1933–2023

Cormac McCarthy

American prose as scripture and slaughter. Blood Meridian takes the Western and strips it to a metaphysics of violence, with the Judge as its smiling theologian.

Fused King James cadence with the atrocity of the borderlands, and refused the consolations of the frontier myth.

Primary works

Novel · 1985

Blood Meridian

Cormac McCarthy

The kid rides with the Glanton gang across a border country of massacre. Judge Holden, enormous and learned, argues that war is the true god. The book is a sunrise over bones.

Western epic