This collection of essays from established and emerging scholars focusses especially on landscapes and borders throughout Cormac McCarthy's oeuvre, from novels to screenplays to dramas, from the Appalachian works to the southwestern fiction, as well as what editor Louise Jillett refers to as McCarthy's “cinematic aesthetic” (vii), this last reflected most obviously in Peter Josyph's contribution to the relatively sparse critical engagement with the 2013 film The Counselor (directed by Ridley Scott from a screenplay by Cormac McCarthy), but in interesting ways in other chapters, as well. Organized in five sections of three chapters each, Cormac McCarthy's Borders and Landscapes engages “Frontier Violence,” “Comparative Literature and Landscape,” “Bioregionalism and Nomadism in McCarthy's Western Literature,” “Liminal Thresholds” (a sort of catch-all section looking at everything from the poetics of paragraph breaks in The Road (2006) to Anthony Uhlmann's exploration of “Suttree, Joyce, and Flaubert”), and “Interdisciplinary Approaches.” As Jillett argues in her Preface, ecocritical and bioregional studies continue to grow in importance across numerous scholarly fields, and, along with critical approaches like post-humanism and animal studies, seem particularly well suited to engaging McCarthy's body of work.

What this collection adds to an already fairly well-established turn in McCarthy studies is both a nicely organized approach, and a refreshingly globalized vision. While many critical works have examined McCarthy's southwestern novels in particular vis-à-vis their physical, cultural, and/or colonial relationship with Mexico, few have directly engaged the similarities between the violent settler colonial history of North America and the equally violent settler colonial history of Australia, with their parallel legacies of devastated indigenous cultures and devastated natural landscapes. Part Two of the collection, “Comparative Literature and Landscape,” is especially relevant here as it considers the useful intersections between McCarthy's borders and landscapes, both linguistic and geographic, and those of prominent Australian authors Tim Winton and Patrick White. Jan Nordby Gretlund's “‘Knowledge Was Never a Matter of Geography’: Patrick White and Cormac McCarthy” traces the connections between European languages used to obsessively rename colonized landscapes in the US Southwest and the Australian interior, which is the setting for most of White's 1957 novel Voss. “The complexity of colonial invading and settling makes language a vehicle of conquest and the very land is suddenly endowed with concepts very different from those of the original population,” Gretlund points out (47). Both the scalphunters in McCarthy's Blood Meridian (1985) and the surveying party in Voss, ostensibly headed by the eponymous Voss, but in many ways guided by the character named Judd, progress over a hostile earth, at once claiming it for their culture while attempting to bloodily erase from it the indigenous cultures already inhabiting it. In tracing their narrative movements, Gretlund asserts a resonance in the authors’ rhetorical stylings with their “elaborate, almost ‘intoxicated’ poetic buildups” (53), and between McCarthy's judge and White's Judd, who resembles Judge Holden “in his sublime arrogance … The lasting difference is that unlike Judd, McCarthy's judge is never humbled” (52).

In Part Three, “Bioregionalism and Nomadism in McCarthy's Western Literature,” David Gugin's “The Blood of a Nomad: Environmental Stylistics and All the Pretty Horses” continues the fruitful dialogue between the arid landscapes of the American Southwest and much of Australia by investigating literary bioregionalism and what he terms environmental stylistics by looking at McCarthy's novel alongside other Australian texts, and also by teasing out of All the Pretty Horses “an analysis of linguistic patterns” by locating and identifying thirty “‘nomadic sentences’ … that contain a minimum of five independent or dependent clauses” – sentences, Gugin claims, that indicate a “nomadic syntax [that] marks the novel from the very beginning” (88).

Part Five of the collection, “Interdisciplinary Approaches,” opens with Paul Sheehan's “Western Scourge: Myth, Language, and Law in Blood Meridian and Deadwood,” which wrestles with perhaps the two most violent and profane texts to engage the North American West. He situates both Blood Meridian and Deadwood within American cinema and a taxonomy of generic archetypes which the texts revere and destroy while tracking the continuing reinvention of the western across multiple forms of media. McCarthy and David Milch, producer of Deadwood (HBO, 2004–6), Sheehan argues, allow us to see “in the shift from film to literature, and from film to television … the Western's ability reorient and rejuvenate itself” (180). In fact, he contends, “Blood Meridian is a novel that aspires to be a film,” but not necessarily a western, rather a war film, specifically a Vietnam war film, having more in common with Apocalypse Now (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) than with golden-age westerns. Deadwood is equally derivative and innovative in its simultaneous embrace and rejection of classic western tropes, Shakespearean and Dickensian dialogue, and motifs of Victorian-era theater. While they are hardly the first western texts to de-familiarize the genre, they are, Sheehan says, “the first to do so by using paradoxical innovations of form … they turn historical realism against itself, by invoking non-Western movie genres” (186).