The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended the westward expansion of the United States, 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 Tennessean who stumbles into a nightmarish world.
This week's book is Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and we'll be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury.
For continuity purposes we'll also be discussing Nigel Kneale's Quatermass and the Pit, the utility of time travel in addressing the problems of inchoate totalitarianism, and the wisdom of superimbibation.
