Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West
by Cormac McCarthy
Narrated by Richard Poe
Why Listen to This Audiobook?
Richard Poe reads McCarthy's most unrelenting novel like a man reciting scripture from a religion where violence is the only god.
- Great if you want: dense literary darkness and one of fiction's most terrifying villains
- Listening experience: relentless and hypnotic — McCarthy's prose demands full attention
- Narration: Poe's deep, grave delivery matches the novel's Old Testament weight
- Skip if: graphic, unrelenting violence is a dealbreaker for you
Listen to Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West on Audible →
About This Audiobook
Blood Meridian follows the teenage Kid across the Texas-Mexico borderlands in the mid-nineteenth century, where he falls in with the Glanton gang, a scalp-hunting outfit contracted by regional governments that descends into indiscriminate slaughter. McCarthy's novel is one of the most violent in American literature, and also one of the most philosophically serious, centered on the Judge, a figure of near-supernatural menace who articulates a vision of violence as the primary truth of human existence.
Richard Poe narrates with the biblical cadence that McCarthy's prose demands, his voice moving through the novel's long, unpunctuated sentences with a natural authority that honors both the beauty and the horror of the language. The Judge's speeches are among the most challenging passages in the American literary canon to deliver aloud, and Poe gives them a weight that makes McCarthy's argument land with its full philosophical force.
