I read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road this past weekend. I wish I’d been the editor to first read this book, because the excitement of reading a book this well crafted, this frightening, and this beautiful is such a rare experience.

The following is a snippet from the jacket cover:

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there.

McCarthy never uses the names of the characters, which dehumanized them for me. The only person to say his name lies and does not say the real one. It’s as though all of the survivors have erased their past and the only existence is one of the now or, possibly, the dim future.

The writing itself is poetic. He uses a lot of fragments. His writing is painterly — grey upon grey upon grey — and reveals the horror, suffocating solitude and fear of surviving nuclear war.

I can’t do this book justice in my description. Just buy it.

This is what Dennis Lehane had to say on Amazon:

Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is. McCarthy may have just set to paper the definitive vision of the world after nuclear war, and in this recent age of relentless saber-rattling by the global powers, it’s not much of a leap to feel his vision could be not far off the mark nor, sadly, right around the corner.