Blood Meridian

Oft-touted as a contender for the title of Great American Novel, McCarthy's violent, unflinching and majestic Western centres on the bloody coming-of-age of a fourteen-year-old Tennessee boy amidst the savagery of the Texas-Mexico border.

The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell aint half full.

Set in the anarchic world opened up by America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy is an epic and potent account of the barbarous violence that man visits upon man. 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.

But the apparent chaos is not without its order: while Americans hunt Indians - collecting scalps as their bloody trophies - they too are stalked as prey.

Since its first publication in 1985, Blood Meridian has been read as both a brilliant subversion of the Western novel and a blazing example of that form. Powerful, mesmerizing and savagely beautiful, it is established as one of the most important works in American fiction of the last century.

MEDIA REVIEWS

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