The Road - Cormac McCarthy

The Road begins with brief sections, sometimes just a paragraph, highly descriptive, very evocative, like blinking: each time opening your eyes to see something new. The overall feel of the novel is cold, bleak, scary, harrowing. It is post-apocalyptic in a generally unspecified way: there is ash, and a burnt landscape and cold and dark. The plot follows a journey of a man and his son, to somewhere, anywhere.

It captures the hopelessness of an apocalypse better than anything I have ever read. Forget electricity, there is not even food. And fire is sometimes avoided so as to not attract unwanted attention. No one can be trusted. Everywhere is abandoned.

I read most of it with a knot in my stomach.

There is no hope. Just fear. Perhaps the ending is supposed to provide hope, to illuminate the good in some of mankind. It just left me depressed.

Undoubtedly great writing to make me feel so much. But not pleasant.