Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

At a Glance

In the late 1840s, a nameless teenager known only as 'the kid' drifts from Tennessee into the Texas-Mexico borderlands and joins the Glanton gang — a historical band of scalp hunters contracted by Mexican governors to exterminate Apaches. Led by the maniacal John Joel Glanton and accompanied by Judge Holden, a seven-foot hairless polymath who may or may not be human, the gang descends into indiscriminate massacre, killing Mexicans, peaceful Indians, and anyone whose scalps can pass for Apache. The violence is panoramic, ritualistic, and relentless. The gang is eventually destroyed by Yuma Indians at a Colorado River ferry crossing. The kid survives but cannot escape the Judge, who finds him decades later in a Fort Griffin saloon and kills him in an outhouse. The Judge dances naked, declaring he will never die.

Why This Book Matters

Published in 1985 to mixed reviews and modest sales, Blood Meridian was championed by Harold Bloom, who placed it alongside Moby-Dick, As I Lay Dying, and Gravity's Rainbow as one of the four supreme American novels. It has since become the most critically discussed American novel of the late twentieth century, the subject of hundreds of scholarly articles, and a fixture on 'greatest novels' lists. Its influence extends from literary fiction (Denis Johnson, Roberto Bolano) to film (the Coen Brothers) to philosophy (its Gnostic framework has been analyzed by theologians and ethicists). It is widely considered the apotheosis of the American Western and the novel that made it impossible to write the genre naively again.

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