus continues as perversity, in assuming that one is being driven by a higher command, in objectivising oneself to the command of the big Other. But there are few who don't see the judge as the big Other, but instead, as just another subject like them, just another man. The kid, Toadvine, the expriest, maybe a couple others. The kid for sure. His confrontations with the judge have the kind of intersubjective tension that we saw between Batman and the Joker (bad example again). For the kid the big Other (presumably, always presumably) is not the judge but a code of self-sustenance as exemplified by John Joel Glanton (the leader of the pack). In the least, Glanton's reticent bravado and his reduction of most logic to the sheer economics of scalphunting is a small Other, an Ego-Ideal, an American code as exemplified in most of Elmore Leonard's heroes and villains. 
 But Blood Meridian turns very violent very early, before all of this even becomes clear. Much before the judge's exclamations of war's endurance et cetera, which is to say much before any justification. 
 The detail of violent acts is beyond the reader's control (simply because it is in the text and not reality) and also beyond any immediate ethical reaction by the reader. The reader is helpless, not less because he assumes a level of historical fidelity in these actions. But the important point here is - one which I believe is at the heart of the novel's intent - that the reader feels helpless precisely because he cannot consider, knowing the world as he does, such violent acts to be impossible even today. The fiction becomes real (helped of course by the language and the guile of the novelist). A Lacanian Real. The problematic is the difficulty of achieving a symbolic normalization of the violence for the international reader, and the sheer impossibility of this normalization in the case of an American reader inured with 'Manifest Destiny' and 'Westward Ho!' and Elmore Leonard and John Wayne and Clint Eastwood and clash of civilizations. 'Was it really this bad?' becomes as stupid as asking 'Is blood really red?' Through excess and its details, McCarthy presents to us a real that is unwrappable in a symbolic regime, at least not immediately, in any regime of truth. The reader is helpless because he knows that in no way can he make sense of this and live on. This is the stuff of terror. The only recourse is a will to power. 
 It is here that the judge begins to talk. The judge brings this Real into a symbolic understanding which, while relying on abstractions and whiling away what really is, does provide immediate relief, both to the ones listening inside the novel and the ones listening outside it. 
 The judge is immortal (he is the only one who survives). He dances on. McCarthy's own pessimistic (?) stand is clear at the end of the novel. The judge is like the lamella that Lacan talks of, that indestructible being of pure life will, that libido, only that in McCarthy's novel he is perhaps more a manifestation of a will to power. That the judge is very tall and erect and hairless also makes him a phallic symbol not very difficult to notice.