books similar to the road by cormac mccarthy

“With only the corpse of a natural world to grapple with, McCarthy’s father and son exist in a realm rarely seen in the ur-masculine literary tradition: the domestic. But what propels The Road far beyond its progenitors are the diverted poetic heights of McCarthy’s late-English prose the simple declamation and plainsong of his rendered dialect, as perfect as early Hemingway and the adamantine surety and utter aptness of every chiseled description.” Abandoning gruff but profound male camaraderie, McCarthy instead sounds the limits of imaginable love and despair between a diligent father and his timid young son, ‘each other’s world entire.’ The initial experience of the novel is sobering and oppressive, its final effect is emotionally shattering …The vulnerable cultural references for this daring scenario obviously come from science fiction. Now he has given us his great American nightmare … The Road is a novel of transforming power and formal risk. This is a very great novel, but one that needs a context in both the past and in so-called post-9/11 America … we should remember that the history of Cormac McCarthy and his achievement is not an American dream but near on 30 years of neglect for a writer who, since The Orchard Keeper in 1965, produced only masterworks in elegant succession. “Shorn of history and context, Cormac McCarthy’s other nine novels could be cast as rungs, with The Road as a pinnacle. –Michael Chabon, The New York Review of Books “The paradox in every part and sentence of the post-apocalyptic narrative-evoking even as it denies-is repeated as if fractally by The Road as a whole … All the elements of a science fiction novel of the post-apocalypse are present or at least hinted at…There are bits of satire of a very dark order in the hints that religious extremism caused the holocaust, and in the relentless way McCarthy deprives the foolish reader of the reassurances … The Road is neither parable nor science fiction, however, and fundamentally it marks not a departure but a return to McCarthy’s most brilliant genre work, combined in a manner we have not seen since Blood Meridian: adventure and Gothic horror.” Here’s a look back at the very first reviews of McCarthy’s “great American nightmare.” The story of a father and son traversing a fallen US where an unspecified ecological cataclysm has destroyed almost all life on the planet, The Road won McCarthy the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and has since been hailed as one of the greatest works of climate change fiction ever written.

It’s now 15 years since Cormac McCarthy’s terrifying post-apocalyptic odyssey, The Road, first hit shelves. Keep a little fire burning however small, however hidden.

Books similar to the road by cormac mccarthy