In Cormac McCarthy's Violent Destinies: The Poetics of Determinism and Fatalism, editors Brad Bannon and John Vanderheide collect eleven essays that constitute an intriguing intervention into a long-running question in McCarthy Studies: to what degree is McCarthy's world one in which some external being, force, or structuring principle determines the lives of characters? The book widens the scope of what is possible—perhaps required—as scholars unravel the philosophical underpinnings of McCarthy's world. The particular concerns that animate this collection, our editors tell us in a useful introduction, are “McCarthy's interests in questions of fate, free will, theological determinism, and human agency” (3)—concerns that began to crystallize among McCarthy's critics some years ago. Nevertheless, the editors continue, until now no monograph or collection of essays has focused specifically on the place of determinism and fatalism in McCarthy. This is true, our editors correctly claim, despite near-universal acknowledgement of the roles of both in the writer's fictional worlds and plenty of evidence (e.g., 2017's “The Kekulé Problem”) of McCarthy's continuing investment in these matters. Of course, to develop such an observation into a claim, implied or explicit, about the necessity of a book-length engagement is to beg the question of what the editors mean by “determinism” and “fatalism.”Bannon and Vanderheide offer a useful definition that envelops both terms. This definition is worth quoting at some length, before we challenge a key aspect of it: In its most basic sense, determinism is the notion that all events are necessary, whether they are dictated by the physical laws of the universe (causal determinism), the will of an omnipotent creator (theological determinism), or both. If events are in fact determined in either of these manners … then humans cannot truly determine their actions and free will is an illusion. Fatalism, on the other hand, is the notion that certain events have been determined and will come to pass one way or another. The classic example is that of Oedipus: if fate holds ultimate sway, then no matter what Oedipus does, he will kill his father and marry his mother. He is perhaps free to do what he likes in the meantime, but regardless of what actions he takes to avoid this result, it will necessarily occur because it has already been predetermined; it is inevitable. … Determinism [on the other hand] would dictate that all the events that take place do so necessarily, and not one detail could have been different. (5) As we see, this definition is clear and coherent, which is crucial insofar as it frames much of the good work the collection's essays undertake in their multifaceted readings of McCarthy.That said, there is one bone worth picking: while the definition of “determinism” and “fatalism” works well when operationalized, the choice of terms itself is unfortunate. What Bannon and Vanderheide are calling “determinism” and “fatalism” better would be called “hard determinism”—which typically functions in exactly the way the editors describe “determinism” working—and “soft determinism,” which indeed is both “fatalistic” and to some degree open-ended in terms of how it understands the means by which we arrive at our ends.1 A good example of soft determinism is the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose perspectivism both valorizes free choice and often insists on implacable outcomes.2 Sometimes, though, even soft determinisms are pretty vague about the contours of our “fated” ends. Hence, Bannon and Vanderheide construct a dichotomy of sorts here—determinism versus fatalism—that the essays necessarily reveal to be something closer to a spectrum, especially as this “dichotomy” arises in McCarthy.Bone picked, we should give credit where credit is due: this collection does realize the promise the editors make in the introduction, enabling readers to “more fully engage and explicate the greater scope of his [McCarthy's] apparently prodigious theological and philosophical interests … to achieve a greater understanding of the many complex viewpoints that inform his literary aesthetic” (7). Three of the collection's essays offer readings of the Border Trilogy. “Romance and Naturalism in Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses,” by James Giles, argues adroitly that in the Border Trilogy's first volume, a tension between romantic and naturalistic codes and tropes operates as an aesthetic analogue for the novel's engagement with a philosophical dialectic between determinism and fatalism. In conversation with previous critics such as Jay Ellis and Megan Riley McGilchrist, Giles shows how All the Pretty Horses is in part a romance that inherits, renews, and extends various romantic aesthetics. By contrast, Giles further shows us, All the Pretty Horses also inherits, renews, and extends the Western's longstanding investment in literary naturalism (itself an aesthetic analogue or series of analogues for scientific and philosophical naturalisms, which tend to be deeply deterministic). It is through the tension between the novel's romance and naturalism, Giles concludes, that McCarthy “creates a richly satisfying text” (40).The collection's third essay, Dennis L. Sansom's “God, Evil, Suffering, and Human Destiny: Learning from the ‘Teachers,’ ” takes up the theological problem of evil in the trilogy—that is to say, the thorniest issue for all the Abrahamic faiths, which we can state as the following question: why does man suffer if he is made in the image of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omnipresent God?3 Sansom narrows his investigation to scenes in which we meet the trilogy's thirteen “teachers,” a term of Sansom's creation that works well for his purposes. By “teacher,” he means the thirteen characters who “give extended, didactic lessons … and, as good teachers, prod the reader to think hard about serious and arresting aspects of God, evil, suffering, and human destiny” (68). Sansom argues that three primary strains of thought emerge in the trilogy—he calls these nihilistic determinism, purposeful determinism, and open destiny—to compete for readers' assent in “a grueling, acute philosophical-theological reflection” that refuses easy conclusions (69). Sansom is most compelling when he approaches how the possibility of a stable theodicy arises in the trilogy, while he is least compelling in those sections that treat nihilism (especially insofar as Sansom uses the idea of the eternal return as a stand-in for nihilism in McCarthy, which is a brutally reductive reading of Nietzsche and Nietzsche's influence on McCarthy).The last essay in Cormac McCarthy's Violent Destinies to dive into these novels is Petra Mundik's “‘A Clamorous Tide of Unforeseen Consequence’: Heimarmene in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy.” Mundik's thoughtful piece reanimates her influential engagement with the dynamic exchange between Gnostic belief and McCarthy's fictions. Here, she reads the play between determinism and agency in the trilogy as that between heimarmene (the abortive state created by the demiurge) and gnosis (wisdom of and transcendence by way of communion with the pure, alien God). More than willing to allow for how the trilogy invites multiple readings of a determinism-versus-agency opposition, Mundik convincingly claims that nevertheless we can “identify a common thread … the law of cause and effect” (219). If we foreground the trilogy's Gnosticism in light of this law we reach the conclusion that “the path of our lives may be ruled by maleficent cosmic forces, but free will remains in our ability to transcend these forces on a spiritual level” (231).Just as three of the collection's pieces turn our attention to the trilogy, so too do three essays direct readers to McCarthy's early-career novels—that is, those texts that comprise his “Tennessee Period,” or the Appalachian novels. Woods Nash's essay, “‘All Things Fought’: Fate, Violence, and the Illusion of a Lockean Social Contract in Cormac McCarthy's Child of God,” is of particular interest, insofar as by reading John Locke and McCarthy together Nash effectuates something truly new. He focuses on Child of God and argues that the text at all three key levels—individual, social, and theological—subverts readers' ability to situate the Sevier County, Tennessee, it depicts within a Lockean world. Given that Locke's social-contract theory largely undergirds the United States' central political documents and structures, Nash is implying that McCarthy, with Child of God's deterministic ethos, offers a distressingly convincing deconstruction of the same. Nash is most compelling when he reveals how the stories of McCarthy's protagonist, Lester Ballard, and Ballard's community, Sevier County, conform to a Lockean state of war. In other words, Nash shows us that Ballard never enjoys a social contract or a state of nature, and neither does anybody else in the county. Nash is less convincing when he argues that Child of God operates outside a Christian metaphysics (which is the ground for Locke's philosophy and which McCarthy appears to explicitly signal when he introduces Ballard as a “child of God much like yourself perhaps”4). I say this because traditional Judeo-Christian theodicy follows Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in explaining evil as a “fall” from God's grace made possible by man's freedom to will, and both the Old Testament and New Testament are rife with accounts of entire “fallen” communities (e.g., Sodom and Gomorrah). Why is Sevier County not just another of the “cities of the plain” that has turned its back on the Christian God and would do well to watch over its shoulder?Both of our editors work with the Appalachian novels in their individual contributions. Vanderheide's “Doom's Adumbration: Suttree and the Problem of Fatalism” addresses the last novel of the Tennessee Period, which is McCarthy's only urban novel. Vanderheide offers a Gilles Deleuze- and Félix Guattari-inspired reading of Suttree that follows from Deleuze and Guattari's valorization of Anglo-American literature's “traitorous” characters who flee ossifying social structures. Vanderheide constructs a compelling case that the social structures that constrain Suttree, though, are so strong as to severely limit options for traitorous flight. Vanderheide especially is persuasive when he shows how Suttree's privileges—stemming from his racial, class, and gender positions—render him both agent of and subject to the stratification he bemoans. Given its alignment with the protagonist's point of view, Vanderheide concludes, we can say the same thing about McCarthy's novel. Intriguingly, Bannon's piece operates as a complementary and equally counterintuitive exploration of determinism in the Tennessee Period texts. That is, while Vanderheide's essay reveals privilege to be something of a trap that limits agency in McCarthy, Bannon's piece, “Fatal Loss and Teleological Blindness in McCarthy's Tennessee Novels,” shows how ignorance of one's destiny can beget agency. Bannon reads the Appalachian novels as an “elegiac quartet” possessed of “a kind of conclusive symmetry” in which we can trace the origins of myriad McCarthian metaphysical concerns (243, 265). The essential insight of this provocative piece is Bannon's contention that in the Tennessee Period texts—and in later McCarthy novels, too, it would seem—ignorance of one's fate can grant him or her a kind of free will. This is because “knowledge” of one's fate often is productive, rather than merely reflective, of that fate in McCarthy's oeuvre—that is, this kind of “knowledge” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in McCarthy.Perhaps not surprisingly, given the collection's subject matter and extant criticism's frequent insistence on viewing this novel as McCarthy's greatest achievement, four of the eleven essays analyze determinism's place in Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West. In “Holden and Chigurh: Cormac McCarthy and the Ethics of Power,” Adrian Mioc moves primarily between Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men to argue that we can read McCarthy's most horrifying characters, Judge Holden and Anton Chigurh, as ethical. Mioc grounds this premise on the distinction William Blake, disagreeing with Aristotle, draws between moral concerns and “character” understood as something more like one's inclinations and abilities (which is to say, character read as one's powers, as they relate to the human capacity to actualize power as such). From here, Mioc works with Baruch Spinoza and Nietzsche—as well as Deleuze and Guattari's readings of both—to unravel an ethics of power operative in each of the aforementioned novels. Perhaps the most intriguing effect of Mioc's persuasive case that the judge and Chigurh are possessed of coherent ethics, which they follow to the letter, is that when revealed these ethics just are not terribly convincing.5 Hence, a reader—or at the very least, this reader—experiences a welcome diminishment of each villain.Robert Kottage's “Mysteries of the Meridian Revealed: McCarthy's Anachronistic Tarot,” as well as Tom Cull's “Freaking Determinism: The Image of the Wild Man in Blood Meridian,” both take New Historicist angles on Blood Meridian. Kottage eyes one element in McCarthy's first Western that virtually screams for treatment in a collection like this—the tarot cards. Necessarily operating in conversation with John Sepich's enormously influential Notes on Blood Meridian (2003), as well as a host of sources relevant to tarot card history, Kottage unveils the centrality of the tarot to the fatalism so ever-present in Blood Meridian. For his part, Cull contextualizes McCarthy's fifth novel within the carnival-show culture of nineteenth-century America, as well as the 1980s of the novel's publication. He shows us how the connection of judge-to-freak functions as double-layered, self-reflexive historiography. This connection occasions reflection on the relationship between history's victors and victims, as well as the fraught nature of McCarthy's own commitment to viewing human history in a judgelike manner as the always-unfolding effect of continual bloodshed. As Cull writes, “McCarthy's narrative performs what he sees as the dangerous logic of a revision that attempts to stand outside history and re-order its chaotic archives into narrative coherency. The judge is the metonym for this re-ordering” (279).Speaking of chaotic archives, the final Blood Meridian-centered essay of the collection is Theo Finigan's “‘Archives of Our Own Devising’: Structural Fatality in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West.” Finigan shares a nimble Derridian argument. He applies Jacques Derrida's reading of the nature of the archive and archivist to a reading of Holden's attempt to become “suzerain” largely through archival work. Finigan's analysis deeply troubles the judge's claims to agency, because, as Derrida shows us, the archivist's assumed agency—especially in epistemological terms, which manifest themselves as the archivist proper's claim to “objectivity”—is undermined by the structuring power of the archive itself. Moreover, this structuring power always already stands a priori to the archivist's work. Hence, the judge-as-archivist is always already archived.Rasmus R. Simonsen's essay, “Guns and Material Determinism in The Road,” is unfortunately the only piece from the collection to address McCarthy's latest novel. Simonsen moves away from a subject-centered reading of The Road to focus on how the catastrophe that precipitates the novel's plot reveals the fragility of man's relationship with the world's materiality, even as it opens new ways of thinking about the same. While Simonsen certainly is not wrong about this assertion—and while the tour he offers readers of thing-thinking philosophy is at times intriguing—he makes a series of metaphysical claims that demand rather than earn the reader's assent. Likewise, it is further unfortunate that Vanderheide and Bannon's collection writ large does not offer exactly what Simonsen avoids: a character-centric reading of The Road that addresses the tension in that novel between hard and soft determinisms for human subjects, particularly in light of the novel's ostensible happy ending.This criticism aside, our editors have compiled a thoughtful, multifaceted collection of essays. This volume enters into McCarthy Studies as an important work, particularly as interest in McCarthy's philosophy grows from within and without the domains of traditional literary criticism and literary theory.