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McCarthy is a wonderfully consistent writer, but Blood Meridian must surely be the peak of his form. His use of language is as always marvelously poetic, but here even more he seems to tap some literary well, from which springs sentence after sentence of perfect construction:

A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

This single sentence is not typical in length but is exactly representative of the form and style that is here in such quality on every page. Read this passage aloud, and read it slowly. Notice the alliterative phrases, the subtle internal rhymes, the rhythm, the deliberate noise of each syllable, so that the meaning and power is transferred not only in the words themselves but in their very voicing. This is not a hastily composed run on sentence: this is a prose poem, meticulously constructed. Every word chosen for its meaning; its artistic power.

And that is Blood Meridian. Three hundred and fifty pages, and every single one like this. Each word in all those thousands of paragraphs deliberately selected; not a single one carelessly cast. And in service of what are such carefully-chosen words employed? Human violence. The depravity of power. This book drives like a spear to the heart of the dark side of humanity. That hidden but very real side of humanity. It is on free and open display here, and the reader is asked to look - not just to glance momentarily and then look away, but to stare and stare again and to stare repeatedly and again still - to be confronted with and to see and acknowledge the truth of what is real and what is within us all and will be always.