Brutally violent novel by
Cormac McCarthy, selected as the
48th best book ever by
Larry McCaffrey in the
American Book Review.
Blood Meridian is the story of a young man drifting through the west around the turn of the century. He joins a band of mercenaries who are hired to murder indians, and they set off on a graphic killing spree. Eventually, the tables are turned and the mercenaries themselves are hunted down and killed.
If this book were a film, it would be banned for extreme violence. In particular, the scenes of mass murder of defenseless native americans are filled with images of gore and scalping.
"The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medecine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a muddied field is unspeakable and calamatous beyond reckoning."