Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West - Picador Collection
Cormac McCarthy

Reprint

Paperback (17 Feb 2022)


Publishers Synopsis

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 McCarthys reputation as one of the twentieth centurys 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 - The Times

Through 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 - Guardian

Praise 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 - 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 Mountain

Part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature.


Book information

ISBN: 9781529077162
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Imprint: Picador
Pub date: 17 Feb 2022
Edition: Reprint
DEWEY: 813.54
DEWEY edition: 23
Language: English
Sales rank: 99
Number of pages: xiv, 352
Weight: 270g
Height: 130mm
Width: 196mm
Spine width: 31mm