Given the notoriously violent, tooth-andclaw subject matter of McCarthy's fiction, complimented by McCarthy's famous statement in "Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction," his 1992 New York Times interview with Richard B. Woodward, that "There is no such thing as life without bloodshed," McCarthy's indebtedness to the tradition of literary naturalism would seem to be self-evident, and yet Frye's monograph is remarkably the first book-length endeavor to undertake an influence study of this kind. Child of God, when held up to the light that the influence of American literary naturalism can shed, yields McCarthy's debt to naturalist works from the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth that focused on atavistic themes and, not least, the figure of the brute. After the first three "regional" novels (always a reductive phrase!) capturing the wilderness and the fecund rural nature of East Tennessee, McCarthy's Knoxville novel deals with nature writ large within the modern urban space rather than within an environment of rocks and stones and trees. Suttree uncovers "the brutality of economic indifference as class confronts class in a battle for resources that brooks no argument or moral principle outside the game of life" (58); nevertheless, like all of McCarthy s works, Suttree invests in what Frye terms "romantic naturalism," that is, a "manifestation of a material realm of evocative mystery and cosmological implication" (59), be it in the subtle brotherhood of McAnally Flats, Suttree s tortured soul, or this same anti-hero's devotion to the living.