num_pages: 337
description: Blood Meridian is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting 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 a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. 'McCarthy's achievement is to establish a new mythology which is as potent and vivid as that of the movies, yet one which has absolutely the opposite effect...He is a great writer" - "Independent". "I have rarely encountered anything as powerful, as unsettling, or as memorable as "Blood Meridian"...A nightmare odyssey" - "Evening Standard". "His masterpiece...The book reads like a conflation of the "Inferno", "The Iliad" and "Moby Dick". I can only declare that "Blood Meridian" is unlike anything I have read in recent years, and seems to me an extraordinary, breathtaking achievement" - John Banville.
language: English
title: Blood Meridian, Or, the Evening Redness in the West
titlecomplete: Blood Meridian, Or, the Evening Redness in the West
characters: Judge Holden, Benjamin Tobin, John Jackson, John Joel Glanton, Louis Toadvine, David Brown, The kid
genres: Literary Fiction, Fiction, Classics, Historical, American, Historical Fiction, Horror, Literature, Westerns, Novels
ratings_count: 150142
places: Mexico, The United States of America, Texas
publisher: Ecco Press