Blood Meridian (Picador Classic Book 32)
£5.70
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.
‘[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.
‘In Blood Meridian, McCarthy reaches the peak of his style: spare and ornate at once, repetitious but endlessly readable’ – Guardian
Praise for Cormac McCarthy:
‘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
‘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
‘[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.
Read more
Additional information
| Publisher | Picador, Reprints edition (13 Aug. 2015) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| File size | 2463 KB |
| Text-to-Speech | Enabled |
| Enhanced typesetting | Enabled |
| X-Ray | Not Enabled |
| Word Wise | Enabled |
| Sticky notes | On Kindle Scribe |
| Print length | 372 pages |
by Peter McBride
The Judge, he is a great Favourite.
He does not sleep, some say that he will Never die.
Each man has a Destiny, that is dark and nameless.
The Kid becomes the Man and the Judge will forever facilitate each Man on his Ullysean fugue to his destiny.
We are the Kid
We are that Man
The Judge is the Dancer.
The Dancer that never sleeps.
by Ian
My first Cormac McCarthy book, although I’ve seen the films. The language and precision of the prose is wonderful, the story bizarre and hallucinogenic, the ending strange and mysterious. Undoubtedly the best book I’ve read in 2023
by Randal
The 19th century Mexican-American border area is the main character here in this vicious and pitiless rendering of a skulp-hunt of the Apache by a band of grotesques. These focus on the psychopathic ‘Judge,’ a hairless giant who holds the band in thrall with his monologic philosophising and uncanny capacity for survival, and on the Kid, a brutalised illiterate fourteen year-old who is more narrative pretext than protagonist. The problem is that character reductions to mono dimensional creatures crawling over this astonishingly well rendered landscape loses the draw of the human interest that normally keeps a reader going.
by Amazon Customer
Can’t really say I’ve read anything like this before. The writing style reminded me a bit of Moby Dick although I didn’t enjoy that as much as this.
I had no idea beforehand that Blood Meridian had a reputation for being a difficult novel to read and had I been aware of that in advance I may not have attempted it but actually I didn’t find it hard to follow or understand.
It is the kind of book that you need to concentrate on though and the language is very rich. There were some sections I had to read a couple of times and I also reached for the dictionary more than usual although I think that’s part of the fun and point of reading anyway.
Also I used on-line chapter analysis after each chapter to check how much of what I’d read I was taking in (I do this quite often when I read fiction) and I’d say 90% of the time I was on board with and able to follow what was going on.
It’s hard to describe what makes this novel so memorable. It feels like a western and it for me it played out like a movie in my head, although I’m not sure that turning it in to a film would necessarily do it justice.
The story in itself is quite straight forward, it’s McCarthy’s descriptions and similie’s and poetic flow that make the book stand out so vividly. It’s also a relentlessly violent story so although a notable work it may not be for everyone.
As someone who has always been a sporadic reader of fiction, I’m currently trying to do some catching up for lost time and as a result never feel like I have enough time to read a book twice but I think I would read this again.
If you like violent Westerns rich in poetic symbolism then you’ve probably read this way before I did but if by any chance you haven’t then do !
by KRO
Brilliant. I would definitely read this again. McCarthy writes like a dark dream.
by DTJ
Sparse and direct, this is an expertly crafted yet chillingly brutal account of the 1840s west. Drawing on historical characters and events, the events unfold against a permanent backdrop of violence and horror with only hints of any form of organisation or law and barely a sympathetic protagonist in sight. A masterful creation.
by J. Stevenson
I had recently been reading about the ‘Indian Wars’ so I decided to give this a try as I had loved his novel ‘The Road’. It’s a great story but I had some difficulty deciphering so many American colloquial words and phrases…hence the 4 stars.
by Ben
One of the best books by one of the best American authors. A phenomenal piece of literature that sticks with you long after you put it down.
It may be a slightly difficult read in some places, but it is worth every minute you spend reading it.