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Cormac McCarthy has become infamous for a signature, inimitable style: lurid violence; mystical and metaphysical themes; and abstruse, laconic, and deadened prose. Petra Mundik's A Bloody and Barbarous God ties these quantities together, offering an essential concordance for the Good Books of McCarthy, including Blood Meridian, the Border Trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain), No Country for Old Men, and The Road. At the heart of the book is the assertion that "McCarthy's novels are enriched by a system of metaphysics that draws on the teachings of various esoteric traditions, namely, Gnosticism, Christian mysticism, and Buddhism" (5). What follows is an extensive journey through McCarthy's later novels, with Mundik as a priest taking the reader beneath the rich and complex surface to reveal the secrets hidden therein. Though dense enough to inhibit a straightforward reading, A Bloody and Barbarous God serves as an essential resource and valuable companion for any reader of the aforementioned novels.
McCarthy's fiction occurs within a contemporary American Judeo-Christian milieu, but, as Mundik details, the spirituality therein draws more from Old World religion than orthodox Christianity. She gathers disparate systems of metaphysics under the umbrella of the "Perennial Philosophy," a term coined by Aldous Huxley (from Leibniz) which holds there is a "Highest Common Factor" to all traditional religions and that spiritual experiences and revelation are "potentially accessible through every religion" (2). Some of the traditions Mundik touches upon will be familiar to the reader—namely Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, and Sikhism. But Mundik, following McCarthy, also surveys the tenets of Gnosticism, a second-century movement that emerged from a "syncretic blending" of Christian, Hellenic, Babylonian, Egyptian, and Iranian religious traditions, among others....