Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West

McCarthy, Cormac

ISBN 10: 0330304496 / ISBN 13: 9780330304498

Published by Picador Pan Books Ltd, London, 1989

About this Item

First UK edition. Originally published in the US by Random House in 1985. Boards have a small but heavy dent in the bottom edge of the front panel but are otherwise clean and unmarked. Heavy browning to the edges of the pages with small creases to the top corners of two pages towards the back of the book. The pages are browned around the edges but otherwise unmarked. The jacket has very slight fading to the spine and a little edge creasing and light surface wear. There is also a little red staining along the bottom edge of the reverse of the front panel - no sign of any damp staining to the boards however. Jacket design by George Sharp. First printing. Seller Inventory # 022300

Bibliographic Details

Title: Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the...

Publisher: Picador Pan Books Ltd, London

Publication Date: 1989

Binding: Original Cloth

Illustrator: Sharp, George

Condition: Very Good

Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good

Edition: First Edition

About this title

Synopsis:

"The fulfilled renown of Moby-Dick and of As I Lay Dying is augmented by Blood Meridian, since Cormac McCarthy is the worthy disciple both of Melville and Faulkner," writes esteemed literary scholar Harold Bloom in his Introduction to the Modern Library edition. "I venture that no other living American novelist, not even Pynchon, has given us a book as strong and memorable."

Cormac McCarthy's masterwork, Blood Meridian, chronicles the brutal world of the Texas-Mexico borderlands in the mid-nineteenth century. Its wounded hero, the teenage Kid, must confront the extraordinary violence of the Glanton gang, a murderous cadre on an official mission to scalp Indians and sell those scalps. Loosely based on fact, the novel represents a genius vision of the historical West, one so fiercely realized that since its initial publication in 1985 the canon of American literature has welcomed Blood Meridian to its shelf.

"A classic American novel of regeneration through violence," declares Michael Herr. "McCarthy can only be compared to our greatest writers."

Review:

"The men as they rode turned black in the sun from the blood on their clothes and their faces and then paled slowly in the rising dust until they assumed once more the color of the land through which they passed." If what we call "horror" can be seen as including any literature that has dark, horrific subject matter, then Blood Meridian is, in this reviewer's estimation, the best horror novel ever written. It's a perverse, picaresque Western about bounty hunters for Indian scalps near the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s--a ragged caravan of indiscriminate killers led by an unforgettable human monster called "The Judge." Imagine the imagery of Sam Peckinpah and Heironymus Bosch as written by William Faulkner, and you'll have just an inkling of this novel's power. From the opening scenes about a 14-year-old Tennessee boy who joins the band of hunters to the extraordinary, mythic ending, this is an American classic about extreme violence.