Blood Meridian

Om boken

Brutally violent, Blood Meridian is the story of one teenage runaway in the nineteenth-century American South, as a sadistic gang unleashes its massacre across the desert land. It is the work that sealed Cormac McCarthy's reputation as one of the twentieth century's greatest writers – his magnum opus. Through the hostile landscape of the Texas–Mexico border wanders the Kid, a fourteen year-old Tennessean who is quickly swept up in the relentless tide of blood. A group known as the Glanton gang hunt Indigenous Americans, collecting scalps as their bloody trophies. At the centre of this violence stands Judge Holden: a massive, hairless man, mysterious if not supernatural, erudite and cold-blooded. He is singularly extreme in his sadistic violence. But the apparent chaos is not without order – the Glanton gang, too, are stalked as prey. Read as both a brilliant subversion of the Western novel and a blazing example of that form, it is a powerful, mesmerizing and savagely beautiful novel – and one of the most important works in American fiction of the last century. 'A brilliant, uncompromising work of fiction – imagine if the authors of the King James Bible, their hands guided by Satan, wrote a western' — The Times 'In Blood Meridian, McCarthy reaches the peak of his style: spare and ornate at once, repetitious but endlessly readable' — Guardian 'His prose takes on an almost biblical quality, hallucinatory in its effect and evangelical in its power' — Stephen King 'McCarthy worked close to some religious impulse, his books were terrifying and absolute' — Anne Enright 'In presenting the darker human impulses in his rich prose, McCarthy showed readers the necessity of facing up to existence' — Annie Proulx