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    Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
    Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
    Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
    Audiobook13 hours

    Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

    Written by Cormac McCarthy

    Narrated by Richard Poe

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Author of the National Book Award winner All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy is one of the most provocative American stylists to emerge in the last century. The striking novel Blood Meridian offers an unflinching narrative of the brutality that accompanied the push west on the 1850s Texas frontier. His birth ended his mother's life in Tennessee. Scrawny and wiry, he runs away at the age of 14. As he makes his way westward, the impoverished and illiterate youth finds trouble at every turn. Then he's recruited by Army irregulars, lured by the promise of spoils and bound for Mexico. Churning a dusty path toward destiny, he witnesses unknown horrors and suffering-and yet, as if shielded by the almighty hand of God, he survives to breathe another day. Earning McCarthy comparisons to greats like Melville and Faulkner, Blood Meridian is a masterwork of rare genius. Gifted narrator Richard Poe wields the author's prose like a man born to speak it.

    Editor's Note

    Bloody masterpiece…

    McCarthy’s bloody, horrifying masterpiece employs his signature difficult prose, alternating between lyrical and profane, winding and abrupt, chock-full of some of the richest and most terrifying sentences in English.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateMay 16, 2007
    ISBN9781440780653
    Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
    Author

    Cormac McCarthy

    Cormac McCarthy was the author of many acclaimed novels, including Blood Meridian, Child of God and The Passenger. Among his honours are the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His works adapted to film include All the Pretty Horses, The Road and No Country for Old Men – the latter film receiving four Academy Awards, including the award for Best Picture. McCarthy died in 2023 in Santa Fe, NM at the age of 89.

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    Reviews for Blood Meridian

    4/5

    3,159 ratings162 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Every word is beautiful and horrific in the text, and the voice acting is perfect.
    • 5/5
      Multiple times throughout this book it felt as if the antagonist would speak through the page in into my very soul, and then it felt as he would glance away and fold himself neatly back into the story. It was crazy.
      While it is disturbing the themes and just the way the author writes makes this a must read in my opinion.
    • 5/5
      Richard Poe was incubated to read this modern American classic, and he did so exquisitely.
    • 5/5
      Simply Incredible! Cormac McCarthy is a True a True WordSmith. And Mr. Poe an Amazing reader
    • 4/5
      A little hard to follow on audio. But oh boy, the Judge is a bad bad man.
    • 4/5
      It’s a little hard to follow. Pay close attention. Worthy
    • 5/5
      Way underrated. One of McCarthy’s very best books, yet one that few people have had the pleasure to read. Read or listen, rinse and repeat. After five times it will still have fresh secrets and majesty to behold. I can’t believe I waited so long to delve into this book. It’s incredible.
    • 5/5
      Dark, haunting, terrifying and mesmerising. Wonderfully narrated. The old times were bad, man.
    • 5/5
      Has a very good reader. Voice matches the prose perfectly.
    • 2/5
      Het is altijd mijn indruk geweest dat je zelf een Amerikaan moet zijn om iconische romans als Moby Dick echt te kunnen appreci?ren. Met dit werk lijkt dat ook het geval. Ik merk dat dit boek vooral in de VS op handen wordt gedragen, en zelfs dikwijls met Moby Dick wordt vergeleken, en dat de meeste Europeanen er zich onbegrijpend en met afschuw van afkeren. Die afschuw heeft uiteraard in eerste instantie te maken met het gratuite geweld in de roman, zelfs de bijna esthetiserende verheerlijking van geweld. Natuurlijk hebben we in Europa ook wel onze eigen reeks gewelddadige romans (Oorlogsroes van Ernst J?nger bijvoorbeeld), die desondanks als literaire hoogtepunten worden gezien, dus waarom dit werk ook niet. Want ook van deze roman kan je - als je wil - "genieten": de taal van McCormack is briljant beeldend als het over ruwe landschappen (vooral woestijnen) gaat en zelfs de geweldssc?nes zijn met bijzonder literair talent in beeld gebracht. De setting, het Amerikaans-Mexicaans grensgebied rond het midden van de 19de eeuw en het tuig van indianen, gelukzoekers en scalpjagers dat er rondwaart, geeft daar alle gelegenheid toe. Maar dan moet je wel een verhaal te vertellen hebben en dat mis ik hier compleet. Er is uiteraard de "kid", door wiens ogen we het grootste deel van de actie waarnemen, maar McCormack doet eigenlijk weinig met dit personage. Hetzelfde probleem heb ik met de figuur van de "Judge", een imposante kale reus die vooral duivelachtig rondloopt, als personificatie van het kwaad, een soort van dr Kurtz uit Heart of Darkness. McCormack geeft zijn boek een epische ondertoon, en dat is best imponerend (zeker ook omdat het in een soort van archa?sch-bijbels Engels is geschreven) maar dan zou er best ook een verhaallijn in te vinden moeten zijn. En vooralsnog heb ik dat niet ontdekt.
    • 4/5
      How in the world did I dislike this book the first time I read it!? McCarthy is a disciple of the darkness that chases each of us but that never leaves the confines of the human heart.
    • 5/5
      39. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (1985, 337 page paperback, Read June 7 - July 5)Rating: 4.5 starsI'm struggling on how to review this, or even how to approach a review.The kid was born in 1833 in Tennessee, exactly 100 years before McCarthy, who grew up in and had lived most of his life in Tennessee. So, in 1848, when this alter-ego begins his wanders through American and Mexican deserts, party to and witness of massacres, in the era and territory of Kit Carson, he is about 15, and he's already been shot once. Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to a man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.He winds up with a group of Indian hunters, led by Glanton, who is wanted in Texas. The group includes a handful of Delaware Indians, one Mexican, two Jacksons, one black and spiritual and surreal, and ex-priest, various veterans and outlaws, and the Judge, Judge Holden. The Judge is seven feet tall, free of any hair, even eyelashes and immensely strong. He speaks several languages, has distinct formal and elegant manner, references classics, and carries a notebook in which he constantly records what he sees, then generally destroys it. Wikipedia tells me he is the 43rd greatest character in fiction since 1900.I guess this book is about the Judge.The killers wander through no man's land hunting down a different kind of killer. This was a territory haunted by Indians. Mexicans and the violent Indian tribes constantly raided, captured, tortured and killed each other, and neither could control the other. Mexican towns existed in fear. Indian tribal societies were structured on their warriors, or lack of them. McCarthy takes no sides. He only hunts down gore, ritual and a coldest of philosophy. The wild Americans slaughter through until they basically run out of territory.I read this always with my iPhone and it's app The Free Dictionary and always noting words in my notes app. I read it in a kind of hypnotic detachment, observing the violence, but lost in the rhythmic text, thinking about the words, and the Judge. In the days to come they would ride up through a country where the rocks would cook the flesh from your hand and where other than rock nothing was. They rode in narrow enfilade along a trail strewn with the dry round turds of goats and they rode with their faces averted from the rock wall and the bake-oven air which it rebated, the slant black shapes of the mounted men stenciled across the stone with a definition austere and implacable like shapes capable of violating their covenant with the flesh that authored them and continuing autonomous across the naked rock without reference to sun or man or god.McCarthy goes out his way to find something to bother the reader. The dead babies handing off the trees come on page 57. The reader knows what he or she is in for. There are few kindnesses here and little hope. ...the ragged flames fled down the wind as if sucked by some maelstrom out there in the void, some vortex in that waste apposite to which man’s transit and his reckonings alike lay abrogate.It's also surreal. I don't want to overstate that. The book is steeped in fact. The places are real and aptly described, and the characters often have an aspect of documented truth to their actual existence. But, it doesn't feel real, and I don't think we are supposed to see this as a real world. I have wondered what McCarthy is saying to us with his Judge and his American slaughterers taking as they wish. I can't be sure the Judge is the same guy in Ezekiel who, with his notebook, marks the few who will survive the destruction of Jerusalem, and then takes the burning coals to set the city on fire, but I can't see him as human. And I wonder what he is judging, and he leaves me feeling judged and condemned.I think McCarthy has given us an odd creation, an unorthodox and detached condemnation, and call too see things in some other way, some way that we would rather not look into.
    • 3/5
      Seemingly written only for the literary scholar, "Blood Meridian" is a delightfully gruesome and unglamorous interpretation of the Wild West, but may be too cerebral for most readers.
    • 5/5
      sa good book babey y wont find nuthr lak et
    • 4/5
      Holy shit. I still feel a little sick after putting this down. But I'm beginning to figure out what McCarthy was trying to do in this unbelievably violent book. "It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. ... As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. ... War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god."
    • 5/5
      It’s Shakespeare, only it’s in the dusty southwest and Mexico. And there’s more blood and torture and genocide
    • 5/5
      First reading of a book that deserves to be read many times. The chapter titles are vignettes unto themselves, as well as being clues to the narrative. An almost excruciatingly slow read, due to the beauty of the words and images as well as to the direness of what is being disclosed, described. The horrific scenes slide by in almost painless acknowledgement, while more mundane scenes take on the gut-wrenching tragedy that makes up these brutal, brutish lives. An amazing, amazing book.I would almost have to quote the entire novel, so will choose only one or two.
    • 1/5
      The narrator was excellent. This is supposed to be such a great book and I listen to the whole thing even though it was painful. It started out bad and just got worse. Don’t waste your time.
    • 2/5
      Amazing writing but next to no plot which made it hard going. The violence is brutal. I know Mcarthy is a genius and I really appreciated The Road but just struggled with this one.
    • 5/5
      well. i didnt love the story. it was bleak, dark,sad simply horrible in places. very hard to get through. yet the writing is so compelling that you just keep listening. wondering what next dark hole you will go down. the narrator is fantastic!
      i gave it 5 stars because , for the type of tale woven… it was excellent.
    • 3/5
      Blood Meridian is a book that would have had John Wayne sucking his thumb and clutching a security blanket. The novel is unrelenting in its visceral violence and Cormac McCarthy eschews character development or too much of a plot for a bleak paean to the power of the strong to subject, humiliate and exploit the weak. The frightful and frightening Judge tells us that morality is merely an invention of the weak to disenfranchise the strong, consequently that the concept of morality should be mocked and rejected. This is a fantasy world of right-wing extremes where normal measures of human worth - compassion, mercy, humility, nurturing, interdependence and so on are totally alien. These characters murder, burn and pillage their way across the southern states of America and Mexico taking everything they need and laying waste to the poor and meagre communities they encounter. Not one has a relationship with any woman. And the only loyalties are those of the bar-room.If you can stomach all that and I'm not sure I can - the book has much to recommend it. It is a big American novel of some import. It features an intoxicating string of superbly described but hellish Western settings; and the strongest ending to a novel that I have read for a long time, where a wash-room cubicle holds more perverse horrors than the whole of American Psycho.
    • 5/5
      A boy grows into a man, baptized by great violence, in the American West. “The Kid” makes his way west from Tennessee and falls in with a band of marauders led by Glanton, a man who had “long forsworn weighing of consequences.” With contracts in hand from governors of Mexican states for Apache scalps they roam the “cauterized waste” of the deserts killing with impunity. They are accompanied by a man known as The Judge, who catalogs nature between battles and believes “whatever in creation exists my knowledge exists without my consent.”McCarthy has a unique ability to describe nature and territory the men travel. “The air was cold and clear and the country there and beyond lay in a darkness unclaimed by so much as an owl. A pale green meteor came up the valley floor behind them and passed overhead and vanished silently into the void.”That’s just one example. He also has a way with describing the violence men do to one another.This is a beautiful and terrifying book .
    • 5/5
      As usual, almost every page had a phrase I wanted to write down.
    • 4/5
      This book makes The Road look like a walk in the park ...
    • 5/5
      La violencia del espacio (el Oeste, que para el pensamiento estadounidense es casi mítico y fundacional) es captada en toda su crudeza por Cormac McCarthy en esta novela. La forma en la que los seres humanos son capaces de adentrarse en el horror y de seguir cometiéndolo. Un hombre que fue un juez encabeza a un grupo variopinto que recorre rl territorio recién conquistado a México tras la guerra México-Estadounidense y el norte del país, así van de Texas s Chihuahua, luego a Sonora, a Nuevo México, Arizona, Colorado y a California. McCarthy, con una prosa precisa y que no por la aridez que evoca deja de ser bella.
    • 4/5
      In the brutal world of the Texas-Mexico borderlands of the mid-nineteenth century, the teenage Kid is caught up in the Glanton gang’s mission to scalp Indians. Beautifully written, unbelievably violent, may make you lose your faith in humanity.
    • 5/5
      Experimental language describing horrid events and picking apart human nature; a violent philosophical adventure. There is a lot to pick at in this book. Fully engrossing and overwhelming.
    • 5/5
      This book rightly deserves a place as a classic of American literature, and this recording truly does it justice.
    • 1/5
      I read this on the strong recommendation by a well-read woman. What a disappointment . It had no charm at all, just endless violence. I don't think the landscape did anything for me either. Definitely a waste of my time. I later read The Road which had less violence , more tolerable than Meridian, and the movie was interesting. The terrible content of Meridian left me unable to see anything good about his writing style.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Very beautiful and intense. I felt such a sense of realism in the story and the way it was told.

      1 person found this helpful