Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (Modern Library) [Hardcover]

Cormac McCarthy (Author), Harold Bloom (Introduction)

Book Description

Release date: January 2, 2001 | Series: Modern Library

"The fulfilled renown of Moby-Dick and of As I Lay Dying is augmented by Blood Meridian, since Cormac McCarthy is the worthy disciple both of Melville and Faulkner," writes esteemed literary scholar Harold Bloom in his Introduction to the Modern Library edition. "I venture that no other living American novelist, not even Pynchon, has given us a book as strong and memorable."

Cormac McCarthy's masterwork, Blood Meridian, chronicles the brutal world of the Texas-Mexico borderlands in the mid-nineteenth century. Its wounded hero, the teenage Kid, must confront the extraordinary violence of the Glanton gang, a murderous cadre on an official mission to scalp Indians and sell those scalps. Loosely based on fact, the novel represents a genius vision of the historical West, one so fiercely realized that since its initial publication in 1985 the canon of American literature has welcomed Blood Meridian to its shelf.

"A classic American novel of regeneration through violence," declares Michael Herr. "McCarthy can only be compared to our greatest writers."

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"The men as they rode turned black in the sun from the blood on their clothes and their faces and then paled slowly in the rising dust until they assumed once more the color of the land through which they passed." If what we call "horror" can be seen as including any literature that has dark, horrific subject matter, then Blood Meridian is, in this reviewer's estimation, the best horror novel ever written. It's a perverse, picaresque Western about bounty hunters for Indian scalps near the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s--a ragged caravan of indiscriminate killers led by an unforgettable human monster called "The Judge." Imagine the imagery of Sam Peckinpah and Heironymus Bosch as written by William Faulkner, and you'll have just an inkling of this novel's power. From the opening scenes about a 14-year-old Tennessee boy who joins the band of hunters to the extraordinary, mythic ending, this is an American classic about extreme violence. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Review

"McCarthy is a writer to be read, to be admired, and quite honestly—envied."
—Ralph Ellison

"McCarthy is a born narrator, and his writing has, line by line, the stab of actuality. He is here to stay."
—Robert Penn Warren

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Modern Library; First Edition edition (January 2, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679641041
• ISBN-13: 978-0679641049
• Product Dimensions: 4.6 x 1 x 7.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (598 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #40,904 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island. He later went to Chicago, where he worked as an auto mechanic while writing his first novel, The Orchard Keeper. The Orchard Keeper was published by Random House in 1965; McCarthy's editor there was Albert Erskine, William Faulkner's long-time editor. Before publication, McCarthy received a traveling fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which he used to travel to Ireland. In 1966 he also received the Rockefeller Foundation Grant, with which he continued to tour Europe, settling on the island of Ibiza. Here, McCarthy completed revisions of his next novel, Outer Dark. In 1967, McCarthy returned to the United States, moving to Tennessee. Outer Dark was published by Random House in 1968, and McCarthy received the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing in 1969. His next novel, Child of God, was published in 1973. From 1974 to 1975, McCarthy worked on the screenplay for a PBS film called The Gardener's Son, which premiered in 1977. A revised version of the screenplay was later published by Ecco Press. In the late 1970s, McCarthy moved to Texas, and in 1979 published his fourth novel, Suttree, a book that had occupied his writing life on and off for twenty years. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, and published his fifth novel, Blood Meridian, in 1985. All the Pretty Horses, the first volume of The Border Trilogy, was published by Knopf in 1992. It won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was later turned into a feature film. The Stonemason, a play that McCarthy had written in the mid-1970s and subsequently revised, was published by Ecco Press in 1994. Soon thereafter, Knopf released the second volume of The Border Trilogy, The Crossing; the third volume, Cities of the Plain, was published in 1998.McCarthy's next novel, No Country for Old Men was published in 2005. This was followed in 2006 by a novel in dramatic form, The Sunset Limited, originally performed by Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago and published in paperback by Vintage Books. McCarthy's most recent novel, The Road, was published in 2006 and won the Pulitzer Prize.

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#37 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary

#66 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

252 of 271 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars McCarthy's masterpiece October 27, 2004

By Peter Kettle

Format:Paperback

Blood Meridian

by Cormac McCarthy

Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy, is the most overwhelming novel I've read for years. I came late to it in two senses. It's almost 20 years since it was published in 1985, and it is late in my own reading life, because I'm 63. I read it on holiday. Not a comfortable choice, and certainly not the best thing to relax with on a sunlounger, while supping a drink with a hat on. But Blood Meridian is, at the risk of sounding pretentious, on a par with Faulkner's 'As I Lay Dying' or Beckett's 'Waiting For Godot' or even that most astounding work of all, 'King Lear'. High claims, but give it a try.

You might well have to try it more than once, because it is very strong, and at times even rancid, meat. But a lot of people, after they've closed the book, might find they can't read another novel for a while.

I finished the book, and picked up another. But the pages were slipping by and all my head could think on was Blood Meridian. So I did something I very rarely do. I put the other novel down and turned back to Blood Meridian, and read it again. It's a hell of a book. And I'm not speaking particularly metaphorically. It tells us more about the human condition than most other respectable works we laud so much. Blood Meridian is original, disturbing, heretical, challenging, difficult, and awe inspiring. Just like King Lear.

Here endeth my rant.

237 of 258 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Sanctity of Blood April 12, 2002

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

I've read all of Cormac McCarthy's earlier books set in Tennessee, such as "The Orchard Keeper" and "The Outer Dark" and I've read his "Border Trilogy" which contained the wonderful, "All the Pretty Horses." Nothing, however, that this wonderful author has written can prepare the reader for the sheer brutality and the sheer lyricism of "Blood Meridian."

The Old West portrayed in "Blood Meridian" is not the Old West of Zane Grey or even of Larry McMurtry. Images of the most horrific abound in "Blood Meridian," (charred human bones, blood-soaked scalps, a tree hung with the bodies of dead infants), all rendered in McCarthy's gorgeously lyrical writing.

As far as I'm concerned, "Blood Meridian" is McCarthy's best book, by far. It doesn't have the "feel good" qualities sometimes found in "All the Pretty Horses" but I didn't expect it to. "Blood Meridian" is the book in which McCarthy makes crystal clear the one theme that runs through all of his writing: the undeniable presence of evil in the world. The fact that he writes about this evil in language so lyrical and so elaborately beautiful only intensifies the horror of it all. We feel as though we have left the real world behind and entered into some surreal place from which no escape is possible.

"Blood Meridian," which takes place in 1847, is loosely based on actual events and is the story of a fourteen boy, known only as "the Kid." Drifting through the American Southwest, the Kid joins a disparate and bloodthirsty band of Indian-hunters-for-hire led by a mysterious and learned man called, Judge Holden.

It is after the Kid joins Judge Holden and his band that McCarthy really hits his stride. Juxtaposed next to descriptions of the most horrific and grotesque are images of the most sublime beauty.... Consider this description of a group of Indians, "...wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery...one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a blood stained weddingveil." That's prose most authors would kill for.

McCarthy, unlike most writers who portray horror, concentrates not on the horrific images themselves, but on his characters' reactions to them. I'm not at all surprised at this, for McCarthy is not a horror writer; he is a writer of literature of the very highest order.

Although many people would have expected McCarthy to keep his emphasis on the Kid, he chooses to concentrate on the character of Judge Holden instead. Anyone who has read this book knows it was a good choice for the Judge is the dominant personality in "Blood Meridian" and all the other characters in this book are defined only in relation to the Judge. It is also the Judge who exemplifies McCarthy's major themes and it is he (the Judge) who becomes a metaphorical and spiritual father to all of McCarthy's later characters.

This is not a typical "Western novel," not even a very, very good "Western novel." In this book, the line between the victims the perpetrators of evil is subtlely drawn...if it is drawn at all. McCarthy seems to be telling us that all men are villains, all men are perpetrators, all men are bloodthirsty...if only the reward is high enough. And for some, evil, itself is its own reward.

I am giving nothing away by saying that the ending of this book is a sophisticated and stylistic masterpiece involving both the Judge and the Kid. The last image we have of the Judge is one that epitomizes the sheer lunacy of the man. In a saloon where a trained bear dances on the stage, we see the Judge, "...naked, dancing...He says that he will never die." In a beautiful and enigmatic epilogue, however, McCarthy skillfully denies the Judge the last word in the novel.

This is a sophisticated and complex book, far more complex that it would appear on the surface or even after one reading. It is filled with the Faulknerian prose that has become a McCarthy trademark (though McCarthy employed it less in "The Border Trilogy"). These convoluted sentences, (in my opinion, far better than anything Faulkner ever wrote), can be difficult, since they contain within them the seed of all of McCarthy's writing.

This brilliant novel is more than just a book; it is an experience. It is an experience of horror, of beauty, of the insanity of man. Set in a time when man attempted to sanctify himself in the blood of other men, this is, without a doubt the rawest exposition of horror I have ever read, yet, at the same time, it is probably the most beautiful book I have ever read as well. It is something that simply defies description. Read it for yourself and see. Read more ›

203 of 226 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An American Classic November 20, 2001

By Bruddy Dahl VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

I recently saw Harold Bloom, the famous literary scholar from Yale, on a television show where he stated that Blood Meridian was the greatest work of any contemporary American author. I agree. First, you have the prose style, which is so controlled and crafted and at the same time flows so naturally that it must have taken years to develop. It reminded me of the bible: hypnotic, enigmatic, ancient and at the same time, familiar. I kept thinking of the ocean when I was reading it because of the vastness of the landscape he describes. It seems as if the characters are on a journey, but they're not, unless they're circling further and further down into hell.

I think the familiarity of the novel comes from it's relation to violence from a Christian standpoint. There's no doubt that McCarthy intends to have us react to this book from a moral perspective and yet at the same time be fascinated with it's violence. The setting, the wild wicked west, is a part of the American psyche that still takes forms today in our action films and tv shows that feed our hunger for blood and murder. By taking us back to our roots, stripping away the restraints of our Judeo-Christian values, MCCarthy steeps the story of death and evil in biblical prose and washes it with blood so that we see our dark selves reflected in all our ugliness.

I compare this work to the works of the great Russian novelists ,Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who always went for the big questions, What is life?, Who is God?, What is morality? and the American Moby Dick which encapsulated a universe. When you read books like these a lot of what appears on the bestseller lists seems so meaningless.

This is a book you simply stand in awe of if you're a writer or ever thought of being one.

43 of 45 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Hard work that more than rewards the effort October 17, 2005

By Jacob G Corbin

Format:Paperback

his was one of those things where I'd heard about the book, in bits and pieces, for years: namechecked by William Gibson in Virtual Light and by Garth Ennis in Preacher, yapped about by online friends, and requested every so often by customers at the bookstore where I once worked. You know how this kind of thing goes: after a while, all these name-droppings have a cumulative impact, flipping a little switch in your brain one day and sending you off in search of the item in question. So that's how I came to Blood Meridian - knowing the book by its notorious reputation alone and little else. Having finally finished it, I can say that its notoriety is richly deserved, but that's hardly the whole story.

The premise could be described for the ADD among you as Huckleberry Finn meets Natural Born Killers, which hardly sounds flattering, I'm sure, but bear with me. The story opens on the peregrinations of the Kid, a vicious, knife-fighting fourteen-year-old runaway from Tennessee who in 1848 drifts down the Mississippi first to New Orleans and thence to Texas, where he falls in with a rogue Army unit making a piratical raid into Mexico. After Apaches wipe out the unit in the Sonora desert, the Kid lands in a Mexican jail, where he meets and is recruited by a group of bounty hunters retained by the government to collect Indian scalps as retaliation for a string of Apache massacres in remote border villages.

Here is where the story really begins.... The Kid is absorbed into the gang, a collection of opportunists, outlaws, drifters and psychopaths presided over by two domineering personalities: the nominal leader of the group, Ike Glanton, a mercenary ex-soldier with a nasty temper and a deep vein of sadism, and Glanton's advisor, the fat, hairless, urbane, and utterly mercurial Judge Holden. The gang finds an Indian tribe - not the marauders but a peaceful fishing village - and slaughters it utterly. But unable to catch the ever-elusive Apaches, the company elects to pursue easier prey; namely, the defenseless villages and mining camps littering the arid wastes of the Southwest. As their bounty hunt turns into a genocidal murder spree, the gang, and even Glanton, forget their simple mercenary aspirations and become increasingly captivated by the magnetism of the Judge, who tells them they are agents of a pitiless natural law, high priests sacrificing the undeserving to a blood-soaked pagan god.

The Kid, his ego subsumed by the group organism, essentially disappears from the book as Glanton and the Judge assume center stage. Occasional chapters deal with other members of the gang - an apostate priest, a runaway slave - but their individuality is eventually consumed too. The narrative becomes increasingly distant and godlike - rather than seeing their surroundings through the eyes of the gang, we see the gang from the point of view of, for instance, the wind passsing through their camp. They go beyond a place where most readers could follow, so like elusive elementary particles, we have to look for understanding in the marks left by their passage.

The book is a fantasia of luridly-described, Hammer-horror violence set against a landscape whose harsh geography is, like the wildernesses of the Bible or the open seas of Melvile, spiritual in nature as well as temporal, a place where men come to commune with higher or lower powers. In fact, as a quick glance at Amazon shows, it's nigh-on impossible to review this book without invoking Melville or the Bible. McCarthy's prose seems to have rumbled out of the hollow places of the earth itself; even his descriptions of innocuities like tumbleweeds and roadrunners can sound like passages from "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God."

Let me be clear: this book is not a "revisionist western." It is not an apologia. McCarthy is not tut-tutting and bewailing the fate of the proud, noble Indian; in point of fact, many of the Indians in this book are as messed-up and psychopathic as the whites. His vision is bigger than that. He's talking about the nature of violence - the little stain of destructive insanity in all of us that is not adequately explained by genetics or psychology or class theory. Original sin, if you like. The problem, as McCarthy sees it, is not that white people are bad. It is not even that civilization is bad - the natives, as McCarthy reminds us, had a civilization too. The problem is that people have evil inside of them at a fundamental level, and when they're cut loose from their moorings and isolated in an unforgiving environment, that mindless, all-consuming blackness is free to bubble up to the surface.

So yeah. The book is as dense and heavy-duty as it sounds - indeed, even at a slim 350 pages it's tough going. I had to take a couple of long breaks to cleanse my literary palate with lighter fare. But even so, I predict I will be coming back to Blood Meridian often in the future - like a pile of bloodsoaked treasure, there are ample rewards here for people willing to get their hands dirty, and like murder, it can only get easier with practice. Read more ›