“A nameless teenager joins a band of Indian-hunters along the Texas-Mexico border in 1849, in the most violent American novel of the late twentieth century.”
What's in this book
- Cormac McCarthy's 1985 Western - the Glanton Gang and the Judge across the Texas-Mexico border
- Canonical contemporary American novel and McCarthy's structural masterwork
- 352 pages of biblical-prose register applied to nineteenth-century scalp-hunting
- The kid, the Judge Holden, and the closing scene have been the subject of forty years of scholarship
- Richard Poe audiobook is the definitive audio production
- For readers of No Country for Old Men, The Road, and contemporary American literary fiction
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Blood Meridian is Cormac McCarthy's 1985 novel, the Glanton Gang Western that remains the most violent major American novel of the late twentieth century and one of McCarthy's two unquestioned masterpieces (alongside Suttree). The unnamed teenage protagonist (called only the Kid) joins Captain John Joel Glanton's band of historical scalp-hunters along the Texas-Mexico border in 1849-1850. The Glanton Gang was a real historical band of mercenaries hired by Mexican states to hunt Apache scalps; the novel draws heavily on Samuel Chamberlain's memoir My Confession.
What makes Blood Meridian the literary event it is is the prose. McCarthy is writing in his most patient and most ornate register here, with sentences that echo the King James Bible and Faulkner without resembling either. Judge Holden, the seven-foot-tall albino philosopher of war who rides with Glanton, is one of the most carefully constructed antagonists in American literature: a character whose moral and metaphysical arguments the novel takes seriously rather than dismissing. The desert geography is rendered with the kind of attention to ecological specifics most Westerns skip. The violence is rendered with the kind of attention to physical and moral specifics that no Western had done before.
Recommended as canonical American literary fiction reading, as McCarthy's most ambitious novel, and as the source for one of the most-discussed potential film adaptations in contemporary cinema. The 30-hour audiobook narrated by Richard Poe is excellent if you can handle the prose density at audio pace. Five stars without reservation. This is not a beach book.
Related reads
If you liked Blood Meridian
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
The Road by Cormac McCarthy 2006 review. A father and son walk south across a burned-out post-apocalyptic America toward an uncertain coast. Pulitzer Prize 2007 and one of the great American novels of the twenty-first century.
No Country for Old Men
by Cormac McCarthy
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy 2005 review. A Texas welder finds a satchel of cash at a drug-deal massacre, and the man who comes for it does not stop. Late McCarthy in his cleanest thriller mode.
Suttree
by Cormac McCarthy
Suttree by Cormac McCarthy 1979 review. An educated Knoxville man lives as a fisherman among the city's underclass. McCarthy's pre-Blood-Meridian comic-tragic masterwork.
The Passenger
by Cormac McCarthy
The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy 2022 review. A New Orleans salvage diver investigates a submerged private-jet wreckage. The first of McCarthy's two final novels.
Cold Mountain
by Charles Frazier
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier 1997 review. A wounded Confederate deserter walks across the Civil-War-era Carolinas to return home. National Book Award 1997 and the basis for the 2003 Minghella film.
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
by James McBride
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride 2023 review. A 1972 skeleton found at the bottom of a Pottstown, Pennsylvania well sends the novel back to a 1930s neighborhood where Black, Jewish, and immigrant families lived alongside each other. The most important American novel of 2023.
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