“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.”
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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.
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