The Road
Author: McCarthy, Cormac
Tags: post-apocalyptic, horror, edifying, audio
Timeline: between Wednesday, October 1, 2025 and Wednesday, October 15, 2025
“When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. ”
This story is not graphic but still manages to be emotionally brutal, as I read I felt the same as I did watching ‘No Country for Old Men’, like Anton Chigurh is gonna show up with his hydraulic hammer any second. I had to stop several times because I had disaster fatigue. And yet, when story ends, though mournful, it leaves the reader with at least some small hope and the sense that whatever problems you might have it could always be worse.
Its about a dying man and his 9(?) year-old son wandering through post-nuclear-war (now nuclear winter) America: nothing good happens until the end when the man finally passes away and another family group adopts the boy.What was most striking about the story is how the man continues on, horror after horror, disaster after tragedy because his priorities have boiled down to one thing only: preserving the life of his child. The man’s resolve to continue in the face of desolation, pain, privation, entirely and only for his son comes through in a way that anyone who is/has been a parent must surely understand. In flashbacks we learn that the mother, the man’s wife(?) has left them to commit suicide because she has lost all hope.
I only noticed two evolutions in character: the boy matures during the story and by the end the man knows that there is no point trying to hide the gruesome realities from the kid since he has hardened to them. And the man who at the beginning of the story intends to die with the child (and possibly shooting the boy) rather than leave him to an inevitable, lonely death is by the end, willing (demanding) for the boy to go on without him.