Blood Meridian, Or, The Evening Redness in the West

Cormac McCarthy's BLOOD MERIDIAN is an epic nightmare of a novel. Set in the 1850s on the Tex-Mex border, it is about a 14-year-old runaway--known only as "the kid"--who comes of age in a brutal culture. Joining up with a gang of Indian-killers, the kid learns to kill Apaches for bounty. Barely escaping with his life from a group bent on revenge, he takes up with a larger-than-life figure called Judge Holden, a truly vicious man who represents all that is evil in humanity. In the end, it's the kid vs. the judge: only one will survive. The kid's journey through a landscape fraught with violence and horror is a kind of satire of the traditional literary epic quest, and an allegory of the transformation of the American west as it became increasingly despoiled by blood, greed, and its own fake heroic grandeur. Considered by many to be McCarthy's masterpiece, BLOOD MERIDIAN reads like an American parable of Biblical proportions, a dire warning for the fate of man.