SOURCE: Hislop, Andrew. “The Wild Bunch.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4490 (21-27 April 1989): 436.

In the following review, Hislop views Blood Meridian as more than a conventional Western, believing it to be a treatise on the interconnection of violence and culture.

The sheriffs and gun-slingers of European culture have long preferred the American West on film rather than in fiction. While even “spaghetti” Westerns have been roped in as intellectual property, the novelists of the “Wild West”, like Holly Martins in The Third Man, are still not considered quite worthy of literary discussion. Though the abuser-friendly graffiti of any urban American literary urchin able to make a pun of “crack” is almost instantly beamed across the Atlantic, Cormac McCarthy's extraordinary, poetic novel about the West, Blood Meridian, published to critical acclaim in the United States in 1985, has only just appeared in Britain.

The novel is indeed a bloody affair, which...