SOURCE: A review of Blood Meridian, in Western American Literature, Vol. XXI, No. 1, Spring, 1986, pp. 59-60.

In the following review, Baines comments briefly on the "cruelty," "inhumanity," and "gore" present in Blood Meridian.

Set in the Southwest of the mid-nineteenth century, Blood Meridian does not invite confusion with any romantic notion of the West prevalent in that century or this. Cormac McCarthy reconstructs that West as a Daliesque stage upon which characters and forces often resonant of Shakespeare and the Bible act out their roles. Loosely based upon, or more accurately, around the Yuma Crossing Massacre of 23 April, 1850, and some of its principals, the book rises from its beginning above the mean particulars of history to universal certainties and uncertainties, the stuff of serious fiction.

McCarthy's book focuses on cruelty, perhaps man's most apparent quality in the world the author creates. The book's inhumanity is not—as is...