Here's a post-apocalyptic near-moribund world of grey and cold and hunger and ash and drizzle through which we're led, down the road. Cormac McCarthy is insanely meticulous. As with Blood Meridian (1985), which is one of my favorite novels, The Road (2006) instills in us a haunting, spellbinding sense of doom, made all the more real by McCarthy's painstaking attention to every detail, sentence to sentence to sentence. And he's brilliant at precisely capturing the moment and conveying its core essence with just a handful of words, like with these twelve:
A corpse in a doorway dried to leather. Grimacing at the day.
It was an anxiety-inducing read for me and likely the cause of at least two dreary nightmares, which is why I had to read quickly! But for all the darkness there's beauty in it too. One of the better novels I've read this year.