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The Road is a work of “Post-Apocalyptic Fiction”. This is a genre that, and this might suprise you, is not quite comedy, not quite satire, but instead, something along the lines of a brutal and searing look at the world as it might be just after some form of nuclear holocaust or errant meteor has pretty much killed just about everything on the burnt up, ashen-skied skeleton of what used to be our planet.

Which is not to say that it doesn’t have it’s darker moments, Cormac does deal with some issues that some might find disturbing, for lack of a better word, such as cannibalism, slavery, rape, and, in one of the most uplifting moments, a baby smoldering on a skewer.

However, on the whole, I found The Road to be a light hearted and touching portrayal of one man’s love for his son illustrated through a mischievous romp through a dark, barren wasteland to try to find a beach, despite the ever present threat of starvation, rape, suicide, sickness, or death by cannibalism.

No, seriously, I have to say I had higher hopes for this book. I mean — post apocalyptic? How does it get more intense than that? We’re talking, and I’m not exaggerating in any way, END OF THE WORLD TYPE STUFF here!!!!! The Day After, Mad Max, Armageddon, Independence Day, most of Jerry McGuirre — The imminent end of all life as we know it is cool. . . but the lone survivors of the planet AFTER the end as they try to put things back together — That’s gotta be ten times as cool.

Or so I thought.

Actually the book starts out at a pretty timid pace. And by timid, I mean, mind numbingly uninteresting. And by starts out, I mean the whole book. There is no prologue of any kind. We have no idea what happened to the planet but there are, evidently, no resources. Survivors of whatever caused the ash to cover the ground and unpotablize all the rivers and lakes, are forced to scavage around hoping to find stashes of resources from before the Event (since Cormac won’t tell us what to call it, I’ll call it that). Our window into this world is from the perspective of one guy and his son who are doing just that. Wandering around trying to find abandoned houses, shops, pharmacies, bars, restaurants, whatever that may have food, water, fire, gasoline, blankets, shoes or pretty much anything else that may come in handy after the end of the world.

Predictably, you have good guys and bad guys and the assumption made by the author is that the bad guys have teamed up and seem to be roaming the countryside looking for good guys to force into slavery, first. Rape second. And then provide dinner later. And by provide dinner, I don’t mean pick up the tab. I mean, they literally are the dinner for these bad guys.

So we have the guy and his son. Roaming tribes of bad guys. Random stashes of food and supplies. One really really long walk for the guy and his son, interrupted briefly and always in the nick of time, by discovering mostly houses that the other people wandering around haven’t found yet and then punctuated by tense moments in which they are hiding from the next roaming bunch of cannibals that they happen to hear coming their way.

Lather, rinse, repeat that in any number of combinations and if you do it enough, you’ll eventually, with luck, come to the end of the book when Cormac tidies things up neatly in an overly convenient and thoroughly disappointing ending that leaves you wondering how you’ll get the 4 hours of your life that you spent reading The Road back.

So, you may be asking yourself, why do I recommend this book. Cormac has a very unique writing style. The characters are mostly annoying, the plot, such as it is, sucks, but the writing is very elegant and, perhaps if you go into it looking to savor each chapter for it’s style and language — and looking not for action and adventure, but more subtle spiritual things or life lessons or fundamental moral questions of what’s right or wrong given the circumstances, you might find the book . . . maybe not good. . . but . . . . interesting.

I won’t spoil the ending for you, but I will say this:

[EDITED --  The original post actually did spoil the ending, which at first I thought might be funny, but in hindsight... I don't wanna be THAT guy...  ]