SOURCE: A review of Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West, in Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 9, 1985, p. 2.

In the following review Nolan discusses the "gruesome pilgrimage" undertaken by the protagonist and the writing style of the author.

The apocalyptic landscape of Cormac McCarthy's harrowing and remarkable fifth novel is a blasted purgatorial heath, a hellish waste of thorns and buzzards where a malevolent sun squats and pulses like some great fire at earth's end. Across this tortured region of death and fear moves a crew of loathsome brigands as foul and evil as the arid waste they seem condemned to roam.

Blood Meridian is a fiction purportedly based on historical events that took place in the Southwestern United States and in Mexico in 1849–1850. Its central antihero is "the kid," a nameless lad still in his teens when first he demonstrates his "taste for mindless...