Blood Meridian
- 368
- Pages
- about 7 h
- Reading time
- 20th Century's Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction
Affiliate link: buying through it supports BookRank at no extra cost to you.
Our view
McCarthy’s anti-Western turns the frontier into a long procession of violence, and the point is the excess. It presents bloodshed as something close to human nature, with an unblinking seriousness that is its strength. Some readers are worn down as scene after scene of killing begins to blur, and find the central figure too distant to care about. A demanding book, for those prepared for bleakness.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West is a 1985 epic historical novel by American author Cormac McCarthy, classified as an anti-Western and Gothic Western. McCarthy's fifth book, it was published by Random House.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.1 across 823 ratings. With that many, the reader vote carries 85% of the weight and the score stays at 8.1 — the Rankings average of 8.3 barely moves it.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 7.9 | 16 | 2% |
| Google Books | 8.0 | 35 | 4% |
| Hardcover | 8.1 | 772 | 94% |
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
