Blood Meridian
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.
Stats for nerds
105recommend
260mentions
192people
2007–2026years
54% recommend40% neutral5% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I felt the same way. It started slow and I nearly quit, but something beneath the surface kept me reading. After 50 pages or so, I was hooked. It's an amazing book. The only other book that pulled me in that deeply in a couple of last years was Blood Meridian.
- I'm not sure I'd call it grim, per se. Blood Meridian takes that label for me, almost at the exclusion of all else in what could loosely be called the "western" genre. Lonesome Dove is more just very... gritty. And packs a serious emotional heft. Great book either way.
- Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian especially. His style won't be to everyone's tastes, but you certainly can't describe it as bland.
- Wait til you read Blood Meridian. The imagery he created with words, some of them his own creations, is just ... beyond compare. I'm reading The Road now, which comes from the same place. I can only read either in small doses. It's very intense, and the passages deserve to be read carefully.
Another contemporary writer who worked with new words in a very creative way was Gene Wolfe in The Book of the New Sun. Some were inventions using Greek, French, or Latin roots. Others were forgotten terms which he resurrected. Someone compiled a dictionary, Lexicon Urthus, which discusses the origins of certain terms and their placement within the series.
- > My McCarthy readlist is structured so: Suttree (current); Blood Meridian; The Road — is this advisable?
If you've read Suttree you could do either one next.
If you were coming new to McCarthy, I would start with Blood Meridian, as there's nothing else like it (The Road invites comparisons with other post-Apocalyptic fiction).
- You should read Blood Meridian.
