Entanglement between two macroscopic atomic ensembles induced by measurement on an ancillary light system has proven to be a powerful method for engineering quantum memories and quantum state transfer. Here we investigate the feasibility of such methods for generation, manipulation, and detection of genuine multipartite entanglement (Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger and clusterlike states) between mesoscopic atomic ensembles without the need of individual addressing of the samples. Our results extend in a nontrivial way the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen entanglement between two macroscopic gas samples reported experimentally in [B. Julsgaard, A. Kozhekin, and E. Polzik, Nature (London) 413, 400 (2001)]. We find that under realistic conditions, a second orthogonal light pulse interacting with the atomic samples, can modify and even reverse the entangling action of the first one leaving the samples in a separable state.