Blood Meridian

In 1849, a fourteen-year-old known only as the Kid drifts from Tennessee into Texas and northern Mexico during the violent aftermath of the Mexican–American War. After surviving a disastrous filibustering expedition, he joins the historical John Joel Glanton’s company of scalp hunters, men employed by authorities in Chihuahua to collect bounties for Apache scalps. Under the intellectual and physical domination of the enigmatic Judge Holden, the expedition becomes an indiscriminate campaign of murder across deserts, settlements and Indigenous homelands.

Drawing partly on accounts of the Glanton Gang, the novel dismantles heroic versions of westward expansion and the conventional Western adventure. Its biblical scale and uncompromising violence place bounty hunting, territorial conquest and private warfare within a larger meditation on human cruelty, complicity and the attempt to turn history into myth.