“McCarthy’s long surge into academic and popular consciousness began more than twenty years ago, so finding fresh scholarly terrain is increasingly difficult. Taking a theoretical approach that is fresh and useful, Dorson proves that all is not exhausted. His study centers on the idea that McCarthy’s Western novels provide ‘a model for renewed narrative agency in the twenty-first century.’ Employing the term ‘counternarrative,’ Dorson takes a less reductive approach. . . . He argues that one should look for a mode in McCarthy that does not simply disturb and muddy cultural waters but instead casts a transformative influence across new millennial fiction. One of Dorson's strongest claims is that Blood Meridian’s horrible Judge Holden merely shelters the reader from the ‘real horror in the novel . . . the horror of the Real’—i.e., the horror of narrative stillness and silence hovering between and beneath the book’s violent incantations and soaring rhetoric. . . . Dorson provides an eloquent encapsulation of scholarly approaches regarding the affirmation and subversion of romantic narratives in the novels. And throughout he offers wonderful connections to Herman Melville and James Joyce. Highly recommended.”