By the author of the critically acclaimed Border Trilogy,Blood Meridian is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion,brilliantly subverting 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 a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.

Blood Meridian,or the Evening Redness in the West is a 1985 Western novel by American author Cormac McCarthy.It was McCarthy's fifth book,and was published by Random House.

The narrative follows a teenage runaway referred to only as "the kid",with the bulk of the text devoted to his experiences with the Glanton gang,a historical group of scalp hunters who massacred Indians and others on the United States–Mexico borderlands in 1849 and 1850.The principal antagonist is the demonic Judge Holden,an extremely large and intelligent man who is utterly devoted to violence and conflict.Much of the book is based on Glanton gang member Samuel Chamberlain's My Confession,which has been criticized as unreliable,but Blood Meridian is historically accurate in general,and includes numerous references to contemporary occurrences.

Though the novel initially earned a lukewarm critical and commercial reception,it has since become widely recognized not only as McCarthy's masterpiece,but as one of the greatest American novels of the 20th century.