Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West

McCarthy, Cormac

ISBN 10: 0330304496 / ISBN 13: 9780330304498

Published by Picador Pan Books Ltd, London, 1989

About this Item

First UK edition. Originally published in the US by Random House in 1985. Boards have a small but heavy dent in the bottom edge of the front panel but are otherwise clean and unmarked. Heavy browning to the edges of the pages with small creases to the top corners of two pages towards the back of the book. The pages are browned around the edges but otherwise unmarked. The jacket has very slight fading to the spine and a little edge creasing and light surface wear. There is also a little red staining along the bottom edge of the reverse of the front panel - no sign of any damp staining to the boards however. Jacket design by George Sharp. First printing. Seller Inventory # 022300

Bibliographic Details

Title: Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the...

Publisher: Picador Pan Books Ltd, London

Publication Date: 1989

Binding: Original Cloth

Illustrator: Sharp, George

Condition: Very Good

Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good

Edition: First Edition

About this title

Synopsis:

Based on incidents that took place in the southwestern United States and Mexico around 1850, this novel chronicles the crimes of a band of desperados, with a particular focus on one, "the kid," a boy of fourteen

Review:

Cormac McCarthy is now the greatest American novelist --The Times

It's 1849 and the 14-year-old nameless "kid" has drifted into the violent life of an outlaw band of bloodthirsty Indian hunters on the Texas-Mexico borders. Grotesque characters play out their roles against an unforgiving landscape. The understated southern drawl is just right, suggesting the symbolic richness of McCarthy's language. --Rachel Redford, The Observer

Voiced here with slow deliberation, the nightmarishly enigmatic Judge - a man who declares he feels the personal freedom of birds as a personal insult - is a presence I'm finding horribly difficult to shake. --Bella Todd, Time Out

Having thought that no book could ever be as harrowing or as frightening as McCarthy's apocalyptic Pulitzer prize-winning The Road (I finished it at 3am sitting up in bed with the light on), here's an even bleaker story about man's inhumanity to man. It's set in the familiar Tex-Mex territory of All the Pretty Horses, his best book, and its hero, the kid, like John Grady Cole, is a 16-year-old drifter who pretty much lives in the saddle. There, alas, the resemblance ends this is definitely not a love story. It's an allegory about survival, lawlessness and natural justice. The kid, who's been living, scavenging, fighting, killing, surviving on his own since he was 12, heads for the Apache wars circa 1840 in the legendary Wild West and joins a troop of mercenaries paid in gold for Indian scalps. The battle scenes are absolutely terrifying. Bullets, arrows, decapitated heads flying, the braves daubed with war paint, some naked, some wearing the looted clothing of their victims US army jackets, whalebone corsets and ruffled shirts the Americans by now so blood-crazed and inured to violence that they massacre Indians, Mexican peons and peaceful settlers indiscriminately. McCarthy's prose is compelling, a potent mix of stark and lyrical: The night sky lies so spread with stars that there is scarcely space for black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less. The little prairie wolves cry all night and dawn finds him in the grassy draw where he'd gone to hide from the wind. The hobbled mule stands over him and watches the east for light. The sun that rises is the colour of steel, his mounted shadow falls for miles before him. Brilliant, but not for the faint-hearted. --Sue Arnold, The Guardian