After seeing a bunch of comments about Blood Meridian, I wanted to put in my two cents.
First, I’m not saying this to try to convince anyone to like any book or genre, some genres just aren’t enjoyable for some people and that’s okay!
But as someone who loves this genre, it is HARD to read (even for someone who has been reading it for a long time). Every genre takes a specialty reading skill-set, some are more niche than others (e.g. Shakespeare) and this is one of them! For a lot of people first reading SGL texts, it can simultaneously seem too much (gruesome and detailed topics, opaque dialogue) and not enough (slow-paced, abstract). Every time I try to read Faulkner my head about falls off. For me, learning to read the genre has been worth it (Wise Blood and A Streetcar Named Desire are two of my all-time faves), for some it won’t be.
Ultimately, I’m just trying to say you’re not a bad reader or an outlier if Blood Meridian is tough to wade through for you.
I really don’t understand what everybody seems to find so difficult or inaccessible about Blood Meridian. I read it a few years ago as my first McCarthy and had zero trouble with it, aside from sometimes stumbling over McCarthy’s punctuation. There was no part where I felt like I didn’t know what was going on.
Faulkner on the other hand? Absolutely. The first part of The Sound And The Fury is fiendishly hard to make sense of on a first read. But that’s just Faulkner.
There is plenty of Southern Gothic that isn’t uniquely “hard”. And there is plenty of other literature that I consider way more cryptic and inaccessible than Flannery O’Connor or Tennessee Williams. When I think “difficult” books, the first things that come to mind are Ulysses, Gravity’s Rainbow, To The Lighthouse… none of which are Southern Gothic.
I think it’s a bit absurd to make a blanket statement like “Southern Gothic is hard”.
Is a Streetcar Named Desire a book? I thought it was a play, and am interested in it and would probably read it if it is a book. Guess I’ll have to look it up again
Could anyone explain to the ignorant what ‘Southern Gothic’ is and how it differs from proximate genres?