**** 1/2 The Road By Cormac McCarthy
The triumph of evil.
In a postapocalyptic America, an unnamed man and his sickly young son, among the few survivors of a devastating holocaust, traverse a "barren, silent, godless" wasteland devoid of life and cloaked by gray ash. As winter approaches and they head south to the sea, they face unnamed horrors: memories of a previous life; starvation; frightening beasts; "blood cults"; barbarous gangs of cannibals; an old house surrounded by dead bodies. While the man convinces his son they are two of the "good guys," survival necessitates the compromising of morality. Despite this bleakness--the man saves his last two bullets for himself and his son--their love for each other rekindles a small glimpse of hope in humanity. Knopf. 256 pages. $24. ISBN: 0330447556
Texas Monthly *****
"Yes, The Road is speculative fiction--pure genre stuff--and postapocalyptic scenarios are well-trod ground. But there is nothing pedestrian about its execution or effect.... This is a work that will invite superlatives--and 'masterpiece' is not too strong a word." MIKE SHEA
Entertainment Weekly **** 1/2
"Cormac McCarthy discovered his voice decades ago, but maybe only now, with his devastating 10th novel, has he found the landscape perfectly matched to his cosmically bleak vision.... [The Road is a] masterpiece." JENNIFER REESE
Hartford Courant **** 1/2
"McCarthy doles out horrors every 20 pages or so--burned corpses half-mired in asphalt, a headless baby roasting on a campfire spit. All this is rendered in an ultra-literary style, one that is McCarthy's trademark--sometimes as simple and clear as Hemingway, other times as ornate and prolix as Faulkner." DAN POPE
Los Angeles Times **** 1/2
"One of the few tokens of hope The Road offers is that although the catastrophe that scorched the earth also burned away people's names, identity is fireproof.... One of McCarthy's best novels, probably his most moving and perhaps his most personal, The Road would be the ideal coda to a body of work that now spans 10 books over 40 years." STEVE ERICKSON
New York Times **** 1/2
"The Road would be pure misery if not for its...
