Blood Meridian

Published in 1985, Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West is Cormac McCarthy’s monumental vision of the American frontier. Set along the US–Mexico border in the late 1840s, the novel follows a nameless young runaway known as the Kid, who joins a band of mercenaries led by John Joel Glanton and paid to hunt Indigenous people for their scalps. Their journey through the deserts of Texas and northern Mexico brings them into the orbit of Judge Holden, a formidable and enigmatic figure whose intellect, eloquence and appetite for violence make him one of modern literature’s most unsettling characters.

Drawing on the history of frontier expansion, McCarthy strips the mythology of the American West of its familiar heroism, revealing a landscape shaped by conquest, brutality and the pursuit of power. His extraordinary prose moves between biblical grandeur and unflinching physical detail, creating a world that is at once historically grounded and almost apocalyptic. Often regarded as his greatest achievement, Blood Meridian is a radical reimagining of the Western and a profound meditation on violence, history and the darker impulses of civilisation.

From the book

“Men of God and men of war have strange affinities.”

— Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

On Blood Meridian

“Blood Meridian makes it clear that all along Mr. McCarthy has asked us to witness evil not in order to understand it but to affirm its inexplicable reality.”

— Caryn James, The New York Times