Brood Meridian

With Blood Meridian, McCarthy had traded the woods and caves and backroads of the Southeast for the plains and deserts and big skies of the Southwest. After Blood Meridian he simplified the language and softened the violence in his books; his subsequent novels still boast sizable body counts, but there’s less glee in the killing, and corpses are radically less likely than heretofore to get scalped and/or fucked. The other big change was editorial: Albert Erskine retired from Random House in 1987, after twenty-two years of failing to deliver for McCarthy (or McCarthy for him) the kind of commercial and critical success that had come to Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, and Eudora Welty.