Book Bearings
Blood Meridian
- 354 pages · about 6 hours
- First published 1985
- 37 editions
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1 About this book
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.
- Adventure
- Outlaws
- Teenage boys
- Native Americans
- Massacres
- Westerns
- West (u.s.)
2 What to expect
A historical novel of extreme violence: a teenage runaway joins a gang of scalp hunters on the Texas-Mexico border around 1850. There is little plot beyond their journey and its massacres, described without comment, and at the center stands Judge Holden, a huge, learned and terrifying figure who delights in destruction. The prose is biblical and dense, with rare words, untranslated Spanish and no quotation marks, and it is a demanding and disturbing read.
Good for readers who want: a dark anti-western, powerful literary prose, and an unflinching look at frontier violence.
3 About Cormac McCarthy
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
4 More by Cormac McCarthy
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