Since I first read Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian some years ago I have been fascinated and at times bewildered by his amazing use of language. Honestly, his often obscure turns of phrase and his sometimes arcane words are one of the delights of the book. One of his favorite tools is the “like some” comparison. Having just finished Richard Poe’s Audible version of the novel, I was struck again by the vivid imagery of these “like some” statements. So I pulled up my Kindle version of the book and copied and pasted the thirty-something instances. (After creating this list I noticed a longer list of similes from Blood Meridian here that was compiled in 2017. Biblioklept includes all of the “like” similes whereas this list is only the “like some’s,” but check out that longer list as well.) Enjoy!

like some fairybook beast (p. 2)

like some wholly wretched baptismal candidate (p. 26)

like some demon kingdom summoned up or changeling land that come the day would leave them neither trace nor smoke nor ruin more than any troubling dream (p. 45)

like some reeking issue of the incarnate dam of war herself (p. 52)

like some deserter scavenging the ruins of a city he’d fled (p. 55)

like some heliotropic plague (p. 71)

like some great pale deity (p. 86)

like some loutish knight beriddled by a troll (p. 96)

like some instrument of ceremony (p. 101)

like some drunken djinn and resolve itself once more into the elements from which it sprang (p. 106)

like some fabled equine ideation out of an Attic tragedy (p. 110)

like some tatterdemalion guard of honor (p. 114)

Like some ignis fatuus belated upon the road behind them. (p. 115)

like some crazed defector in a gesture of defiant camaraderie (p. 132)

like some fabled storybook beast (p. 132)

like some third aspect of their presence hammered out black and wild upon the naked grounds (pp. 145-146)

like some strange vendor bound for market (p. 151)

like some reeking outland nurse (p. 153)

like some changeling (p. 155)

like some pale and bloated manatee surfaced in a bog (p. 163)

like some more ancient ossuary (p. 170)

like some terrible hatching (p. 207)

like some egregious saltland bard (p. 214)

like some queer unruly god abducted from a race of degenerates (p. 248)

like some storied hero (p. 264)

like some great balden archimandrite (p. 265)

like some wild thaumaturge out of an atavistic drama (p. 266)

like some scurrilous king stripped of his vestiture and driven together with his fool into the wilderness to die (p. 275)

like some medieval penitent (p. 275)

like some immense and naked barrister whom the country had crazed (p. 277)

like some dim neolithic herdsman (p. 282)

him like some mad dowser (p. 283)

like some naked species of lemur (p. 291)

like some monster slain in the commission of unnatural acts (p. 319)