Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Cormac McCarthy (1985)
“The most blood-soaked novel in the American canon — and possibly its most profound meditation on whether violence is the foundation of all human civilization.”
Short Summary
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.
Detailed Summary
The novel opens in 1833 with the birth of the kid in Tennessee, under a meteor shower — a Leonid event that McCarthy renders as cosmic portent. The kid's mother dies in childbirth. By fourteen he has run away, drifting south and west through a landscape of casual brutality. In Nacogdoches, Texas, he...