The Road

The Road is the most terrifying book Cormac McCarthy ever wrote, and McCarthy spent his career writing terrifying books. Published in 2006, it follows a nameless father and his young son as they push a shopping cart through a post-apocalyptic America. The world has been destroyed — the cause is never specified — and what remains is ash, silence, and roving bands of cannibals. There is almost no food. There is no law. The sun is hidden behind a permanent gray sky.

The plot, such as it is, consists of the father and son walking south toward the coast, hoping without evidence that something better awaits. Along the way, they scavenge for food, hide from other survivors, and have conversations so spare and so tender that they will shatter you. The boy asks his father if they are "the good guys." The father says yes. The boy asks how they can tell. The father says they carry the fire. This exchange, in a book stripped of almost everything, carries the weight of all human morality.

McCarthy's prose has never been barer. Gone are the baroque sentences of Blood Meridian and Suttree. The Road is written in short, declarative fragments, punctuated by descriptions of desolation so vivid they feel hallucinatory. There are no quotation marks. There are almost no proper nouns. The effect is of reading something carved into bone. This is a book about the end of the world that is really about the only thing that matters: the love between a parent and a child.

The Road earns its place because it does something that should be impossible: it takes the most exhausted genre in fiction — the post-apocalyptic survival story — and makes it feel entirely new by stripping it down to its emotional core. There are no exciting action sequences, no clever rebuilding of civilization, no explanation of what happened. There is only a father trying to keep his son alive and good in a world that has ceased to reward either quality.

The book's power comes from its absolute refusal to offer false comfort. McCarthy does not sentimentalize the father-son relationship. The father is capable of violence. The boy's innocence is not portrayed as wisdom but as a vulnerability that the world is trying to destroy. Yet the book is not nihilistic. The boy's insistence on compassion — his desire to help strangers even when helping strangers could mean death — is presented as something irreducible, something that survives even the end of everything. The Road is McCarthy's most human book, and for a writer often accused of coldness, it is his most devastating argument that love matters.

The Road was published in 2006 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2007. Oprah Winfrey selected it for her book club, introducing it to millions of readers who might never have picked up McCarthy otherwise. The book debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. It was adapted into a feature film in 2009, starring Viggo Mortensen. Critics have called it one of the greatest novels of the 21st century. The book has been translated into dozens of languages and has sold millions of copies worldwide. It is regularly cited in discussions of climate change and environmental collapse as a literary representation of worst-case scenarios. McCarthy's stripped-down prose style in The Road influenced a generation of literary fiction writers.