Blood Meridian
1985
- fiction
- glanton gang
- outlaws
- teenage boys
- indians of north america
- massacres
- indians of north america, fiction
- fiction, westerns
- fiction, historical
- west (u.s.), fiction
The story
An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west." Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.
What it’s like
Stark, sun-bleached desert and scorched mountain country rendered in prose that reads like scripture cut from rock: long, unpunctuated sentences, biblical cadence, catalogues of landscape and weather that feel vast and indifferent. The sensory world is dust, heat, blood, gunpowder, and the blank white of the sun on alkali flats, with a voice that is ornate and unsparing rather than lyrical in any soft way. The mood is dread-laced and hallucinatory, a slow grinding unease that builds into something close to mythic horror, best sat with alone and in one long stretch rather than dipped into. Pacing is episodic and relentless, moving from one riding party and camp to the next with little breath between. Intensity is very high: frequent, graphic, sometimes prolonged scenes of killing, scalping and atrocity, along with cruelty toward children and animals, and a bleak, morally corrosive tone; there is no gentleness here. The arc follows a teenage boy swallowed by a violent band of men, his hardening and erasure of conscience charted without consolation. It suits readers who want demanding, uncompromising literary fiction about the American frontier's brutality, and it is not for anyone seeking comfort, romance or relief.
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