An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west." Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.
- Graphic violence
- Body horror
- Bleak ending
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Character
Bleak, grave, overwhelming and epic.
- warmbleak
- gravecomic
- cooloverwhelming
- intimateepic
- earnestironic
Who loves it, who doesn't
10 profiled raters. Loved most by The Empaths; disliked most by The Comfort Seekers.
Where do you stand?
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“Is this Cormac McCarthy's best work?”
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“Would Blood Meridian hit harder if it came out today rather than in 1985?”
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“Is it the best fiction book of its decade?”
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A yes-or-no question, answered from what people wrote here, on TMDB and on Wikipedia. Never made up.
Reviews
We read them all: the case for is ruthless_ruth's, funniest is viktor_v's. Marked below.
- viktor_vFunniestThe Provocateur★★★½
The scalp-hunters ride and the judge dances and there is no moral and that is the moral. The most beautiful prose ever wrapped around the worst things.
- ruthless_ruthThe case forThe Provocateur★★★★
The judge is the most frightening character in American fiction and he is barely a character; he is weather. I read it in a week and slept badly for two.
About the book
- Author
- Cormac McCarthy
- First published
- 1985
- Pages
- 353
- Publisher
- Plaza y Janes, Random House, Picador
- Editions
- 37
- Language
- cat, Polish, English, German
- ISBN
- 9780330544580
Where to read
Libraries first: a card gets you most books for nothing. Each opens that service’s page for this title.
On Open Library, 44 have read it and 994 want to.
“Thirty years ago, if you’d asked someone to name the most important writers in America, Cormac McCarthy would not have been one of them.”
Cormac McCarthy (born Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr.) is an American writer who has written twelve novels, two plays, five screenplays, and three short stories, spanning the Western and postapocalyptic genres. He is known for his graphic depictions of violence and his unique writing style, recognizable by a sparse use of punctuation and attribution. McCarthy is widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary American writers.
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