Product Description

Blood Meridian is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. 'McCarthy's achievement is to establish a new mythology which is as potent and vivid as that of the movies, yet one which has absolutely the opposite effect...He is a great writer" - "Independent". "I have rarely encountered anything as powerful, as unsettling, or as memorable as "Blood Meridian"...A nightmare odyssey" - "Evening Standard". "His masterpiece...The book reads like a conflation of the "Inferno", "The Iliad" and "Moby Dick". I can only declare that "Blood Meridian" is unlike anything I have read in recent years, and seems to me an extraordinary, breathtaking achievement" - John Banville.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1422 in Books
• Published on: 1994-01-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Review
Virtually all of McCarthy's idiosyncratic fiction (The Orchard Keeper, Child-of God, Suttree) is suffused with fierce pessimism, relentlessly illustrating the feral destiny of mankind; and this new novel is no exception - though it is equally committed to a large allegorical structure, one that yanks its larger-than-life figures across a sere historical stage. "The kid" - a Tennessee teenager - wanders aimlessly into the Texas Indian wars of the 1850s. First he's taken on by a wandering troop of ex-American soldiers, planning its own raid into Mexico. Then, after thoroughgoing slaughter of the troops by the Indians, the kid survives to be recruited as a scalp-hunter in a band of Mexican-financed marauders - led by a madman named Glanton, along with his associate: The Judge, a hairless God-or-devil figure who is capable of great ingenuity (when the men run out of gunpowder, The Judge alchemizes a new batch) but who also indulges in eccentric sermons to explain his bloodthirsty brand of philosophy. ("If God meant to intrude in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now?. . . The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his days.") McCarthy, even more than in previous novels, strains for prophetic, Bible-like tones here - with a cast of allegorical types (a judge, a fool, an ex-priest, the kid) and an archaic vocabulary that lurches from "kerfs" and "bedight" to "rimpled" and "thrapple." But, though there's something stubbornly impressive about McCarthy's unwavering gloom, the novel's unceasing slaughter sometimes suggests a spaghetti-western without a hero, all gore and blazing sun - while its stentorian, pretentious prose will quickly dissuade most readers from attempting to share McCarthy's dark vision. ("He'd long forsworn all weighing of consequence and allowing as he did that men's destinies are given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so and," etc.). Grandiose, feverish, opaque. (Kirkus Reviews)

Synopsis
Blood Meridian is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. 'McCarthy's achievement is to establish a new mythology which is as potent and vivid as that of the movies, yet one which has absolutely the opposite effect...He is a great writer" - "Independent". "I have rarely encountered anything as powerful, as unsettling, or as memorable as "Blood Meridian"...A nightmare odyssey" - "Evening Standard". "His masterpiece...The book reads like a conflation of the "Inferno", "The Iliad" and "Moby Dick". I can only declare that "Blood Meridian" is unlike anything I have read in recent years, and seems to me an extraordinary, breathtaking achievement" - John Banville.

About the Author
Cormac McCarthy is the author of ten acclaimed novels, most recently The Road. Among his honours are the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.