Summary
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.
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Media Reviews
"A classic American novel of regeneration through violence...this is [McCarthy's] masterpiece." -- Michael Herr
"A Western that evokes the styles of both Sam Peckinpah and Hieronymus Bosch...McCarthy employs a neo-Biblical rhetoric, a soaring, pulsing...always stirring diction without parallel in American writing today." -- Alan Cheuse
-- USA Today
"The book reads like a conflation of 'The Inferno,' the 'Iliad,' and 'Moby Dick'...an extraordinary, breathtaking achievement." -- John Banville
-- Independent (London)
Bibliographic Details
Publisher: Random House Inc
Published date: 1985
Publisher's Notes
Based on incidents that took place in the southwestern United States and Mexico around 1850, this novel chronicles the crimes of a band of desperados, with a particular focus on one, "the kid," a boy of fourteen.
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