Blood Meridian

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

‘[A] brilliant, uncompromising work of fiction – 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.

Review

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 -- John Banville, author of The Sea

A bloody and starkly beautiful tale -- Stephen Amidon ― Sunday Times

Possibly the greatest American novel of the past 25 years -- Aleksandar Hemon, author of The World and All That It Holds and The Lazarus Project

I have rarely encountered anything as powerful, as unsettling, or as memorable as Blood Meridian . . . A nightmare odyssey ― Evening Standard

The Judge is the book, and the Judge is, short of Moby Dick, the most monstrous apparition in all of American literature -- Harlold Bloom, on the character of Judge Holden in Blood Meridian

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 ― New York Times Book Review

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

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 ― The Times

About the Author

Cormac McCarthy was the author of many acclaimed novels, including Blood Meridian, Child of God and The Passenger. Among his honours are the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His works adapted to film include All the Pretty Horses, The Road and No Country for Old Men – the latter film receiving four Academy Awards, including the award for Best Picture. McCarthy died in 2023 in Santa Fe, NM at the age of 89.