More work on the religious and broadly spiritual dimensions of his work is welcome in studies of Cormac McCarthy. Professor Potts's work fills an obvious gap in dealing with the Christian aspects of his characters and the societies about which McCarthy writes in the Appalachian novels. Potts is no less interested in the Border trilogy, and particularly The Crossing (1994), and his book provides much useful material on the more diffuse spirituality that permeates the three works. He recognizes, too, the focus on Gnosticism in the secondary literature on McCarthy, and there is some high-quality analysis of Suttree (1979) and Suttree's relationship with women. I agree with Potts that this is a neglected area, and it is very satisfying to read his nuanced account of Suttree's “trouble with women” (89).

For all its complex and theoretically informed reading of McCarthy's work, however, the book lacks a degree of coherence. There are too many long passages of secondary critical and philosophical material that sometimes bypass the primary texts and can be unhelpful to the reader trying to synthesize “sacrament,” theory, and primary text. It is hard to digest chunks of Judith Butler, or Hannah Arendt, without the direct, regular, and explicit relation of this material to the novels – although, to be fair, there is more work done of this kind in the closing third of the book. What I struggle with most, however, is keeping in mind the notion of “sacrament,” as the idea does not feature frequently enough – notwithstanding persuasive arguments, for example, about the offer of water as an act of mercy in McCarthy's fiction, and the association of similar acts with Christ in the Gospels. As a governing conceit, sacrament is interesting, but it does not govern in the way that I wanted it to. There is also a dubious idea in the book that the novels of the Border trilogy are more accessible than earlier works, and I do not accept that the violence in Blood Meridian (1985) is necessarily “prurient” and “gratuitous” (121). A visit to the McCarthy archive in the Southwestern Writers Collection in the Alkek Library at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas might have been useful in this respect. Correspondence lodged here between McCarthy and his editor at Random House, Albert Erskine, shows that Erskine was successful in persuading McCarthy to delete the self-castration scene in Child of God – reminding the reader that McCarthy and Erskine were both wary of scenes of violence that seemed not to have a wider purpose. It is also relevant to note that, if Erskine had always had his way, the characters from Suttree’s McAnally Flats that provoke speculation in the book under review would have been cut too.

The archive provides a sense of the depth and breadth of McCarthy's reading and research, and allows the critic an insight into the ways the work is inflected with ideas from both scientific and spiritual quarters. I would venture that a book on McCarthy that focusses on religion must also account for his interest in science, or it is vulnerable to accusations that its arguments are partial and lack richness of elaboration. Signs of the Sacrament, more generally, supports its assertions in a convincing fashion, and makes good use of the work of those who have written on McCarthy and the spiritual in the past. Occasionally, however, certain assertions do not seem wholly convincing: that McCarthy acknowledges the work of Jacques Lacan, Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida (139), for example, or that there are two direct biblical references in Bell's dreams in No Country for Old Men (2005) (78). McCarthy's The Sunset Limited: A Novel in Dramatic Form (2006) is a notable omission from the book, which is unfortunate as it concerns a very clear conflict between the secular and the spiritual, and is potentially fertile ground for a book like this one. If, as Potts argues, binaries like spiritual–secular obscure as much as they explain, then The Sunset Limited is a good place to conduct an investigation into how and why. I am a little frustrated, too, by the summaries of plot and character for the novels – if we're reading a book like this as McCarthy scholars, it's pretty safe to assume we don't need a precis, and if we're not McCarthy scholars, why would we be starting here? The following are small matters, I know, but Dave Holloway's name is spelled incorrectly in the index, there are missing references (page 6, for example, quotes Chip Arnold, but fails to provide a page number either in the text or in an endnote), “Borginnis” is spelled “Borginnes,” and “squeak” is transcribed as “squeek” in one quotation. Signs of the Sacrament is, however, a valuable contribution, and Potts is to be commended for applying complex critical and theological concerns to the fiction as he drives forward this very challenging area in McCarthy scholarship.