Blood Meridian

The genre at its most literary and least comforting.

Why Consider This One

Cormac McCarthy takes the western apart and rebuilds it as a vision of history soaked in blood. The novel follows a nameless teenager, known only as the kid, who falls in with the Glanton gang, a real band of scalp hunters roaming the Texas-Mexico borderlands in the 1850s. Presiding over them is Judge Holden, a hairless giant of monstrous intelligence and pure menace, one of the most frightening characters in all of fiction. The prose is biblical, hypnotic, and unlike anything else in American literature, and the violence is relentless and unflinching.

Save this one until you have a few westerns behind you. It offers none of the warmth of Lonesome Dove or the wit of True Grit. What it offers instead is the darkest possible answer to the frontier myth: a version of the West with the romance stripped out entirely, rendered by one of the finest prose stylists the country has produced. Many readers consider it the great American novel. Almost all of them found it hard going, and worth it.

What to Expect

A demanding, brutal, and extraordinary book. The sentences are long and unpunctuated in McCarthy’s signature style, the geography is vast and merciless, and the bloodshed never lets up. It rewards patience and re-reading. Come to it when you want to be tested rather than comforted, and when you want to see how far the genre can be pushed.