As a horror boy, I take a certain pleasure in seeking out the nastiest of the nasty. Whether it's thumbing through the pages of Brit Easton Ellis's American Psycho to find the worst bits, or working my way down the official list of video nasties, the darker and yuckier the better. Naturally, it didn't take me too long to run into Cormac McCarthy, and more specifically THE ROAD.
And hushed whispers and through cringing grimaces, I heard people talk about McCarthy. I heard tails of the bleakest post-apocalyptic story ever told. A real nasty piece of work that permanently cemented itself into the all-time champions of disgust, discomfort, and unease. A real difficult slog of a novel that would guarantee you to make your stomach turn and your eyes water.
Maybe it's because of all the hype I've been hearing, maybe it's because of everything I've seen in red before this already, but this really wasn't the nasty little piece of work I expected it to be.
But don't get me wrong, this is an incredibly difficult novel to read for anyone even remotely compassionate. The entire story is one long walk through a graveyard planet of the starved in the desperate, steeped in hopelessness, discomfort, and death. Moments of any real levity are few and far between, but it's one of those books you can't stop thinking about until the moment you pick it back up again. It has a way of almost effortlessly introducing subjects and ideas that are hard to shake, and hard to answer.
At what point is it no longer worth living? Is there ever a point where suicide becomes the only reasonable option? How many people are there left, and how many of them want to kill you? Is it even possible to rebuild some kind of society, or are we all too far gone now that we've been feral for a little while?
But wait I hear you saying, didn't you say that this wasn't as dark and as hopeless as you thought it would be? I sure did.
Okay yeah yeah there's fetus munching and all kinds of nasty stuff on this book, but the way Cormac McCarthy writes is damn near poetry. He has an incredible talent for seeing beauty in damn near everything, and finding the perfect words to capture the emotions. Even looking past the way he writes, the entire story is a fiercely positive one.
The only reason the man is traveling the road with his son at all, It's just a stay alive. They're only goal in the entire novel is survival, and a world that doesn't need them to survive at all. All throughout the book, you can feel these characters wanting to give up. Wanting to finally rest, wanting to not be scared anymore, wanting to be reunited with their mother and their wife. But they don't. Because they cant. Because somebody has to carry the fire.
Even at the absolute end of the novel (which I have no intentions of spoiling), he had the choice to leave us with one hell of a bleak ending. He died. She died. Everybody died. Good night folks.
But that fire, that hope, is really what McCarthy wanted to highlight in this whole novel. Even when surrounded by the worst possible settings in the worst possible times, you MUST rage against the dying of the light.
It's pretty hardcore optimist s*** man.
And then, I immediately watched the movie a few days after I finished the book. I'm still not sure if that was a mistake or not.
For as much as the movie does right, It's never as effective as the novel. Scenes and dialogue are completely mixed around for no reason whatsoever, incredibly impactful lines in the book are casually mumbled way too early, the whole thing just feels like they wanted more action for the movie.
The settings, the characters, the best character beats an emotional moments, none of them as strong as they could have been. Oh well
5/10
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