Blood Meridian

The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hidden a million years before men were, and only men have the power to wake it. Hell ain’t half full. Set in the anarchic world opened up by America’s westward expansion, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy is an epic and potent account of the barbarous violence that man visits upon man. Through 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. But the apparent chaos is not without its order: while Americans hunt Indians collecting scalps as their bloody trophies, they too are stalked as prey.

Since its first publication in 1985, Blood Meridian has been read as both a brilliant subversion of the Western novel and a blazing example of that form. Powerful, mesmerizing and savagely beautiful, it is established as one of the most important works in American fiction of the last century.