Blood Meridian
First published 1985 · English · 345 pages
- Novels
- Adventure
- Young adult
Blood Meridian is a historical novel set in the borderlands of Texas, Mexico and the American Southwest around 1850. A runaway Tennessee teenager, known only as the kid, falls in with a gang of scalp hunters paid to kill Native Americans and others. Among them is the towering, learned Judge Holden, a figure of unsettling menace. Based loosely on real events, the book is extremely violent and written in a dense, biblical style. It is often called a great American novel, a dark challenge to myths of the frontier and a meditation on war and human nature.
Quotes
Solitary, half mad, his eyes redrimmed as if locked in their cages with hot wires
The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell ain't half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman's making onto a foreign land. Ye'll wake more than the dogs.
[...] words were said that could not be put right again [...] The men were gone, the whores were gone. An old man swept the clay floor within the cantina. The boy lay with his skull broken in a pool of blood, none knew by whom.
There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.