<p><b>Brutally violent, <i>Blood Meridian</i> is the story of one teenage runaway in the nineteenth-century American South, as a sadistic gang unleashes its massacre across the desert land. It is the work that sealed Cormac McCarthy's reputation as one of the twentieth century's greatest writers - his magnum opus.</b><br> <br> <b>'[A] brilliant, uncompromising work of fiction - imagine if the authors of the King James Bible, their hands guided by Satan, wrote a western' - <i>The Times</i></b><br> <br> Through the hostile landscape of the Texas-Mexico border wanders the Kid, a fourteen year-old Tennessean who is quickly swept up in the relentless tide of blood.<br> <br> A group known as the Glanton gang hunt Indigenous Americans, collecting scalps as their bloody trophies. At the centre of this violence stands Judge Holden: a massive, hairless man, mysterious if not supernatural, erudite and cold-blooded. He is singularly extreme in his sadistic violence.<br> <br> But the apparent chaos is not without order - the Glanton gang, too, are stalked as prey.<br> <br> <b>Read as both a brilliant subversion of the Western novel and a blazing example of that form, it is a powerful, mesmerizing and savagely beautiful novel - and one of the most important works in American fiction of the last century.</b><br> <br> <b>'In <i>Blood Meridian</i>, McCarthy reaches the peak of his style: spare and ornate at once, repetitious but endlessly readable' - <i>Guardian</i></b><br> <br> Praise for Cormac McCarthy:<br> <br> 'His prose takes on an almost biblical quality, hallucinatory in its effect and evangelical in its power' - Stephen King, author of <i>The Shining</i> and the Dark Tower series<br> <br> 'McCarthy worked close to some religious impulse, his books were terrifying and absolute' - Anne Enright, author of <i>The Green Road</i> and <i>The Wren, The Wren</i><br> <br> '[I]n presenting the darker human impulses in his rich prose, [McCarthy] showed readers the necessity of facing up to existence' - Annie Proulx, author of <i>Brokeback Mountain</i><br> <br> Part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature.</p>