My research notes for Blood and Bone are now online at Necessary Fiction:
“The ugly fact is books are made out of books,” Cormac McCarthy once said. “The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.” But as well as appending those remarks to a list of his literary influences, McCarthy named the writers whose work he most dislikes (Marcel Proust, Henry James) and suggested that his own books are made not only out of others but against them as well. According to this view of things, literature is a form of protest against a sense of absence in the world. Since readers hardly need new work that merely echoes work already in existence, there must be, among the forces that compel a person to sit down and write a book, some lingering dissatisfaction with the books already written and some notion of a sort of book that has not been written before. Those forces are certainly what compelled me to write my novel Blood and Bone, a novel that contains traces of the books instrumental to its creation and that also, in a way, endeavors to unwrite them.
Thomas Keneally, David Malouf, Kate Grenville, Rohan Wilson, Geraldine Brooks, and Hannah Kent each score a mention for having influenced the writing of Blood and Bone in much the same way that Proust might have influenced Blood Meridian.
Infinite Patience 