Patrick O'Neil read and liked Melissa Chadburn's review of Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West:

"McCarthy, Cormac (1985), Blood Meridien , Vintage International, NY, NY

I have no idea what happened in this novel. There was some scalping there, but it was the Godiva chocolates of scalping or some more decadent European brand only off...more McCarthy, Cormac (1985), Blood Meridien , Vintage International, NY, NY

I have no idea what happened in this novel. There was some scalping there, but it was the Godiva chocolates of scalping or some more decadent European brand only offered at Dean & Deluca. What I’m trying to say is this was the richest most dirty temptation of blood and wit offered in prose that I have ever come across, although admittedly I do not really remember the story I just read. It’s the details that clung to me, like dirty syringes poking into the inflated belly of the perch that skim the surface of Echo Park, the details and the fine way that McCarthy cradles the word is haunting.
I had been swimming in non-fiction and reading memoirs and this was a black belt version of the fiction I had been yearning for. Every fiction mentor I’ve had speaks of “the stage test” in which a writer asks themselves if all the elements of a stage are in each scene they’re writing. McCarthy exemplifies this not only in his ability to completely set and ground each scene but he starts off wide and then hones in on the intricacies so the reader sits at rapt attention waiting to be weaved in to the next scene and he does this line by line scene by scene. Every fourth page was underlined completely. In addition to this every fifth word was underlined. If I used my kindle as a barometer for the quality of novels I choose to purchase I would have to say this is not a book for the kindle this is a book I need to hold and love and coddle and return to every three months to jumpstart any writers rut I might find myself in. Contrary to that it is also the type of novel that makes writers question why they are even attempting to convey anything with words when someone else has been able to do so so masterfully.
For example, “They rode north along the river trace. The woods were bare and the leaves on the ground clutched little scales of ice and the mottled and bony limbs of the cotton woods were stark and heavy against the quilted desert sky. In the evening they passed through Tubac, abandoned, wheat dead in the winter fields and grass growing in the street there was a blind man on a stoop watching the plaza and as they passed he raised his head to listen.”-226
Haunting seems to be the very best word to describe this novel. You can’t read it and keep a clean loving psyche. Throughout the entire novel at least one of my dreams was laced with blood and guts and yet I found it beautiful. I felt safely distanced from it. I think perhaps this is why the main character, a boy never got a name. To protect the reader from being too attached or to allow the reader to be the boy to see everything. So I suppose either to create or dissipate distance. I’m not sure. I remember when I was younger I used to have dreams of blood and guts and all these dreams featured a boy. Later on (through court ordered therapy) I came to learn that this boy was me a representation my body chose as a safe way for me to experience this pain this longing a way to encourage myself to look after over and beyond my younger more injured self. But again there are no words of my own that can exemplify this better than McCarthy’s.
“Some by their beards were men but yet wore strange menstrual wounds between their legs and no man’s parts for these had been cut away and hung dark and strange from out their grinning mouths. In their wigs of dried blood they lay gazing up with ape’s eyes at brother sun now rising in the east.” -153
“They found the lost scouts hanging head downward from the limbs of a fire blackened paloverde tree. They were skewered through the cords of their heels with sharpened shuttles of green wood and they hung gray and naked above the dead ashes of the coals where they’d been roasted until their heads had charred and the brains bubbled in the skulls and steam sang from their noseholes. Their tongues were drawn out and held with sharpened sticks thrust through them and they had been docked of their ears and their torsos were sliced open with flints until the entrails hung down on their chests.” -227
I have to concur with Steven Shavirot "the scariest thing about Blood Meridian is that it is a euphoric and exhilarating book, rather than a tragically alienated one, or a gloomy, depressing one. . . Once we have started to dance, once we have been swept up in the game, there is no pulling back."

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