SOURCE: "Cowboys and Nothingness," in The Village Voice, Vol. XXXI, No. 280, July 15, 1986, p. 48.

In the following review, O'Brien discusses Blood Meridian within the context of the Western genre, noting differences and similarities between the two.

The Western, being the simplest of genres, is also the most protean, ever ripe for new variations. For a moment in the '60s, Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone appeared to have arrived at its logical dead end, but writers today are taking a fresh look at the genre. It attracts like a power source, a link to the limitless. Reinventing the Western means re-inventing America, turning the creation epic upside down to come up with a different end-product: a new Texas, a new Mexico, a new definition of reality. Notions of the real, of course, change with alarming swiftness, so that The Wild Bunch or For a Few Dollars More, billed in...