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In the Rogue Blood
The offspring of a whore mother and a homicidal father, Edward and John Little are driven from their home in the Florida swamplands by a sching parent's treacheries, and by a shameful, horrific act that will haunt their dreams for the rest of their days. Joining the swelling ranks of the rootless--wandering across an almost surreal bloodland populated by the sorrowfully lost and defiantly damned--two brothers are separated by death and circumstance in the lawless "Dixie City" of New Orelans, and dispatched by destiny to opposing sides in a fierce and desperate territorial struggled between Mexico and the United States. And a family bond tempered in hot blood is tested in the cruel, all-consuming fires of war and conscience.With soaring and masterful prose, James Carlos Blake brings to life an enthralling historical time and place--and a cast of memorable characters--in a stunning tale of dark instinct, blood reckoning, and fates forged in the zeal of America's "Manifest Destiny."
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
99 people are currently reading
1965 people want to read
About the author
James Carlos Blake
22 books211 followersJames Carlos Blake was an American writer of novels, novellas, short stories, and essays. His work has received extensive critical favor and several notable awards. He has been called “one of the greatest chroniclers of the mythical American outlaw life” as well as “one of the most original writers in America today and … certainly one of the bravest.” He was a recipient of the University of South Florida's Distinguished Humanities Alumnus Award and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 116 reviews
March 12, 2023
Let us start with a question?
Are you prepared for 344 pages of extreme violence, people being murdered in every imaginable way, racism, sexual depravity including incest, war, and general wild west debauchery?
If you answered yes, then welcome to the ranks of degenerates that enjoyed this novel.
If you answered no then In The Rogue Blood probably isn't for you. You obviously have a higher moral standard than the rest of us, congratulations.
The book is filled with extreme violence and sexual deviancy from the first chapter to the last. The brothers spend much of their time drunk and fighting and when they aren't drunk and fighting they are drunk at the brothel. What can you expect when your father was a murderous drunk and your mother was a reformed prostitute? They did what they knew how to do, survive, and you can't blame them for that.
Overall it was a highly enjoyable and extremely gut-wrenching book.
Are you prepared for 344 pages of extreme violence, people being murdered in every imaginable way, racism, sexual depravity including incest, war, and general wild west debauchery?
If you answered yes, then welcome to the ranks of degenerates that enjoyed this novel.
If you answered no then In The Rogue Blood probably isn't for you. You obviously have a higher moral standard than the rest of us, congratulations.
The book is filled with extreme violence and sexual deviancy from the first chapter to the last. The brothers spend much of their time drunk and fighting and when they aren't drunk and fighting they are drunk at the brothel. What can you expect when your father was a murderous drunk and your mother was a reformed prostitute? They did what they knew how to do, survive, and you can't blame them for that.
Overall it was a highly enjoyable and extremely gut-wrenching book.
June 6, 2020
“For weeks to follow they found no sign of their quarry. They thought that word of their coming must have spread and the Indio was on keener watch and in better hiding. They rode deep into the night and set fires in one place and camped without fire a few miles removed to try to lure [them] but no Indians did appear. They ranged in wide searching loops and the Shawnees cut for sign in vain. They traversed vast and shifting gypsum dunes as fine as lady’s facepowder through which the ponies and mules labored for breath like bellows. The wind blew the sand like sea-spray but only the whited bones of men and animals did they find there. They crossed shimmering flats empty of vegetation but for occasional saltbrush and stunted cactus. They rode up narrow arroyos to mesa tops and searched the terrain to every point of the compass and then descended again and rode out into the broiling cracked flats of the playas. They lay on their bellies to skylight the horizon for sign of men to kill…”
- James Carlos Blake, In the Rogue Blood
James Carlos Blake’s In the Rogue Blood is set in a dystopian, ultraviolent version of the American southwest. It begins in the 1840s, in Florida, and later moves to the borderlands of Mexico and Texas. There are untold murders, a gang of scalp hunters, and a writing-style that often harks back to the ornate grammatical structures of the 19th century.
If this sounds a bit like Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, well, you aren’t the first person to notice the similarities.
And that’s a bit unfortunate. The American southwest, especially the time period encompassing the oft-ignored Mexican-American War, is big enough to handle two novels. Moreover, aside from some obvious overlap – “blood” in the title, a dim view of mid-19th century frontier humanity, and the trafficking of human hair – the two books are as different as night and day.
Having read both, the big difference is simple readability. Blood Meridian is dense. As in Old Testament-dense. Meanwhile, In the Rogue Blood, despite the pretensions of its idiomatic prose, has a much cleaner narrative.
Indeed, the story itself is rather simple. In this case, the focus is on two brothers, Edward and John Little, who leave their home in Florida – fleeing an ex-prostitute, possibly-psychotic mother, and a violent, possibly-psychotic father – and set out for the wider world. There is also a sister, but she does not quite get left behind.
In the early going, these two brothers follow a pattern: they fight/kill someone and take that person’s stuff; later they get robbed in turn; and they are forced to fight/kill someone else to get more stuff. This is interspersed with a great deal of sex: with prostitutes, with farmer’s daughters, eventually with the sister.
If this doesn’t sound entirely pleasant – well, it’s not. The protagonist of a novel does not necessarily have to be likeable. There are countless examples of flawed men and women who nevertheless make excellent lead characters. The trouble with John and Edward, however, is that they both come off as sociopaths. It’s tough to emphasize with a person who isn’t able to conjure normal human emotions. Thus, it’s extremely difficult – at least in the early going – to connect with Blake’s central characters.
Partway through In the Rogue Blood, though, Edward and John take separate paths. From that moment on, the novel really hits its stride. The two brothers are still fairly repellant human beings, yet they show flashes of decency and a depth of kinship that propels the story towards its conclusion.
Even when the characters are being awful, Blake is always able to distract with his beautiful eye for landscapes. One of the true pleasures of In the Rogue Blood is simply going where he takes you. It is a travelogue, albeit one that occasionally sidetracks into flash-violence and incest.
Through a series of twists and turns, Edward and John end up on opposing sides of the Mexican-American War. Here, Blake takes his lethal and oft-unhinged version of the American Southwest and tethers it to the historical record.
Surprisingly, Blake’s novel – which to this point had been high-quality pulp – veers into historical fiction. His recounting of the movements of General Zachary Taylor and General Winfield Scott are accurate as well as blazingly cinematic. Blake’s battle descriptions, especially the battle of Chapultepec (the penultimate act of Scott’s legendary campaign from Vera Cruz to Mexico City) are revelatory. They seem to belong in the realm of Tolstoy and Borodino, not a slim western centering on two murderous brothers. But Blake shifts easily along the literary spectrum. One moment he is describing a beautiful sunset; the next moment one of his characters is canoodling with a first-degree relative; a little later there is an epic battle with thousands of soldiers whirling in the dust and heat and blood.
One of the best things historical fiction can do is to illuminate the footnotes. In In the Rogue Blood, Blake takes marvelous advantage of the San Patricio Battalion, a unit of the Mexican Army that was populated by European immigrants – including many Irish – who had deserted from the American Army, lured by promises of better pay and free land. Blake’s melding of historical reality to his fictional tale is seamless. Unlike a lot of historical fiction, this event becomes integral to the storyline, rather than appurtenant to it.
In many ways, In the Rogue Blood is not for the faint of heart. There’s the aforementioned sister complex, along with rape and murder, thievery and skullduggery, cursing and general bad manners, and also scalp hunting. Besides all that, it’s also an enjoyable read. A crazy ride filled with gorgeous descriptions, laconic dialogue, and the simple, timeless themes of blood-ties and violent destiny.
- James Carlos Blake, In the Rogue Blood
James Carlos Blake’s In the Rogue Blood is set in a dystopian, ultraviolent version of the American southwest. It begins in the 1840s, in Florida, and later moves to the borderlands of Mexico and Texas. There are untold murders, a gang of scalp hunters, and a writing-style that often harks back to the ornate grammatical structures of the 19th century.
If this sounds a bit like Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, well, you aren’t the first person to notice the similarities.
And that’s a bit unfortunate. The American southwest, especially the time period encompassing the oft-ignored Mexican-American War, is big enough to handle two novels. Moreover, aside from some obvious overlap – “blood” in the title, a dim view of mid-19th century frontier humanity, and the trafficking of human hair – the two books are as different as night and day.
Having read both, the big difference is simple readability. Blood Meridian is dense. As in Old Testament-dense. Meanwhile, In the Rogue Blood, despite the pretensions of its idiomatic prose, has a much cleaner narrative.
Indeed, the story itself is rather simple. In this case, the focus is on two brothers, Edward and John Little, who leave their home in Florida – fleeing an ex-prostitute, possibly-psychotic mother, and a violent, possibly-psychotic father – and set out for the wider world. There is also a sister, but she does not quite get left behind.
In the early going, these two brothers follow a pattern: they fight/kill someone and take that person’s stuff; later they get robbed in turn; and they are forced to fight/kill someone else to get more stuff. This is interspersed with a great deal of sex: with prostitutes, with farmer’s daughters, eventually with the sister.
If this doesn’t sound entirely pleasant – well, it’s not. The protagonist of a novel does not necessarily have to be likeable. There are countless examples of flawed men and women who nevertheless make excellent lead characters. The trouble with John and Edward, however, is that they both come off as sociopaths. It’s tough to emphasize with a person who isn’t able to conjure normal human emotions. Thus, it’s extremely difficult – at least in the early going – to connect with Blake’s central characters.
Partway through In the Rogue Blood, though, Edward and John take separate paths. From that moment on, the novel really hits its stride. The two brothers are still fairly repellant human beings, yet they show flashes of decency and a depth of kinship that propels the story towards its conclusion.
Even when the characters are being awful, Blake is always able to distract with his beautiful eye for landscapes. One of the true pleasures of In the Rogue Blood is simply going where he takes you. It is a travelogue, albeit one that occasionally sidetracks into flash-violence and incest.
The pinewoods fell behind and the sky widened and the country opened up and assumed a gentle roll. He rode through bunch grass and along bottoms lined with hardwoods, passed through pecan groves and stands of oak. In time he came upon the first rocky outcroppings and cedar brakes at the edge of the hill country and saw farther to the west a low line of whiterock palisades shaped like wide steps leading to the high plains. There appeared now among the hardwoods scatterings of mesquite and occasional clumps of prickly pear. The west wind carried the scent of cedar and the sunsets seemed a deeper and brighter red, as if painted in fresher blood. The clouds were quicker to shape themselves and to change direction, to dissolve to pale wisps. A hard hailstorm drove him to cover in an oak grove and frightened the Janey mare.
Through a series of twists and turns, Edward and John end up on opposing sides of the Mexican-American War. Here, Blake takes his lethal and oft-unhinged version of the American Southwest and tethers it to the historical record.
Surprisingly, Blake’s novel – which to this point had been high-quality pulp – veers into historical fiction. His recounting of the movements of General Zachary Taylor and General Winfield Scott are accurate as well as blazingly cinematic. Blake’s battle descriptions, especially the battle of Chapultepec (the penultimate act of Scott’s legendary campaign from Vera Cruz to Mexico City) are revelatory. They seem to belong in the realm of Tolstoy and Borodino, not a slim western centering on two murderous brothers. But Blake shifts easily along the literary spectrum. One moment he is describing a beautiful sunset; the next moment one of his characters is canoodling with a first-degree relative; a little later there is an epic battle with thousands of soldiers whirling in the dust and heat and blood.
One of the best things historical fiction can do is to illuminate the footnotes. In In the Rogue Blood, Blake takes marvelous advantage of the San Patricio Battalion, a unit of the Mexican Army that was populated by European immigrants – including many Irish – who had deserted from the American Army, lured by promises of better pay and free land. Blake’s melding of historical reality to his fictional tale is seamless. Unlike a lot of historical fiction, this event becomes integral to the storyline, rather than appurtenant to it.
In many ways, In the Rogue Blood is not for the faint of heart. There’s the aforementioned sister complex, along with rape and murder, thievery and skullduggery, cursing and general bad manners, and also scalp hunting. Besides all that, it’s also an enjoyable read. A crazy ride filled with gorgeous descriptions, laconic dialogue, and the simple, timeless themes of blood-ties and violent destiny.
May 17, 2018
In The Rogue Blood Meridian
Blake's debt to Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy would be crippling if he weren't stealing for the greater good; his own good, mostly, but... it is pretty great. As the story progresses, it marches straight past all the clearly marked signs and fencelines, moving into territory owned by 'Blood Meridian'. Blake, however, has his own ideas for these dry, bone-littered borderlands, and it's not to copy, plunder and plagiarize. This is a homage to both the book and the history that inspired it. Blake is perhaps the only writer alive who could pull off something this audacious, but he succeeds brilliantly.
This was too interesting to ignore, and just topical enough to include. What the fuck is Doctor Manhattan doing in a Blood Meridian adaptation? If that's Judge Holden, he's looking a bit more svelte than McCarthy described him.
The main distinctions come from the narrative perspective and the relationship between characters. McCarthy follows 'The Kid', but spends more time wandering amongst the other members of the Glanton gang, until most of the mighty 'Indian Fighters' meet their just ends at the hands of a peaceful tribe they insult and abuse and treat like slaves, finally pushing them too far. ItRB stays close to the Little brothers, and after they're separated, alternates between them. 'The Kid' was just as alone as everyone else in Cormac McCarthy's greatest work. In Blake's novel, even after this fucked up family explodes, the women fleeing, the men engaged in actions heavier and older than the spoken word, the brothers still need to find their mother and their sister. Their reasons are complicated and perverse; one of them, both of them might want vengeance against their mother, to pay for the lies that forced them into patricidal action... they might even understand her reasons. They may want to find their sister because she's their sister, to protect her from the filth, and disease, and violence that rages all around them, or one of them may have less noble reasons. But while the bleak horror of Blood Meridian shows men completely isolated in one another's company, unable to bond as friends or comrades, incapable of caring or trusting, Blake shows us that the family bond serves to make that hell on earth so much worse, compounding misery with betrayals and regrets.
When the brothers lose each other in the chaotic mass of bodies and humid, steaming swamps of New Orleans, more bad things happen -- including an unforgettable scene when a notoriously skilled French duellist faces off with Edward over a minor insult, and uses his rapier to cut his opponent repeatedly from a distance, since he is armed with a large but much shorter Bowie knife, and is unfamiliar with fencing. It is only when the fencing ends, by means of tactics that don't appear in duels, that the Frenchman discovers the savage effectiveness of a Bowie... Now both brothers are on the run, and they find themselves in places and vocations where life is very cheap. Scalphunting, soldiering on both sides of the 1847 US-Mexican War; life does not get better for the Little Brothers, but they might find some of the answers they had almost forgotten they'd been looking for.
The prose of James Carlos Blake is beautiful, regardless of his inspiration. The sheer brutality of the violence on display is very much like the near apocalyptic atrocities of Blood Meridian. But Blake understands the history and the places he's writing about intimately, even better than McCarthy. I feel 'In the Rogue Blood' is a companion piece to 'Blood Meridian', and each book is made better by the other. These are narratives of a time and place where a man like Judge Holden, a preternatural, diabolical figure, somehow makes perfect sense; his essentially uncanny nature never compromises the feeling of grim historical authenticity. Holden presides over an inferno of carnage and cruelty that begs to be framed with a word like 'evil', even though the wastelands of 'Blood Meridian' and 'In the Rogue Blood' are regions beyond the reach of moral accounting. Every character seems unworthy of forgiveness, incapable of guilt or redemption... and no more 'evil' than a male Lion killing the cubs of a recently defeated pride-leader. In this vast, scorched region, Bruegel's 'Triumph of Death' and 'Dulle Griet' seem like prophecies that are closer to the literal than the symbolic.
Pieter Bruegel - 'The Triumph of Death':
In this Gehenna, the Comanche and Kiowa are like terrifying demons of torture and mutilation, as Mexico and Texas prepare for butchery on a grander scale. In this hell McCarthy and Blake play Virgil and Dante, respectively. The Devil is just one more pioneer, staking his claim in the New World where men become animals fighting for the scraps and drops of sustenance to be found, and any women who venture into such a place are eyed by predators waiting for an opportunity. This is a book about the frontier, the invisible line beyond which civilization is just a word for idiots, and where murder, torture, and rape are everyday occurences. I admire his audacity, and his success, in taking inspiration from one of the greatest living writers. He does McCarthy almost as good as McCarthy.
Pieter Bruegel - 'Dulle Griet':
Blake's debt to Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy would be crippling if he weren't stealing for the greater good; his own good, mostly, but... it is pretty great. As the story progresses, it marches straight past all the clearly marked signs and fencelines, moving into territory owned by 'Blood Meridian'. Blake, however, has his own ideas for these dry, bone-littered borderlands, and it's not to copy, plunder and plagiarize. This is a homage to both the book and the history that inspired it. Blake is perhaps the only writer alive who could pull off something this audacious, but he succeeds brilliantly.
This was too interesting to ignore, and just topical enough to include. What the fuck is Doctor Manhattan doing in a Blood Meridian adaptation? If that's Judge Holden, he's looking a bit more svelte than McCarthy described him.
The main distinctions come from the narrative perspective and the relationship between characters. McCarthy follows 'The Kid', but spends more time wandering amongst the other members of the Glanton gang, until most of the mighty 'Indian Fighters' meet their just ends at the hands of a peaceful tribe they insult and abuse and treat like slaves, finally pushing them too far. ItRB stays close to the Little brothers, and after they're separated, alternates between them. 'The Kid' was just as alone as everyone else in Cormac McCarthy's greatest work. In Blake's novel, even after this fucked up family explodes, the women fleeing, the men engaged in actions heavier and older than the spoken word, the brothers still need to find their mother and their sister. Their reasons are complicated and perverse; one of them, both of them might want vengeance against their mother, to pay for the lies that forced them into patricidal action... they might even understand her reasons. They may want to find their sister because she's their sister, to protect her from the filth, and disease, and violence that rages all around them, or one of them may have less noble reasons. But while the bleak horror of Blood Meridian shows men completely isolated in one another's company, unable to bond as friends or comrades, incapable of caring or trusting, Blake shows us that the family bond serves to make that hell on earth so much worse, compounding misery with betrayals and regrets.
When the brothers lose each other in the chaotic mass of bodies and humid, steaming swamps of New Orleans, more bad things happen -- including an unforgettable scene when a notoriously skilled French duellist faces off with Edward over a minor insult, and uses his rapier to cut his opponent repeatedly from a distance, since he is armed with a large but much shorter Bowie knife, and is unfamiliar with fencing. It is only when the fencing ends, by means of tactics that don't appear in duels, that the Frenchman discovers the savage effectiveness of a Bowie... Now both brothers are on the run, and they find themselves in places and vocations where life is very cheap. Scalphunting, soldiering on both sides of the 1847 US-Mexican War; life does not get better for the Little Brothers, but they might find some of the answers they had almost forgotten they'd been looking for.
The prose of James Carlos Blake is beautiful, regardless of his inspiration. The sheer brutality of the violence on display is very much like the near apocalyptic atrocities of Blood Meridian. But Blake understands the history and the places he's writing about intimately, even better than McCarthy. I feel 'In the Rogue Blood' is a companion piece to 'Blood Meridian', and each book is made better by the other. These are narratives of a time and place where a man like Judge Holden, a preternatural, diabolical figure, somehow makes perfect sense; his essentially uncanny nature never compromises the feeling of grim historical authenticity. Holden presides over an inferno of carnage and cruelty that begs to be framed with a word like 'evil', even though the wastelands of 'Blood Meridian' and 'In the Rogue Blood' are regions beyond the reach of moral accounting. Every character seems unworthy of forgiveness, incapable of guilt or redemption... and no more 'evil' than a male Lion killing the cubs of a recently defeated pride-leader. In this vast, scorched region, Bruegel's 'Triumph of Death' and 'Dulle Griet' seem like prophecies that are closer to the literal than the symbolic.
Pieter Bruegel - 'The Triumph of Death':
In this Gehenna, the Comanche and Kiowa are like terrifying demons of torture and mutilation, as Mexico and Texas prepare for butchery on a grander scale. In this hell McCarthy and Blake play Virgil and Dante, respectively. The Devil is just one more pioneer, staking his claim in the New World where men become animals fighting for the scraps and drops of sustenance to be found, and any women who venture into such a place are eyed by predators waiting for an opportunity. This is a book about the frontier, the invisible line beyond which civilization is just a word for idiots, and where murder, torture, and rape are everyday occurences. I admire his audacity, and his success, in taking inspiration from one of the greatest living writers. He does McCarthy almost as good as McCarthy.
Pieter Bruegel - 'Dulle Griet':
March 1, 2010
What little critical attention James Carlos Blake’s In Rogue Blood has been focused on the clear influence of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. With its setting in the south and Mexican American Border, descriptions of nature and wildlife, relentless gore, and brutal, animalistic, Hobbesian view of humanity I can’t really disagree with this. Blake has a good vocabulary, assured prose, and ability to give voice to characters but as he can’t really match McCarthy (most showing in its most derivative segment featuring a gang of scalphunters) and since the violence is unbelievably beyond even McCarthy this can get a bit relentless. The two main characters, a pair of brothers are a savage couple of unlovable brutes also make this a little hard to take. But it is at the same time more readable and works very well as historical novel. This and Tom Franklin’s Hell at the Breech makes me think that the spirit of Peckinpah is alive in literary form.
July 16, 2023
More than half of this book is about whoring. Every girl in the book is a whore, including the mother and sister. Pardon me, maybe I should call them "sportin ladies" or "women of ready affection."
The rest of the story has the Little brothers drygulching their way from Florida to Mexico City. Plenty of scalping, evisceration, and emasculation. Blake is unsurpassed at crimson prose:
The rest of the story has the Little brothers drygulching their way from Florida to Mexico City. Plenty of scalping, evisceration, and emasculation. Blake is unsurpassed at crimson prose:
"... the ball crunched into it just above the left ear and bore through bone and brain and burst out the other side of the skull and took the right ear with it in a red spray."Many have noted the similarities between Blake's book and Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West. In a GQ interview Blake said that at the time he wrote this he never before heard of Cormac McCarthy. The mood of the book and the writing style remind me more of Outer Dark.
March 20, 2015
The only book bloodier than Blood Meridian. Early on I thought Blake was actually trying to outdo McCarthy in the body count, and maybe he was. But Blake is very much his own writer, and there's plenty of the "Old, Weird (and super violent) America" to go around. I read this a few years back, and its set up is a bit like The Searchers, with two brothers going in search of a sister. But this isn't Hollywood. The Mexican War intrudes. A coming of age story for both, with an absolutely lethal landscape as a backdrop.
November 2, 2014
I've seen this quote posted for a review one time, "I'm not a great book reviewer, but I know what I like to read and I loved this book.". That quote is me. This is the 5th James Carlos Blake novel I've read and it's just as good as the other 4. I see a lot of people have compared In the Rogue Blood to McCarthy's Blood Meridian. The only similarities I see between these 2 novels is the amount of violence and bloodshed. I much prefer Blak's novel as it reads so much smoother. I didn't much care for McCarthy's paragraph long sentences with hardly no punctuations used, it made it hard for me to follow without having to stop and re-read all the time. I would highly recommend Blake's novels to those who like historical fiction.
March 13, 2025
This book is ridiculously hard to review. It is every bit as grotesque, horrific and grim as Blood Meridian - I mean, both books are set in the same place / period / tackle similar themes. It is so hard to not compare it to McCarthy's opus, however, the writing is tonally different through a whole host of aspects and the focus here is on two brothers who become embroiled in the dark deeds that sweep them into Mexico. It is well worth a read, Blake is a talented writer no doubt and this book is one that will stick with me for a long while yet.
November 7, 2010
god. i only read like 50 pages of this book. it was TERRIBLE.
let's have a little synopsis, meet two brothers, find out dad killed a man and they all fled to florida, sister runs away mysteriously, brothers go to find sister, come home find house burned down, mom did it, mom tells them dad was raping their sister, mom runs away, they kill dad, and then they ride to texas and are racist, sexist douchebags the whole way. the end.
let's have a little synopsis, meet two brothers, find out dad killed a man and they all fled to florida, sister runs away mysteriously, brothers go to find sister, come home find house burned down, mom did it, mom tells them dad was raping their sister, mom runs away, they kill dad, and then they ride to texas and are racist, sexist douchebags the whole way. the end.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 7, 2016
Repetitive in its violence, how many scenes of unhinged barbarism with no remorse do you need before the reader knows that it's a common place event in a certain place at a certain time?
November 12, 2007
One of my favorite authors. This was the first J.C. Blake book I read. Wonderful writing, fab. storyteller. I don't understand why more readers don't know about him?
July 12, 2022
Megaviolent and nihilistic saga of two brothers who flee their Florida home after some dark family shit goes down and carve a path west across the country before being swept up in the Mexican-American war of 1846. Blake was definitely on his game with this one, his prose is great and it's hard to deny that he knows how to get right to the uncomfortable vein of America's longstanding obsession with and reliance on violence. No revelatory answers here though, just 400-500 pages of murder, incest, torment, and war. That's kind of the problem I have with Blake though, is that a lot of the time this book seemed to be made up more of vignettes rather than a steady overarching plot. It's easy to kind of reduce this book to "Edward and John show up in city/town, drink, fuck, and then someone gets fucked up horribly and they flee." Still, the writing is great and I kept turning the pages.
December 29, 2020
Because so much commentary on In the Rogue Blood focused on its similarity to Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, before getting into Blake's novel, I decided to read McCarthy's much praised work first. There are indeed similarities in the broad story but a greater difference in form and perspective than apparent at first glance. Frankly, I find McCarthy's self conscious mixture of modernism and post-modernist pastiche a bit gimmicky. But he redeems himself with his superb passages that turn into prose poems. Blake has no time for that. His is a realistic fiction but with a twist on the form itself. For Blake makes his story into a picaresque. A strange one, where the rogue is turned into two violent almost anti-picaros, but a journey through the institutions and social organizations of frontier border life that fulfills the expectations of the picaresque to the fullest. Edward and Johnny pass through the hardships and perversions of frontier family life to surviving in a burgeoning city, New Orleans, that has no sense of definition, being part French, part Spanish, and part American. Just hedonistic opportunity. Pressed into outlawry and trapped into the army, the brothers find themselves on both sides of the Mexican-American war. Even taking turns changing sides, because of loyalty to "the blood." This is the border without definitions, without boundaries, without fixities of language, place, or family roots. It's chaotic and, ultimately, nihilistic. And it ends overlooking the void, without hope, without future. A grim exercise that shames McCarthy's work into insignificance.
October 24, 2013
Does it get any better than James Carlos Blake? (aside from McCarthy and McMurtry) What is it with Texas writers? (Carlos Blake is from Mexico/Texas/Florida if I'm not mistaken) A great read.
April 25, 2008
good story, interesting history (1840s), well written, but very graphic in its violence and gore.
January 20, 2019
Blake’s been on my radar for a long time but not until recently did I get around to reading this compelling historical novel, an ultraviolent tale following the adventures of two teenaged brothers across the southern US and Mexico in the 1840s and their eventual involvement in the Mexican-American war.
The first chapter, tracing the brothers’ lineage, features searing and pitiless insights into the folly and cruelty of human nature. Alas, this type of insight only rarely crops up throughout the rest of the novel, with Blake instead substituting rather unaffecting traces of a certain masculine sentimentality. In fact, characterization is not one of this novel’s strengths- the brothers are in some senses larger than life, with an unconvincing habit of winning practically every fight they get into (which is a lot); at the same time, they’re featureless and indistinguishable, with their only interesting trait being frequent dreams of the ghost of a dead father, the memorably named “Daddjack.”
By contrast, Blake’s prose is universally impressive, full of gnarled lyricism and gracefully employed archaic diction. And he renders time and place with rugged verisimilitude: from landscapes, flora and fauna, to dialect, cuisine, and local custom, to the specifics of firearms and the details of travel on horse and by foot, everything here feels absolutely authentic.
Blake’s descriptions of violence are especially potent. This is a blood-soaked novel, packed with shootings and beatings and almost every type of mutilation and torture imaginable: decapitation, branding, scalping, disembowelment, whipping, and more castrations than any novel I can remember. The brutality comes swift, sudden, and without mercy and Blake describes the carnage with visceral power; particularly memorable are a series of scenes late in the novel describing ghastly atrocities carried out against desolate desert landscapes that achieve a truly hellish intensity.
The first chapter, tracing the brothers’ lineage, features searing and pitiless insights into the folly and cruelty of human nature. Alas, this type of insight only rarely crops up throughout the rest of the novel, with Blake instead substituting rather unaffecting traces of a certain masculine sentimentality. In fact, characterization is not one of this novel’s strengths- the brothers are in some senses larger than life, with an unconvincing habit of winning practically every fight they get into (which is a lot); at the same time, they’re featureless and indistinguishable, with their only interesting trait being frequent dreams of the ghost of a dead father, the memorably named “Daddjack.”
By contrast, Blake’s prose is universally impressive, full of gnarled lyricism and gracefully employed archaic diction. And he renders time and place with rugged verisimilitude: from landscapes, flora and fauna, to dialect, cuisine, and local custom, to the specifics of firearms and the details of travel on horse and by foot, everything here feels absolutely authentic.
Blake’s descriptions of violence are especially potent. This is a blood-soaked novel, packed with shootings and beatings and almost every type of mutilation and torture imaginable: decapitation, branding, scalping, disembowelment, whipping, and more castrations than any novel I can remember. The brutality comes swift, sudden, and without mercy and Blake describes the carnage with visceral power; particularly memorable are a series of scenes late in the novel describing ghastly atrocities carried out against desolate desert landscapes that achieve a truly hellish intensity.
July 26, 2014
I feel totally inadequate to review this book adequately. First it covers the same material as Comac mcCarthy's Blood Meridian. Secondly, it is if anything more violent and bloody than McCarthy.
Some reviewers claim Blake's book is copied from McCarthy's. This I doubt, but lack the inclination to do a proper college level, in depth, analysis.
This book is really not for the faint of heart. This is not a secret so reviews that shriek their protest should be ignored. You were warned, REPEATEDLY.
The biggest difference between the two books seems to me to be the amount of philosophic rage it takes the protagonists to commit the acts of mad bloodletting. McCarthy = much. Blake = little.
I always thought that the chapter in McCarthy's book where the troop rides into Mexico and goes into a blood rage was one hell of a fine piece of writing. Blake's book has similar standout moments. One involves his band of butchers tracking, attacking and decimating a band of savage apache raiders, killing them all in a carnal spree, celebrating drunkenly their merciless victory. The next day they... Well that would be telling, but they meet a force more insane than themselves. This is true berserker territory.
I must read more of this guy, but I fear I've read his best and nothing else will compare.
Some reviewers claim Blake's book is copied from McCarthy's. This I doubt, but lack the inclination to do a proper college level, in depth, analysis.
This book is really not for the faint of heart. This is not a secret so reviews that shriek their protest should be ignored. You were warned, REPEATEDLY.
The biggest difference between the two books seems to me to be the amount of philosophic rage it takes the protagonists to commit the acts of mad bloodletting. McCarthy = much. Blake = little.
I always thought that the chapter in McCarthy's book where the troop rides into Mexico and goes into a blood rage was one hell of a fine piece of writing. Blake's book has similar standout moments. One involves his band of butchers tracking, attacking and decimating a band of savage apache raiders, killing them all in a carnal spree, celebrating drunkenly their merciless victory. The next day they... Well that would be telling, but they meet a force more insane than themselves. This is true berserker territory.
I must read more of this guy, but I fear I've read his best and nothing else will compare.
November 23, 2014
This 344 page book started off with promise. The writing style, the authentic sounding language that harkens back to late 1800s, sounds legit, not over done, and is very compelling. However, it seemed like there were 100s of incidence of extreme violence in this novel, and every one was described in great gory detail. The repeated graphic detailed descriptions of every killing, rape, pillaging, disemboweling, burning, hanging, the lopping off of body parts, the torture, blah, blah, blah became very monotonous. From about half way through the novel each massacre sounded like the last and, with the ending fairly obvious, I started to wonder if the second half of the book really offered anything. My conclusion is that it didn't offer much.
April 22, 2019
James Carlos Blake may have out Cormac McCarthyed Cormac McCarthy with this novel. Once started it was pretty near impossible to put this novel down. It also deals with a period of American history that most of us only superficially understand or know anything about--the period leading up to the Mexican-American War in 1846-1848. You know, part of the whole "manifest destiny" thing. Truly an excellent novel. Be warned though, the "violence meter" is pegged.
June 27, 2012
Spectauclar, blood-soaked epic that teels the true story of the San Patricios battalion and their part in the Mexican/American war. It's as though Sam Peckinpah had adapted a script by Cormac McCarthy.
August 7, 2013
One of my favorite authors. Makes McCarthy's "Blood Meridien" seem like Disney fare. Incredible prose, white hot tension. Loved it.
January 16, 2025
Schurkenbloed is een boek dat je aanvankelijk weet vast te grijpen met het grove geweld van het vroege Wilde Westen waardoor je, begeleid door de actie, makkelijk door de eerste honderd pagina's komt. Langzamerhand groeit de apathie in je als lezer voor al het bloed vergieten en het nodeloze moorden waar Blake je in ieder hoofdstuk mee om de oren slaat tot je rond 3/4 van het boek je begint af te vragen: "Ja maar wat is nou eigenlijk je punt?". Nou, dat laat Blake je wel weten in het laatste hoofdstuk, dat een prachtige afsluiting van een misselijkmakend boek vormt.
Het is een boek dat iedereen zou moeten lezen.
Hoe depressief je ook van het geschetste wereldbeeld mag worden.
Het is een boek dat iedereen zou moeten lezen.
Hoe depressief je ook van het geschetste wereldbeeld mag worden.
December 1, 2025
Blake submerges readers in a part of history that was tough, bloody and violent. The story follows John and Edward, two brothers forced to find a better life in the new state of Texas. But for that to happen, they have to travel from Florida to Texas and life in those years wasn't meant for the weak. Set in 1846-1848 during the Mexico-US war, the book offers an honest view of life in the boderlands during that time. A very good book by Blake and one that had me close to tears at the end.
January 28, 2023
Helaas is de vertaling niet bijster goed
December 10, 2024
The Wild West really was savage and crazy and wild and western...
Wonderful book. Next level imagery. Not for the faint of heart.
4.5 stars.
Wonderful book. Next level imagery. Not for the faint of heart.
4.5 stars.
December 10, 2025
4.0. Was ready for it to be over.
July 10, 2024
From the back cover of the paperback edition, a quote from the El Paso Herald-Post: " A savage portrait of the Western frontier that chills the blood..."
June 3, 2012
More apocalyptic Western carnage from one of the patron saints of historical blood'n'guts gruesomeness. But gory details aside, Blake is a deft weaver of visceral tales designed to astound, horrify and edify. Also, hands down has one of the best final chapters I've read in months. Think I'll try to make my way through the rest of his catalog by the end of the calendar year.
June 27, 2015
I really don't know what I really thought about this one. I like Blake but this book gave me the the willies. Could have done without all the sex but that being said it did hold my intention. I thought character development was outstanding but the book was way too long.
September 9, 2012
If you can make it through the rough parts, this is a fantastic book! I think that I'll try "The Friends of Pancho Villa" next.
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