Blood Meridian

By (author) McCarthy, Cormac
Short description/annotation:
A chaotically violent and hauntingly beautiful novel from one of the greatest American novelists, the late Pulitzer Prize-winning Cormac McCarthy.
Description:

Brutally violent, Blood Meridian is the story of one teenage runaway in the nineteenth-century American South, as a sadistic gang unleashes its massacre across the desert border land.

It is the work that sealed Cormac McCarthy''s reputation as one of the twentieth century''s greatest writers – his magnum opus.

‘Imagine if the authors of the King James Bible, their hands guided by Satan, wrote a western’ – The Times

Through the hostile landscape of the Texas–Mexico border wanders the Kid, a fourteen year-old Tennessean who is quickly swept up in the relentless tide of blood.

A group known as the Glanton gang hunt Indigenous Americans, collecting scalps as their bloody trophies. At the centre of this violence stands Judge Holden: a massive, hairless man, mysterious if not supernatural, erudite and cold-blooded. He is singularly extreme in his sadistic violence.

But the apparent chaos is not without order – the Glanton gang, too, are stalked as prey.

Read as both a brilliant subversion of the Western novel and a blazing example of that form, it is a powerful, mesmerizing and savagely beautiful novel – and one of the most important works in American fiction of the last century.

‘In Blood Meridian, McCarthy reaches the peak of his style: spare and ornate at once, repetitious but endlessly readable’ – Guardian

Praise for Cormac McCarthy:

''His prose takes on an almost biblical quality, hallucinatory in its effect and evangelical in its power'' – Stephen King, author of The Shining and the Dark Tower series

‘McCarthy worked close to some religious impulse, his books were terrifying and absolute’ – Anne Enright, author of The Green Road and The Wren, The Wren

''[I]n presenting the darker human impulses in his rich prose, [McCarthy] showed readers the necessity of facing up to existence'' – Annie Proulx, author of Brokeback Mountain

Part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature.

Review quote:
Blood Meridian is his masterpiece . . . An astonishing sanguinary epic dealing with the Indian wars of the 1840s in West Texas and Mexico . . . Unlike anything I have ever read in recent years, an extraordinary, breathtaking achievement
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A bloody and starkly beautiful tale
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Possibly the greatest American novel of the past 25 years
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I have rarely encountered anything as powerful, as unsettling, or as memorable as Blood Meridian . . . A nightmare odyssey
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The Judge is the book, and the Judge is, short of Moby Dick, the most monstrous apparition in all of American literature
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McCarthy distances us not only from the historical past, not only from our cowboy-and-Indian images of it, but also revisionist theories that make white men the villains and Indians the victims. All men are unremittingly bloodthirsty here, poised at a peak of violence, the "meridian" from which their civilization will quickly fall
Review quote:
In Blood Meridian, McCarthy reaches the peak of his style: spare and ornate at once, repetitious but endlessly readable
Review quote:
Blood Meridian, published in 1985, is a brilliant, uncompromising work of fiction – imagine if the authors of the King James Bible, their hands guided Satan, wrote a western
Biographical note:
Cormac McCarthy was the author of many acclaimed novels, including