Novel
Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy · 1985
Synopsis
A boy born in Tennessee leaves his family at fourteen. In New Orleans, he fights in taverns and is shot twice, then makes his way to Texas, where he arrives in 1849. Enlisted in a band of filibusters that crosses into Mexico, he is one of the few survivors of a Comanche attack. Jailed in Chihuahua, he is released to join a band of scalp hunters led by John Joel Glanton, whom the governor pays one hundred dollars per Apache scalp, and which includes Judge Holden, a hairless giant, learned and polyglot, who draws what he finds.
Context
The author drew on the memoirs of Samuel Chamberlain, who claimed to have ridden with this band, published a century after the events, and from which he takes several characters. He retraced the group's route in Mexico more than once, noting the terrain and vegetation, and researched the making of gunpowder for one scene. A MacArthur Foundation grant, in 1981, supported the writing. Several adaptation projects failed, Ridley Scott withdrawing because of the violence of the book.
Who it is for
A long novel, of unrelenting violence and biblical sentences, with no dialogue punctuation, which critics have counted among the most violent of its time.
Prizes and reception
Fewer than five thousand copies sold on release, then a place among the finalists of the 2006 New York Times poll and among Time magazine's hundred novels.