Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian has been championed by Harold Bloom and many other critics as the greatest American novel of the late twentieth century. Its depiction of scalp hunters in the 1850s borderlands between the United States and Mexico achieves a terrifying sublime, with the enigmatic Judge Holden standing as one of the most unforgettable figures in all of American fiction. McCarthy's biblical cadences and relentless vision of violence as the foundational principle of history make this a work of staggering, unsettling power.

The novel is set in the United States–Mexico borderlands of the 1850s, a lawless region where commercial scalp-hunting expeditions carried out campaigns of indiscriminate slaughter against Indigenous peoples and Mexican civilians alike. McCarthy draws on historical accounts to construct a vision of the American frontier stripped of all romantic myth, revealing the violence and chaos that attended westward expansion.