Notes on "Blood Meridian" (review)

If Blood Meridian (1985) had been the unexpected hit movie of the year and the kid interpreted by a romantically tormented heartthrob, John Sepich's Notes on Blood Meridian would have been its ultimate fan guide, complete with cast biographies, director's notes, and production details. As a meticulous student (the book started as a master's thesis when Sepich was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina) and later an accomplished scholar, John Sepich offers his insight and detailed research to the less knowledgeable reader. He crafts a book that will delight the McCarthy specialists, who will appreciate the heavy footnotes, as well as any American literature undergraduate, grateful to Sepich for making Blood Meridian a more accessible book than many would have expected it to be.

As Sepich makes clear in his revised preface, Notes is an unpretentious book which aims only at giving a proper overview of the historical material available to McCarthy as he wrote Blood Meridian: "what McCarthy saw in the Southwest's mid-nineteenth century journals, narratives, diaries" (xix). Sepich gained such knowledge through his comprehensive research and his privileged phone conversations with McCarthy himself. Notes covers a very wide spectrum of subjects; it offers detailed real-life biographies of Blood Meridian's main characters (his findings on John Joel Glanton are amazingly extensive), studies the different sources and settings that McCarthy uses in the novel, and presents published records of the massacres described in Blood Meridian. It also brilliantly studies how the themes are intertwined and presents many thematic concordances within the book, an endeavor Sepich undertook for all of McCarthy's western novels with fellow scholar Christopher Forbis (all are available on Sepich's Web site: http://www.johnsepich.com/publications.html). Sepich tells us that through Blood Meridian McCarthy "confronts critics who found his earlier books excessively grotesque with a well-researched—yet not less grotesque—historical novel," for history lies at the core of McCarthy's Blood Meridian as deeply as it resides in Sepich's Notes (117).

Sepich follows in McCarthy's footsteps as he retraces the author's path to the historical novel, using his research to tell the behind-the-scenes story of Blood Meridian. His book operates as a documentary of McCarthy's creative process for Blood Meridian. In his excellent additional eighth chapter, "Why Believe the Judge?" Sepich remains faithful in his historical presentation of the violent and erratic Southwest and the men who roamed it, just as McCarthy is in his fiction: "McCarthy [is] faithful to his setting and his characters. In that Southwest, nothing was moist but blood" (151). Sepich does not diminish McCarthy as a fiction writer, neither does he overindulge his historical reading of Blood Meridian. He only wishes to enlighten the reader with a deeper sense of the "connectedness of things" within Blood Meridian, a task he undertakes with great respect and sheer amazement, as any ultimate fan should (All the Pretty Horses [1992] 230).