Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West

“McCarthy is a writer to be read, to be admired, and quite honestly—envied.”

—Ralph Ellison

“McCarthy is a born narrator, and his writing has, line by line, the stab of actuality. He is here to stay.”

—Robert Penn Warren

“Mr. McCarthy has the best kind of Southern style, one that fuses risky eloquence, intricate rhythms and dead-to-rights accuracy.”

—The New York Times

“Cormac McCarthy is a Southerner, a born storyteller, a writer of natural, impeccable dialogue, a literary child of Faulkner … capable of black, reasonable comedy at the heart of his tragedy.”

—New Republic

“[McCarthy’s] lyrical prose never sacrifices necessary economies [and his] sense of the tragic is almost unerring.”

—Times Literary Supplement (London)

Your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time.

PAUL VALÉRY

It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrowing. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness.

JACOB BOEHME

Clark, who led last year’s expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a re-examination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier shows evidence of having been scalped.

THE YUMA DAILY SUN June 13, 1982