Blood Meridian

Or the Evening Redness in the West

Ranked #3 in Western, Ranked #11 in Mexicosee more rankings.

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.

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Reviews and Recommendations

We've comprehensively compiled reviews of Blood Meridian from the world's leading experts.

Jocko Willink Founder/Echelon FrontThe other book that I've read multiple times is Blood Meridian [by Cormac McCarthy]. (Source)

Esi Edugyan A difficult read that I savour for its wondrous prose and stark vision of humanity. (Source)

Robert Macfarlane It’s wild in the astonishing indifference of the desert landscape to human practice – McCarthy evokes this more purely than any other writer. (Source)

Aleksandar Hemon It’s possibly the greatest American novel of the past 25 years. (Source)

Bryan Callen So here are my three must read books. I've been reading a lot of great books like: Outsmart Your Instincts, The Culture Code, and Antonio Damasio’s The Strange Order, and sometimes when you read a lot of nonfiction it’s very enriching, sometimes you need a novel. I really believe you should take a minute and read something beautiful. Listen, listen to Lolita by Nabokov. But also listen to Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy and listen to Richard Poe narrate that. Those are two of the greatest feats of the english language that I can think of. Then there’s Fortress of Solitude, an amazing book,... (Source)

Stacey Peebles It is his opus, his great work. Blood Meridian is really the masterpiece, it’s just such a rich mixture of history and metaphysics. (Source)


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