Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
by Cormac McCarthy
An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, **Blood Meridian** brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west." Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.