Blood Meridian: Or, the Evening Redness in the West (Picador Books)

Time's 100 Best English Novels (100 books items)

""The floor of the playa lay smooth and unbroken by any track and the mountains in their blue islands stood footless in the void like floating temples." McCarthy's prose has the character of the landscape it describes: Harsh and pure, as if it had been sculpted by wind and sand, like a naturally occurring phenomenon. In Blood Meridian McCarthy uses it to spin a yarn of gothic violence: In the 1840's a young boy joins a band of cutthroats who hunt Indians on the border between Texas and Mexico, un"