Blood Meridian: Cormac McCarthy (Picador Collection, 2)
By Cormac McCarthy

Brutally violent,and Blood Meridianand 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' -and The TimesThrough 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. Inand Blood Meridian, McCarthy reaches the peak of his style: spare and ornate at once, repetitious but endlessly readable' -and GuardianPraise for Cormac McCarthy:'His prose takes on an almost biblical quality, hallucinatory in its effect and evangelical in its power' - Stephen King, author ofand The Shiningand and the Dark Tower series McCarthy worked close to some religious impulse, his books were terrifying and absolute' - Anne Enright, author ofand The Green Roadand andand 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 ofand Brokeback MountainPart of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature.