Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
Summary
An unnamed teenager known only as the kid drifts out of Tennessee into the Texas borderlands in the years after the Mexican American War, and after a botched raid with a filibustering militia leaves him for dead, he falls in with the Glanton gang, a real historical band of scalp hunters contracted by Mexican authorities to kill Apache raiders for bounty money and paid, in practice, for any scalp at all, Native American or Mexican, that could pass inspection. Judge Holden, an enormous, hairless, classically educated man who seems to know something about every subject he touches and never appears to sleep, dominates the gang without formally leading it, delivering long, chilling speeches about war as the truest form of human worship even as he takes a personal, unexplained interest in the kid that outlasts everyone else in the story. The gang massacres its way across the desert until a Yuma ambush at a Colorado River ferry crossing destroys them almost entirely, and the kid survives alone into old age, still trailed decades later by Judge Holden, who has not visibly aged at all. Their final meeting takes place in an outhouse in a Texas saloon town in 1878; McCarthy never shows a reader what happens inside, only a witness's horror on opening the door afterward, and the judge, dancing and declaring that he will never die, closes the novel exactly as unexplained as he entered it.
McCarthy writes in dense, unpunctuated, almost biblical prose, violence described in the same steady cadence as landscape or weather, and the novel reads slowly and demands real stamina, since very little relief interrupts its cruelty across more than three hundred pages; even admirers describe needing more than one attempt to get through it, and the absence of quotation marks and any reliable moral compass inside the story is exactly the method by which it refuses a reader easy comfort.
Historical Context & Significance
Random House published Blood Meridian in April 1985 to a small readership and modest reviews; it won no prize that year, and McCarthy's own Pulitzer, awarded decades later in 2007, belongs to a different and much later novel, The Road, not to this one. Caryn James in The New York Times called its violence a deliberate slap in the face to readers expecting something gentler, and the book sold modestly for years before its reputation turned.
Its reputation was rebuilt almost entirely by later critics; Harold Bloom, who admitted his first two attempts to finish it failed, eventually ranked it alongside Moby Dick as one of the great American novels, and by 2005 Time had placed it on its list of the hundred best English language novels since 1923, a slow reversal from the book's own quiet first reception.