Blood Meridian
Set along the brutal Texas-Mexico border of the nineteenth century, Blood Meridian follows a nameless teenage runaway drawn into the orbit of the Glanton gang, a company of men whose capacity for violence seems to know no practical limit. It's a Western, yes, but not one that offers the genre's usual comforts. McCarthy strips the frontier of its romanticism and leaves something far stranger in its place. The result is a novel that's genuinely difficult to shake off. Dominating the story is Judge Holden, a figure of immense physical and intellectual presence whose philosophies on war and human nature lend the book an almost mythological weight. He's one of the most unsettling characters in American fiction. The prose itself is an unusual creature: spare in its sentence-level construction yet grand in its cumulative effect, repetitive in rhythm but somehow compulsively readable. Stephen King has described it as carrying 'an almost biblical quality, hallucinatory in its effect', and that rings true. Anne Enright notes that McCarthy 'worked close to some religious impulse', while Annie Proulx credits him with showing readers 'the necessity of facing up to existence'. The Times, memorably, suggested the King James Bible authors, with Satan guiding their hands, might have produced something like this. Blood Meridian sits in the Picador Collection alongside other works of genuine literary weight, and it earns its place there. Demanding, visionary, and not easily forgotten.
- Author: Cormac McCarthy
- Publisher: Picador
- Genre: Historical Fiction
- ISBN: 978-1529077162
- Pages: 384 pages