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Written by 
- Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
- Publisher: Vintage
- On Sale: May 5, 1992
- Price: $15.00
- ISBN: 978-0-679-72875-7 (0-679-72875-9)
about this book
Blood Meridian is the epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting 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 a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.
In this novel, written before The Border Trilogy, McCarthy demonstrates his Faulknerian sense of epic danger and dramatic tragedy while twisting a horrifying and original tale of blood-lust and greed--traits which have made him one of America's most important writers to date.
"Blood Meridian comes at the reader like a slap in the face, an affront that asks us to endure a vision of the Old West full of charred human skulls, blood-soaked scalps, a tree hung with the bodies of dead infants.... 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; his elaborate language invents a world hinged between the real and surreal, jolting us out of complacency. "
--New York Times
