BLOOD MERIDIAN Or the Evening Redness in the West

New York: Random House, 1985. First edition. Hardcover. A fine copy in a fine dust jacket. A fine, unread copy in a fine dust jacket. One of only 1883 copies sold before the book was remainered. Absolutely uncommon in this condition. In 1981 McCarthy (1933-2023) was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship worth $236,000. This windfall enabled him to travel the American Southwest researching his next book. This one. Packed with violence, truth, and screams from critics on both ends of the scale. When this book is read the massive force bearing down upon you is Cormac McCarthy, armed with the first onslaught of sustained virtuoso prose in the novel, a single all but breathless sentence running a page and a half long that opens with "A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of previous owners" and closes with "all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubing's like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools. (Inventory #: 15330)