Haunted Roads

I rarely find myself blown away by a book. Whenever I read one, the snobby English major in me always sits back, arches one doubtful eyebrow, and says, "Impress me, bitch."

However, I have met my match. Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" might be one of the few instant classics of the modern age. Absolutely haunting, desolate, and unflinching, this novel takes you to the other side of a world utterly destroyed in a nuclear cataclysm. The story is simple. A man and a boy travel down a road in order to find a southern sea before they die in a bombed-out nuclear wasteland. Read on:

"When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below. Everything paling away into the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop. He studied what he could see. The segments of the road down there among the dead trees. Looking for anything of color. Any movement. A trace of standing smoke. He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose on the back of his wrist and then glassed the country again. Then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke."

This is searing prose poetry of the highest caliber. No movie could ever depict the emptiness and despair McCarthy conjurs in this novel. Go get it. RIGHT NOW.