Blood Red Road Setting

The Dustlands

Welcome to the wasteland, folks. If you've ever watched Mad Max or played Fallout 4, then you already have a head start on understanding Blood Red Road's setting. Our unnamed locale is your classic post-apocalyptic desert, complete with over-the-top characters and brief glimpses into a once-thriving past.

Wrecker Studies 101

Before we begin our tour, let's examine what little we know about the wasteland's history. This place was once inhabited by a people known as "the Wreckers," who built giant cities and designed amazing machines. Sounds a bit like us, huh? Due to some massive unnamed ecological disaster, however, the society was crushed and replaced with something far stranger.

We get occasional glimpses of this past in the form of old, destroyed cities scattered throughout the landscape. Most of these small settlements were "swallowed by wanderin sand dunes, great waves of sand that 'ud cover places in minutes" until "the sands 'ud move on, an the place 'ud still be there" (4.15). Creepy.

We never get the inside dirt on what really went down with the Wreckers, but it's certainly inspiring us to recycle more.

The Grand Tour

Now that we've got that out of the way, let's look at the many different locations we visit in the novel. At its heart, Blood Red Road is a road movie: it follows a group of characters as they travel from location to location and learn about each other. So let's follow in their footsteps, shall we? Take a look:

• Silverlake—a.k.a. "Home Sweet Home." Silverlake seems like it was a pretty nice place when Saba and Lugh were growing up, but a brutal drought has turned it into an arid desert.
• Crosscreek—Crosscreek, where Mercy lives, is relatively close to Silverlake. It's insanely beautiful, however, and it gives us the sense that there are still a few sanctuaries in this unforgiving land.
• Hopetown—Hopetown is this universe's Mos Eisley: a wretched hive of scum and villainy. The King rules the place through a combination of Tonton butt-whoopings and chaal, so the populace is pretty much just criminally insane at this point.
• Freedom Fields—The King might do his business in Hopetown, but Freedom Fields is where he derives his power. This is where all of the chaal is grown. Big money. Freedom Fields is a huge bummer on every level, as a patch of good land this big could be used to save countless lives if it wasn't weren't on drugs.

And that's all for our tour, folks. We here at Team Shmoop's Post-Apocalyptic Journeys would like to thank you for joining us on this trip through Blood Red Road's dusty landscape. Come again soon. Or not. In fact, we'd be pretty happy if a post-apocalypse like this never became a reality.