GA Book Reviews

[JamesSavik]

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

 

ISBN: 978-0-307-47212-0

 

The Road is a post apocalyptic story of a father and son trying to survive in a radiation seared world under the deadly chill of nuclear winter. The unspeakable has happened. It is several years after humanity's final war has killed most of the worlds population. The balance of that population has fallen into barbarism and cannibalism.

 

The world is dead and covered with the ash of its atomic funeral pyre. The trees are dead. The grass is dead. Animals are dead. Hope is dead. All that is left is the shattered, ruined and melted monuments of a dead world sparsely populated with the last humans who are dying slowly of radiation, cancer and starvation.

 

I offer no spoilers to this book. It is a traumatic experience. It is as if Faulkner had written a epitaph for the damned: a masterpiece terrible and magnificent in its horror.

 

If fantasy monsters don't scare you, this will. Vampires, werewolves and even aliens are merely the boogieman under the bed of children. The Road will and should scare the hell out of you because you know that it could happen. It is a horror story for our time; a slap in the face for those in denial.

 

My only criticism is scientific: if the nuclear war had been severe enough for the radiation to take out all of the plants and animals, humans would also be gone in short order. Besides for that minor quibble, the book is absolutely authentic in every other detail.

 

The Road is bleak, stark, heartbreaking and miserable. You will taste the blood. You feel the cold. You smell the decay and mouldering death. There is no later. This is later. The end of all things.

 

This is a book that requires some courage because through it you will gaze into the maw of the abyss and you will see it staring back at you.

 

 

________________________

 

The Road wikipedia page.

 

Cormac McCarthy homepage

 

NY Times Book Review

[Wynter]

The Road is a brilliant book and I second this review. My only addition would be that while the setting is indeed bleak, the relationship between father and son is heart-warming and provides a profound counterpoint to the rest of the story.

 

I'll add a review of my own later, just wanted to agree on The Road.

[myself_i_must_remake]

way to start something cool james! <3