"Blood Meridian" is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. 'McCarthy's achievement is to establish a new mythology which is as potent and vivid as that of the movies, yet one which has absolutely the opposite effect . . . He is a great writer' "Independent" 'I have rarely encountered anything as powerful, as unsettling, or as memorable as "Blood Meridian" . . . A nightmare odyssey' "Evening Standard" 'His masterpiece . . .The book reads like a conflation of the "Inferno," "The Iliad "and "Moby Dick." I can only declare that Blood Meridian is unlike anything I have read in recent years, and seems to me an extraordinary, breathtaking achievement' John Banville
