Shelfology Book Pairing

Or the Evening Redness in the West

by Cormac McCarthy

25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road: 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. One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.

by Donald Ray Pollock

In 1917, in that sliver of border land between Georgia and Alabama, Pearl Jewett ekes out an existence as a dispossessed farmer along with his three criminally-minded sons Cane, Cob, and Chimney. Hundreds of miles away, another farming family, the good-natured Fiddlers, have been swindled out of their family fortune while reeling from the disappearance of their son Eddie, who left to fight the Germans. When a crime spree sets the Jewetts on a collision course for the Fiddlers, an unlikely--and turbulent--relationship begins between the families. In the gothic tradition of Flannery O'Connor with a heavy dose of cinematic violence reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino, Donald Ray Pollock pens a bloody tale of dark and horrific conflict between two families in an era not so distant from today.