Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

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 ?_" his magnum opus. ?_~[A] brilliant, uncompromising work of fiction ?_" imagine if the authors of the King James Bible, their hands guided by Satan, wrote a western?_T ?_" The TimesThrough 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?_T ?_" GuardianPraise for Cormac McCarthy:'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?_~McCarthy worked close to some religious impulse, his books were terrifying and absolute?_T ?_" Anne Enright, author of The Green Road and The Wren, The Wren'[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 MountainPart of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature.
Binding: Paperback / softback