Reading Order
Blood MeridianBlood Meridian Reading Order
Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West (1985) is a standalone novel following the Kid, a teenager who joins the Glanton Gang — a historical group of scalp hunters operating on the Texas-Mexico border in the late 1840s — and encounters the Judge, perhaps the most terrifying figure in American fiction. McCarthy's most demanding and most violent novel, and by many accounts his masterpiece.
Where to start
Blood Meridian
Complete Blood Meridian Book List
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Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy·1985·The Glanton Gang's campaign — complete standalone. Often described as requiring a second reading; the prose rewards slow attention. - Buy
The Road
OptionalCormac McCarthy·2006·A father and son walk south through a post-apocalyptic America — McCarthy's most accessible and most widely read novel; the inverse of Blood Meridian: where Blood Meridian finds no redemption in violence, The Road finds no corruption. - Buy
No Country for Old Men
OptionalCormac McCarthy·2005·A hunter finds a drug deal gone wrong in the Texas desert and takes the money — the contemporary thriller in which the Judge's spiritual descendant (Anton Chigurh) reappears. - Buy
Suttree
OptionalCormac McCarthy·1979·Cornelius Suttree lives among the outcasts on a houseboat in the Tennessee River near Knoxville — the most autobiographical of McCarthy's novels and the most Faulknerian in prose; essential for the full McCarthy.
Blood Meridian — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Blood Meridian about and why is it so difficult?
Blood Meridian follows a teenage boy (called only "the Kid") who joins a historical gang of scalp hunters operating under a contract with the state of Chihuahua in 1849-1850, killing indigenous people for a bounty. The novel's difficulty operates on several levels: the prose is dense, allusive, and unpunctuated in its dialogue; the violence is extreme and relentless; the historical and geographical knowledge required to follow the gang's movements is considerable; and the novel's philosophical argument (most concentrated in the figure of the Judge) is expressed obliquely rather than directly. The novel is not difficult in order to be obscure but because its subject — the relationship between violence and history, between the frontier and American civilization — requires this level of seriousness.
Who or what is the Judge in Blood Meridian?
Judge Holden is one of the most debated figures in American literature. He is historically based (the real Glanton Gang included a Judge Holden), though the novel's version has clearly been mythologized: he is seven feet tall, hairless, apparently immortal, a polymath who can speak every language and has mastered every human skill, and who articulates a philosophy of absolute violence as the highest human activity. He has been read as a figure of Satan, as an embodiment of the Death Drive, as the spirit of American history and its relationship to violence, and as the embodiment of a specific Nietzschean philosophy (will to power divorced from all other values). McCarthy does not explain him, and most readers conclude that the mystery is intentional.
Is Blood Meridian anti-Western in the genre sense?
It is explicitly a deconstruction of the Western genre's mythology. The Western typically presents frontier violence as morally meaningful: the violence of civilization against savagery, or the violence of the individual against institutional corruption, produces order and makes the settlement of the West possible. Blood Meridian strips away all of these justifications: the Glanton Gang's violence is random, its victims are not savage (they include friendly Indian peoples, Mexican civilians, and eventually each other), and the violence does not produce order but only more violence. McCarthy has said he considers the Judge's philosophy to be a serious position, not a strawman — he is presenting the darkest possible reading of American history and asking the reader to look at it directly.
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