The Road

At the time, when I read this book, I’d just become a father. Naturally, the story about a father trying to protect his son in a harsh dystopian world was captivating for me and still is to this day.

I loved the book's gritty realism and felt as if I were walking beside the characters during the entire journey. I also found McCarthy’s writing style unique and something new from the best-selling paperbacks I’d often read before picking up his book.

This father and son duo set up residence in my heart.

I recall some scenes with such clarity that I still see them that way, even after subsequently watching the movie. Imagine having the sum of your possessions piled up in a shopping cart, and you’re on the road, excruciatingly aware that at any point, everything you have could be taken from you, including your loved ones.

If that thought doesn’t inspire a bout of enthusiastic wall-worshipping, then maybe you should read the book.  

Love would be the wrong word. This book scared the hell out of me.

I read this book when it first came out in 2006, before it had won the Pulitzer and the James Tait Black prizes, and there are still passages and scenes that haunt me to this day. This is one of the bleakest portrayals of what happens when civilisation collapses that I have read.

The Road is set in a near future affected by some unnamed cataclysm. McCarthy starts hard and does not let up until the last page when he throws us a flicker of hope… show more.

Holy crap, I thought when I finished this incredible, gripping, award-winning book of dystopian fiction — this could really happen!

It isn't the easiest book to read if only because McCarthy disliked the punctuation readers have come to expect. Why bother with apostrophes or quotation marks anyway?

But this story! A father and son, at least you think that is their relationship, are trying to survive after something -- we don't know what -- wiped out most of the world's population. They can trust no one but each other and find out quickly that nice guys finish dead.

It's one… show more.

This is a straight whisky of a dystopian novel. The prose is stark, all bones, no flesh, and the story fizzes along with a simple ‘journey’ plot. What you get along the way is skeletal poetry, honed so finely, so sparsely, so skillfully.

The prose is stripped of ornamentation, floridity, anything that detracts from the deep magnetism of this father and son’s quest through a dystopian wilderness. You end the novel breathless, praying this scenario never comes to pass, and in awe of McCarthy’s storytelling skills.

This is one of the bleakest books I have ever read. And then I read it again, and again.

Why? Because it is scary as hell, and extremely well written. It sets its claws into you and it won’t let go.

The Road is a dystopian masterpiece. The World has ended and what is left is mostly nothing but also horror almost beyond comprehension.

Murder, starvation, cannibalism, you name it. The book is scary because this could happen.

You are also deeply worried about the protagonists; the father and son of the story. In a World without hope, they… show more.

I read The Road when I was working three jobs, enrolled in university full-time, and trying to figure out what it meant to be an adult. I felt the gut-punch bleakness of McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic future, and yet despite all the gray, grim privation, I found hope in the Man and the Boy’s march toward…something. While it’s not quite a fantasy, the ashen world rendered in McCarthy’s beautifully austere language changed the way I write, and changed the way I read. There is a sobering warning that I hear echoed in The Odyssey and Gilgamesh; something like an Ozymandian warning:… show more.

I can’t say enough about this apocalyptic horror novel. The prose is beautiful, the realism adds to the tragedy, and the terror created is truly gut-wrenching. Everything that occurs in this story is realistic and powerful. This novel is so well done that the main characters don’t even need names for the reader to feel their pain. By reading this book, I learned exactly what high-level horror could truly be. If done right, horror can transcend into timeless art.

The Road does an exceptional job portraying the detail and feeling of a lost world. A father and son attempt to survive after a cataclysm ended the known world. Basic items of survival are portrayed in such a real way that the audience feels what the survivors do.

The rush at finding a clean apple to eat. Safe shelter. A sense of hope. McCarthy excels at minimal description and dialogue, and yet the richness of his work and his signature style shows through. I’m personally very inspired by how effective his worlds feel without being overly defined. He has a… show more.

This novel terrified me as well as taught me how to pace a scary, post-apocalyptic story. In this book—which I read twice—every tender moment between the boy and his father is juxtaposed against the harshness of the landscape or the imminent threats of violence and/or cannibalism. When I was writing my own thriller I thought of The Road and how it felt to be immersed in McCarthy’s world. I wanted my readers to be similarly caught up, and I wanted every moment of backstory to propel the reader forward. The scene where the father fills up the bathtub in The… show more.