Blood Meridian: Cormac McCarthy: 2 (Picador Collection, 2) Paperback – 17 Feb. 2022 by Cormac McCarthy

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.

"[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

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.

"In Blood Meridian, McCarthy reaches the peak of his style: spare and ornate at once, repetitious but endlessly readable" - Guardian

Praise for Cormac McCarthy:

"His prose takes on an almost biblical quality, hallucinatory in its effect and evangelical in its power" - Stephen King, author of The Shining and the Dark Tower series

"McCarthy worked close to some religious impulse, his books were terrifying and absolute" - Anne Enright, author of The Green Road and The Wren, The Wren

"[I]n presenting the darker human impulses in his rich prose, [McCarthy] showed readers the necessity of facing up to existence" - Annie Proulx, author of Brokeback Mountain

Part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature.