Blood Horses, by John Jeremiah Sullivan
2026-06-07
Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan's best known work, is one of the best essay collections of recent years, making the New York Times' list of 100 best books the 21st Century. Based on that, I picked up Blood Horses, Sullivan's only other book, released about a decade earlier.
Blood Horses is the grappling of a young man as he explores the life of his father through both family history and an examination of one his interests, horse racing. The threads intertwine, eventually showing how pony culture shaped the Sullivans' home state of Kentucky, and how being from Kentucky shaped the Sullivan family in turn.
It's an ambitious concept and it doesn't always work. We learn that Sullivan's father, a sports reporter, great love was actually baseball. Facially, this makes the younger Sullivan's deep dive into horses a little odd, especially since he comes into his research for the book now knowing much about horse racing. However the device does work in that we do learn what made Sullivan Sr. tick, despite his being not an easy man to know and his lack of shared interests with his son beyond the written word.
Blood Horses is necessarily a grief-inflected early work. Neither the natural pacing nor studied eye of Pulphead's best pieces are present here; the narrative alternately gallops along and plods, and the author's emotions flow in ways that don't always serve it well. Still, like most of Sullivan's work, Blood Horses is interesting, enjoyable, original writing.
★★★☆☆
Tags: books