book review on the road

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On the road, common sense media reviewers.

Poetic, ecstatic, debauched novel that changed literature.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this book.

Through altered and joyful view of narrator-protag

This novel teaches beautiful life lessons while it

The characters in On the Road have, in a sense, a

Early in the novel, Sal is working as a security g

On the Road has no graphic descriptions of sex act

On the Road includes lots of profanity, as well as

Characters in On the Road smoke cigarettes and pot

Parents need to know that Jack Kerouac's seminal 1957 novel On the Road is about two friends, Sal and Dean (based on the author and his friend Neal Cassady), who travel around the United States and Mexico, experiencing life fueled and heightened by drugs, alcohol, and sex. This book is revered as the…

Educational Value

Through altered and joyful view of narrator-protagonist Sal Paradise, On the Road gives readers a glimpse of American life during the late 1940s and early '50s. Readers learn geography, as Sal and his companions travel repeatedly from the East Coast to the West, and back. The novel also touches on modes of transportation, cost of living, and urban life in New York, Denver, and San Francisco. Jazz/be-bop music is described at length, too; several real jazz artists of the time are mentioned, and Keroac's poetic depictions of jazz clubs give readers a feel for the Beat Generation's music scene.

Positive Messages

This novel teaches beautiful life lessons while it also sets a tragic example for young people. Keeping in mind that the characters in On the Road are basically wasted the entire time, the positive takeaway is to love life, see the world, and find beauty, poetry, and bliss in everything.

Positive Role Models

The characters in On the Road have, in a sense, a beautiful and inspiring worldview. However, their behavior is atrocious by any parenting standard. They're constantly drunk or high or both. None holds a steady job for any length of time; Sal borrows money from his aunt whenever he runs out of dough. Also, the men, and the author, objectify women to an impressive degree. In terms of relationships, Dean has two or more lovers at any given time (not always the same ones); he fathers babies in and out of wedlock, and leaves his women and kids behind at the drop of a hat.

Violence & Scariness

Early in the novel, Sal is working as a security guard, and he mentions that one night he waved his gun at a "fag," but Sal doesn't hurt anyone. Violent events don't really occur "onscreen," but Sal occasionally meets characters who relate violent stories. For example, on a bus ride through the Midwest, an ex-con tells Sal that the reason he was in jail was that he slashed the throat of a boy in a movie theater for "making a crack about my mother."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

On the Road has no graphic descriptions of sex acts, but sex is mentioned often. Sal talks a lot about "making" girls or wanting them. Women's bodies are described sexually; Sal especially notices when thighs or breasts are partially showing. In one scene, Dean wants Sal to have sex with his (Dean's) wife, Mary Lou, in front of Dean, but Sal can't do it. Sal and Dean have sex with prostitutes while they're traveling in Mexico, and Sal is attracted to a "young girl" prostitute who he thinks is about 16. Dean gets married three times in the course of the book and impregnates two of the women.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

On the Road includes lots of profanity, as well as homophobic language and outdated racial references. Profanity used includes "s--t" (spelled all sorts of ways to reflect different regional accents, such as "shee-it"), "bastard," "sonofabitch," "dammit," 'c--k." Sal refers to gay men as "fags" or "fairies." Sal calls African-Americans "negroes," reflecting language commonly used at the time the book was written.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Characters in On the Road smoke cigarettes and pot, and take Benzedrine; one section, a couple of characters use heroin, and the book describes them shooting up and their demeanor before and after their fix. Most characters also drink alcohol to excess (beer, port, many unspecified "drinks"). Sal and Dean are usually drunk, high, or both.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Jack Kerouac's seminal 1957 novel On the Road is about two friends, Sal and Dean (based on the author and his friend Neal Cassady), who travel around the United States and Mexico, experiencing life fueled and heightened by drugs, alcohol, and sex. This book is revered as the defining novel of the Beat Generation, a post-WWII cultural movement closely identified with jazz/be-bop music, drug and alcohol use, and other forms of artistic, intellectual, and personal experimentation. The novel, not surprisingly, includes numerous accounts of life on the edge involving drug and alcohol use, and in many ways glorifies substance abuse. Many sexual encounters are mentioned but not graphically described. There's also a fair amount of profanity used ("s--t," "sonofabitch," "dammit," "bastard," "c--k"), as well as outdated racial references ("negroes") and homophobic slurs ("fag," "fairy"). The novel was made into a film released in December 2012.

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Community reviews.

• Parents say (2)

Based on 2 parent reviews

On the Road Book Review

And then some, what's the story.

Jack Kerouac's legendary novel ON THE ROAD chronicles the road trips of two friends, Sal and Dean (based on the author and Neal Cassady, respectively), who travel the United States and Mexico, experiencing a life fueled and heightened by drugs, alcohol, and sex. Revered as the defining novel of the Beat Generation -- a post-World War II alternative cultural movement closely identified with jazz, drug and alcohol use, and various other forms of experimentation -- On the Road describes Sal and Dean's world, their experiences and friendships, their struggles to find money and transportation, their drugged and drunken binges, and the tender and ecstatic feelings they have for humanity.

Is It Any Good?

Music and language, and the way Kerouac's writing grew from the sounds of jazz and be-bop, are even more important than the wild events in the novel. Kerouac's novel is an ecstatic literary masterpiece, in which nearly every sentence is worth reading over and over. This is a book that changed literary language, with rapid-fire phrases seeming to follow a syncopated musical rhythm. Yet, Kerouac's clarity is never given over for poetry; the author is ever a clear communicator even while he's accomplishing that rare feat of writing the way music sounds . but This novel glorifies drug and alcohol use, so it is not for immature readers. but for young adults with decent judgment and a love of language, On the Road is a must-read eye-opener.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

On the Road is considered the most important book representing the Beat Generation (a term coined by Jack Kerouac). What defined this cultural movement and the works that it inspired?

Why do you think Sal so drawn to Dean?

Learn more about the Beat Generation by reading works by Jack Kerouac's contemporaries, such as William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg.

Book Details

• Author : Jack Kerouac
• Genre : Adventure
• Topics : Cars and Trucks , Friendship
• Book type : Fiction
• Publisher : Penguin Group
• Publication date : September 5, 1957
• Number of pages : 320
• Available on : Paperback, Nook, Audiobook (unabridged), Hardback, iBooks, Kindle
• Last updated : June 17, 2015

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By Cormac McCarthy

'The Road' is often cited as McCarthy’s “most readable novel.” It is also one of his most popular. 

Article written by Emma Baldwin

B.A. in English, B.F.A. in Fine Art, and B.A. in Art Histories from East Carolina University.

While exploring the story of The Man and The Boy I found myself amazed by the many different ways to approach this review. The novel is entrancing. It grips readers from its first pages and doesn’t let go until the final words. 

Survival and Relatability

‘ The Road’ is filled with heart-wrenching and painful scenes, ones that are too easy to imagine with one’s own loved ones. Throughout, one can’t help but imagine what they would do if they found themselves in a similar situation. 

The two protagonists, a father and his son , struggle throughout the novel to make their way south, supposedly, to safety. The entire plot is bound up in this march along the road , seeking out a place of refuge among the roadagents, or cannibals, and various other threats. The Man and Boy survive in a state of near starvation. But, throughout it all, there is the drive to move south to the coast to what The Man believes (or purports to believe) may be a safe haven. 

It’s this belief that is tied to nothing but hope and the need to present a goal to his son that is hard to let go of. They travel through a wasteland without so much as a hint of true hope in the future. It’s impossible to know what exactly the two are going to find when they reach their destination, but it’s hard, having seen what the world is like, to believe there is much if any good left out there. Despite this, The Man maintains hope for his son, repetitively telling him that they are the “good guys” and that they have to continue on, “carrying the fire.” 

Carrying the Fire 

This term is tied up in the relationship the father and son have and the way that the latter considers the world around them. It’s clear from the former’s narration that he’s lost hope in the world (except perhaps when it comes to his child). But, that’s not something he’s willing to share with his son. 

The Man shares the phrase “carrying the fire” with his young son as another way of ensuring him that the two have a purpose in life and that they aren’t suffering for no reason. They have to carry hope, kindness, and morality with them through their lives because others aren’t. The “fire” of human goodness is at stake. The Man sees it when he looks at his son in a way I have to believe resonates with readers worldwide. 

The Boy 

The Boy is presented as a figure of hope throughout the novel. While The Man often gets lost in feelings of despair and is tempted by violence, The Boy is kind and helpful to a fault. One of the best examples is when the two pursue and find the thief that stole their belongings off the beach. The Man makes him strip naked and takes his clothes and belongings, condemning him to death. But, The Boy won’t stand for it. He is unwilling to concede that the two are the “bad guys” like the other people they meet on the road. 

In bother instance, the two meet an old traveler named Eli. This old man, who The Man seems surprised is still alive, travels with them for a brief period of time. The Boy, despite The Man’s attempts to stop him, gives him food from their supplies. Eli is without gratitude for this incredibly selfless act, but The Boy does it anyway. Its moments like this make it clear why The Man feels as though he has to preserve The Boy’s life at all costs. He’s willing to do anything to ensure that his son survives. 

The Boy becomes more than just The Man’s son; he’s also, in a way, all that’s left of humanity as it used to be. The world has changed irrevocably. There’s no going back to the way things used to be. The Boy, due to the way The Man has raised him (on memories of the past and how the human race used to act), is different. 

Love as a Theme 

Love is one of the primary themes readers are left with when they walk away from this novel. The book is filled with torment and the horrors of McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic world. But, it’s also filled with a great deal of love. There is the love that keeps The Man thinking about his wife, the mother of his son, and the love that keeps The Man and The Boy bound to one another. One particularly moving scene comes near the end of the novel when The Man has passed: 

He slept close to his father that night and held him but when he woke in the morning his father was cold and stiff. He sat there a long time weeping and then he got up and walked out through the woods to the road. When he came back he knelt beside his father and held his cold hand and said his name over and over again.

The Boy remained at his father’s side, despite the fact that he was dead, for three days. The Man was all he knew in the world. Now, the novel implies, he is going to have to go on and figure out life on his own. But, soon, a new hope arrives. 

When The Boy has been discovered by a new family. The following passage I found to be particularly moving as The Boy is saying goodbye to his father. 

He walked back into the woods and knelt beside his father. He was wrapped in a blanket as the man had promised and the boy didnt uncover him but he sat beside him and he was crying and he couldnt stop. He cried for a long time. I’ll talk to you every day, he whispered. And I wont forget. No matter what. Then he rose and turned and walked back out to the road.

Here, The Boy pledges to speak to his father every day. He “won’t forget,” he adds. Not only won’t he forget the love they shared, this implies, but also the lessons The Man taught him and the concept of “carrying the fire” throughout life. He commits to remembering the past in a way that the rest of the world seems not to. 

Is ‘ The Road ‘ worth reading?

Every reader is different, but for most readers, they are going to find ‘ The Road’ worth reading. It taps into universal themes and tells an unforgettable story. 

Is ‘ The Road ‘ by Cormac McCarthy sad?

The ending of ‘ The Road’ is deeply sad, but it is also tinged with hope. There are several other moments readers might find themselves moved by the subject matter, including when The Man thinks about his wife. 

What caused the apocalypse in ‘ The Road ?’

Cormac McCarthy revealed that the apocalypse in ‘ The Road’ was caused by a meteor strike. But, that fact is never mentioned in the book. 

The Road Review: McCarthy's Harrowing Novel of Survival and Love

Book Title: The Road

Book Description: 'The Road' is a memorable novel that explores the importance of love when one is contending with matters of morality, life, and death.

Book Author: Cormac McCarthy

Book Edition: First Edition

Book Format: Hardcover

Publisher - Organization: Alfred A. Knopf

Date published: September 26, 2006

ISBN: 978-0-375-41542-4

Number Of Pages: 287

• Writing Style
• Lasting Effect on Reader

The Road Review

‘ The Road ‘ by Cormac McCarthy is an incredibly moving novel. It follows two unnamed characters as they contend with the aftermath of an unknown apocalypse. Traveling the barren landscape of what used to be the United States, The Man and The Boy are constantly forced to fight for their lives. 

• Creative writing style
• Mysterious characters and their pasts
• Beautiful descriptions of terrible sights and events
• Dialogue is difficult to read due to lack of quotation marks
• No solid conclusion at the end
• Deeply disturbing scenes

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About Emma Baldwin

Emma Baldwin, a graduate of East Carolina University, has a deep-rooted passion for literature. She serves as a key contributor to the Book Analysis team with years of experience.

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• Read TIME’s Original 1957 Review of <i>On the Road</i>

Read TIME’s Original 1957 Review of On the Road

W hen Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was released on Sept. 5, 1957 — 60 years ago this Tuesday — the first impression of TIME’s critic was that the book was “partly an ingenuous travel book, partly a collection of journalistic jottings about adventures that are known to everyone who has ever hitchhiked more than a hundred miles in the U.S.” And yet, even with that somewhat dubious characterization, it was clear that the work had something noteworthy within it.

Kerouac, working out of his mother’s house in Orlando, Fla., had finally put a literary face on the “ beat generation ,” a world with which the 35-year-old author was intimately familiar. “With his barbaric yawp of a book, Kerouac commands attention as a kind of literary James Dean ,” the reviewer noted.

As TIME’s then explained , the plot was an opportunity for Kerouac to expound upon a new set of moral guidelines for young Americans:

The story is set in the late 1940s, told in the first person by Sal Paradise, a budding writer given to ecstasies about America, hot jazz, the meaning of life, and marijuana. The book’s protagonist is Dean Moriarty (“a sideburned hero of the snowy West”), who has spent a third of his waking time in poolrooms, a third in jail, a third in public libraries, and is always shouting “Yes, yes, yes!” to every experience. Dean and Sal and their other buddies—Carlo Marx, the frenzied poet; Ed Dunkel, an amiable cipher; Remi Boncoeur, who has the second loudest laugh in San Francisco—are forever racing cross-country to meet one another. Their frantic reunions are curiously reminiscent of lodge and business conventions, with the same shouts of fellowship, hard drinking, furtive attempts at sexual dalliance—and, after a few days, the same boredom. Then Sal’s pals are off again, by bus, on foot, by thumb, roaming the continent, feeling the wind of Wyoming nights and the heat of Texas days, looking for Moriarty’s never-to-be-found father or anyone’s sister, always expecting the ultimate in music or love or understanding around the next bend in the road. Excitement and movement mean everything. Steady jobs and homes in the suburbs are for the “squares.” Dean Moriarty, a real gone kid in whom Sal sees traces of a “W. C. Fields saintliness,” is the only authentic proletarian in a basically timorous band of bourgeois rebels. Dean steals cars where the others are scarcely capable of filching a loaf of bread from an untended grocery. He takes women and abandons them, wrecks Cadillacs for the hell of it, deserts his friends. He talks a blue streak in a syntax-free jumble of metaphysics, hipster jargon, quotations from comic strips and animal gruntings. Describing the skills of a hot saxophonist, Dean cries: “Here’s a guy and everybody’s there, right? Up to him to put down what’s on everybody’s mind. He starts the first chorus, then lines up his ideas, people, yeah, yeah, but get it, and then he rises to his fate and has to blow equal to it. All of a sudden, somewhere in the middle of the chorus he gets it . . . Time stops. He’s filling empty space with the substance of our lives, confessions of his belly bottom strain, remembrance of ideas, rehashes of old blowing.”

It was Kerouac’s ability to “create a rationale” for what seemed to many Americans to be a senseless streak of rebellion among the nation’s youth that allowed On the Road to strike a chord even with readers who were not themselves attracted to the beat movement. That’s also part of the reason why, 60 years later, the book remains an iconic moment in American literature — even despite the later revelation that Kerouac himself did not drive.

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What Did Critics Think of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road When It First Came Out?

“an exquisitely bleak incantation...” “a little showy, a little glib...”.

Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.

It’s now 15 years since Cormac McCarthy’s terrifying post-apocalyptic odyssey, The Road , first hit shelves. The story of a father and son traversing a fallen US where an unspecified ecological cataclysm has destroyed almost all life on the planet, The Road won McCarthy the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and has since been hailed as one of the greatest works of climate change fiction ever written .

Here’s a look back at the very first reviews of McCarthy’s “great American nightmare.”

“The paradox in every part and sentence of the post-apocalyptic narrative—evoking even as it denies—is repeated as if fractally by The Road as a whole … All the elements of a science fiction novel of the post-apocalypse are present or at least hinted at…There are bits of satire of a very dark order in the hints that religious extremism caused the holocaust, and in the relentless way McCarthy deprives the foolish reader of the reassurances … The Road is neither parable nor science fiction, however, and fundamentally it marks not a departure but a return to McCarthy’s most brilliant genre work, combined in a manner we have not seen since Blood Meridian : adventure and Gothic horror.”

–Michael Chabon, The New York Review of Books

“Shorn of history and context, Cormac McCarthy’s other nine novels could be cast as rungs, with The Road as a pinnacle. This is a very great novel, but one that needs a context in both the past and in so-called post-9/11 America … we should remember that the history of Cormac McCarthy and his achievement is not an American dream but near on 30 years of neglect for a writer who, since The Orchard Keeper in 1965, produced only masterworks in elegant succession. Now he has given us his great American nightmare …  The Road is a novel of transforming power and formal risk. Abandoning gruff but profound male camaraderie, McCarthy instead sounds the limits of imaginable love and despair between a diligent father and his timid young son, ‘each other’s world entire.’ The initial experience of the novel is sobering and oppressive, its final effect is emotionally shattering …The vulnerable cultural references for this daring scenario obviously come from science fiction. But what propels The Road far beyond its progenitors are the diverted poetic heights of McCarthy’s late-English prose; the simple declamation and plainsong of his rendered dialect, as perfect as early Hemingway; and the adamantine surety and utter aptness of every chiseled description.”

–Alan Warner, The Guardian

“This is an exquisitely bleak incantation—pure poetic brimstone. Mr. McCarthy has summoned his fiercest visions to invoke the devastation. He gives voice to the unspeakable in a terse cautionary tale that is too potent to be numbing, despite the stupefying ravages it describes. Mr. McCarthy brings an almost biblical fury as he bears witness to sights man was never meant to see … His use of language is as exultant as his imaginings are hellish, a hint that The Road will ultimately be more radiant than it is punishing. Somehow Mr. McCarthy is able to hold firm to his pessimism while allowing the reader to see beyond it. This is art that both frightens and inspires.”

–Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“With only the corpse of a natural world to grapple with, McCarthy’s father and son exist in a realm rarely seen in the ur-masculine literary tradition: the domestic. And from this unlikely vantage McCarthy makes a big, shockingly successful grab at the universal … Our literary expectation is that the man’s ingenuity will redeem him, but while it’s true that he and the boy survive a number of scrapes in The Road , the agony of the novel is that things are getting worse, not better … The existence of a moral structure—the will to do good—is the soaring discovery hidden in McCarthy’s scourged planet.”

–Jennifer Egan, Slate

“ The Road is not a science fiction, not an allegory, and not a critique of the way we live now, or of the-way-we-might-live-if-we-keep-on-living-the-way-we-live-now. It poses a simpler question, more taxing for the imagination and far closer to the primary business of fiction-making: what would this world without people look like, feel like? From this, everything else flows … There is nothing easy about the machinery of this book—the mise-en-scene, the often breathtaking writing, the terrifying concentration of the evocation—but there is something perhaps a little showy, a little glib, about the way that questions of belief are raised and dropped … The question of endings in an apocalypse must be philosophical as well as merely emotional, even in a novel.”

–James Wood,  The New Republic

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The Literary Edit

Review: On The Road – Jack Kerouac

I left On The Road by Jack Kerouac until the end; it was the book I knew the least about, and I figured that if I struggled with it, I would read another Roald Dahl in its place. Again, it was recommended to me – this time by someone on twitter, to whom I am now eternally grateful.

I didn’t read the introduction of the Penguin Modern Classic; I was on a tight deadline and could not have afforded the thirty pages it spanned; I also wanted to read the book with innocent eyes and no prior knowledge of what I was about to encounter.

Written in 1951, in the midst of an America fuelled by drugs, poetry and jazz music, On The Road is a largely biographical work by Jack Kerouac that was based upon numerous road trips Kerouac and his friends made across America, from East Coast New York, to the hills of San Francisco . At the time of its publication, the New York Times said thus: “the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as “beat,” and whose principal avatar he is.”; quite an accolade to have earnt.

Both poignant and passionate, the novel tells the story of Sal Paradise as he travels back and forth over American soil. Much of the tale highlights the friendship between Paradise and Dean Moriaty, characters based on Kerouac himself and his friend Neal Cassady; indeed the most prominent relationship in the text. It is the ultimate of road trips; the characters live recklessly; the pace of life is fast. To Sal Paradise, friendship and experience are everything; and both themes play a strong part throughout the novel.

Whilst lacking a traditional plot, the novel captures moments in time and flashes of life in a unique and eloquent manner. And as the text progresses through the life of the protagonist, a subtle sadness descends upon the book as Sal Paradise begins to leave behind his careless youth, thus seeing friendships drift apart, and dreams forgotten along the way.

Evocative and exuberant, Kerouac’s American Dream is beautifully written, and paints a wonderfully nostalgic picture of America. Few books take my breath away; this one absolutely did.

About On The Road

When Jack Kerouac’s On the Road first appeared in 1957, readers instantly felt the beat of a new literary rhythm. A fictionalised account of his own journeys across America with his friend Neal Cassady, Kerouac’s beatnik odyssey captured the soul of a generation and changed the landscape of American fiction for ever.

Influenced by Jack London and Thomas Wolfe, Kerouac always wanted to be a writer, but his true voice only emerged when he wrote about his own experiences in On the Road. Leaving a broken marriage behind him, Sal Paradise (Kerouac) joins Dean Moriarty (Cassady), a tearaway and former reform school boy, on a series of journeys that takes them from New York to San Francisco, then south to Mexico. Hitching rides and boarding buses, they enter a world of hobos and drifters, fruit-pickers and migrant families, small towns and wide horizons. Adrift from conventional society, they experience America in the raw: a place where living is hard, but ‘life is holy and every moment is precious’.

About Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac was born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac on March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts. Jack Kerouac’s writing career began in the 1940s, but didn’t meet with commercial success until 1957, when  On the Road  was published. The book became an American classic that defined the Beat Generation. Kerouac died on October 21, 1969, from an abdominal haemorrhage, at age 47.

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

National Book Critics Circle Finalist

Pulitzer Prize Winner

by Cormac McCarthy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 2, 2006

A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.

Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.

McCarthy ( No Country for Old Men , 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.

Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006

ISBN: 0-307-26543-9

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006

LITERARY FICTION

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IN THE NEWS

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

More by Mark Z. Danielewski

by Mark Z. Danielewski

THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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Cormac McCarthy's The Road May Have the Scariest Passage in All of Literature

Benjamin Percy, author of Red Moon , makes the case.

By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature.

Masters of the horror genre know that monsters are scariest before they're seen.

This is why the makers of Jaws , according to co-writer Carl Gottlieb , kept their shark unglimpsed so long. Their model was The Thing from Another World (1951), which hid its nightmare creature until the end. Before them, we had Melville's distant whale and Verne's squid shrouded in its weird sea. Poe took the dread of temporary blindness to the extreme—the monster of the "Pit and the Pendulum" is a world plunged into total darkness.

Related Story

Benjamin Percy, whose new novel Red Moon updates the werewolf mythos for our era, loves the way suspense ratchets up before something terrible is revealed. When I asked him to choose a favorite passage from literature, he chose a section from Cormac McCarthy's The Road that has haunted him for years. It's the only instance Percy can think when what's finally revealed is, in fact, far scarier than anything he could have imagined.

In addition to Red Moon , Benjamin Percy is author of The Wilding and two acclaimed story collections. His story "Refresh, Refresh" was selected for Best American Short Stories 2006 . His nonfiction regularly appears in venues like GQ, Outside, and Esquire , where he's a contributing editor. He spoke to me by phone.

Benjamin Percy: I picked up Blood Meridian as my first introduction to McCarthy. I remember, at that moment when there's thunder on the horizon and a cloud of dusk and the horde of Apaches dressed in the blood-stained wedding garb as they thunder towards Glanton and his men, being completely overwhelmed by both the language and the horror and the beauty of the situation. I actually set the book aside after I read that passage and felt as though I'd been rewired aesthetically.

McCarthy's is an elemental voice. In his voice I hear stone shifting, glaciers cracking open, trees moaning in the wind. The ancient cadences of his prose take on an almost otherworldly quality, a quality that transports you. I'm constantly in awe of the language and recognizing how he's putting together his sentences so exquisitely.

As many have pointed out before me, he's unafraid to stare into the abyss. He's peering into the darkest corners of human existence, using a lamp with blood.

I've read The Road several times now, but the first time I read it was soon after my son was born. I was especially emotionally vulnerable in that moment because he was having some issues with his breathing: He ended up getting a severe case of croup that closed his throat. He was transported to the hospital by ambulance and was in the ICU for three days. They pricked him full of steroids and put him in an oxygen mask. I've never felt more protective, or helpless, or scraped out emotionally than I did then.

Reading this book around that time put me in a mindset that made me particularly vulnerable to the subject matter. The Road is ultimately about a father sacrificing everything for his son—keeping on and surviving despite a nightmare landscape, and only for his son's sake. I felt plugged into that current in a way that I don't know I would have if not a father.

The most terrifying moment in any horror story is when a noise is heard—a noise behind a closet door; a noise heard in an attic, or the basement; a noise heard in a thicket of bushes; a noise heard deep in a cave—and a person pursues the sound. We always want to yell out: Don't go there. It's that moment of suspense, the second before the bogeyman is revealed, that is the most gripping. After the door opens, after we shine a flashlight on whatever awaits, the audience might laugh or scream but ultimately they feel relief. Because whatever is provided by the author or filmmaker is never as bad as what we imagine ourselves.

In this particular passage, as soon as the father spots a house on the hill, we know something terrible waits inside. It takes a long time for him to approach the house, to explore its many rooms, and finally descend into the basement.

He started down the rough wooden steps. He ducked his head and then flicked the lighter and swung the flame out over the darkness like an offering. Coldness and damp. An ungodly stench. He could see part of a stone wall. Clay floor. An old mattress darkly stained. He crouched and stepped down again and held out the light.

The whole time we're yelling: Don't go in there. But he does, of course.

Huddled against the back wall were naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding their faces with their hands. On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt. The smell was hideous. Jesus, he whispered. Then one by one they turned and blinked in the pitiful light. Help us, they whispered. Please help us.

And maybe this is the only time this has ever happened to me—but what is revealed is even more terrifying that what I could have imagined. Humans are harvesting each other in order to survive. These pale, chewed-up creatures emerge from the dark and rattle their chains and moan and reach for the father. We're afraid of them, but we're afraid more of what might await the father upstairs—the people responsible for this.

I tried for a similar effect in the opening chapter of my new novel, Red Moon . You see a man moving through an airport, the muscles in his jaw flexing, his gaze trained on some middle distance. He's sweating heavily. He is relieved to make it through security. He's staring at the ghost of his reflection in the window as he studies the tarmac. He is biting back at any attempt at conversation his seatmates might have when finally on the plane. And when he stands up and retreats to the restroom when the flight is at 30,000 feet, you know something terrible is going it happen. It's been a long, slow spinning fuse leading towards a detonation. It's the same device McCarthy's using as The Road 's father explores the house and finally heads down to the basement: a long period of withholding as long as we can, suspense-deepening, stakes-raising, until finally what's hidden in the darkness is revealed.

It's the same reason we climb onto a roller coaster. It's the same reason we climb a cliff and put our foot out over the open air and pull back. We're daring the nightmare. You never feel more alive than in that moment. It's a reminder of our mortality. If you look at the horror novel, or the horror movie, it's a way of safely dealing with that spike of adrenaline.

I'm still haunted by that passage. No matter how many times I read the book, it still seems to affect me. It grabs you by the throat and drags you down the rabbit hole. Our world dissolves, his world takes over. That's a major accomplishment—when you make flesh and blood and wood and stone out of ink and paper.

Though McCarthy's not afraid to stare into the abyss, he seems to also carefully consider his use of violence. When I'm reading someone like Chuck Palahniuk, I often feel he's titillated by a kind of gorenography. He's writing violence in a way that feels excessive and part of some carnival sideshow meant to make people slap their knees and guffaw horribly. When I look at The Road , or a book like Blood Meridian , McCarthy describes every terrible thing that a mind could conjure. But he'll also pull back. He'll allow some violence to take place off stage, because he knows unseen acts can be as brutal and affecting as violence that's shown—perhaps more so.

I feel that violence needs to be earned somehow—or it needs to earn out. You need to pipe the oxygen in before lighting the flame—or, in the wake of some violent act, there needs to be repercussions: a period in which the characters suffer and soak up what has occurred. Making it part of the causal structure and making it emotionally resonant, too. I would hope that any narrative that wrestles with this sort of thing is meant to horrify, and not excite. To discourage, instead of encourage, violence. And that's the problem with movies like Saw and Hostel : They make a bloodbath into a kind of joyous exercise.

I've been practicing for these kind of scares my whole life. I grew up on genre: Westerns, sci-fi, fantasy novels, mysteries and spy thrillers—but especially on horror. Horror's always gripped me in its bony fist. So I read everything by Shirley Jackson, and Anne Rice, and Stephen King, and Peter Straub and Robert Aikman, John Saul, and Dean Koontz, and H. P. Lovecraft, and Poe. There's something about me that's drawn to darkness and to the theater of fear. I can't quite put a finger on why that is—it's the same reason some people like romance stories while others like action movies. But my greatest pleasure growing up was terrifying my sister by leaping out of closets with my hands made into claws, or scratching at her bedroom window. She slept with the light on until she was 27. I guess that was training ground for the novelist I've become.

I've become so attuned to craft that it's sometimes difficult for me to get lost in a story. When I grew up reading, the only thing that concerned me was the question of what happens next—and the pages turned so fast they made a breeze across my face. The Road , for the first time in a very long time, owned me emotionally in that same fashion. I was able to turn off my craft radar and be swept away. I felt true terror. The kind of terror that used it make me, when I was a kid, wrap the sheets around my face and breathe through a little blowhole in fear of the shadow that seemed at the edges of my room. Cormac McCarthy, that dark sorcerer, makes me feel that way again.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

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Book Review: The Road (Cormac McCarthy)

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

I read this just a few years after high school, after the birth of my second child, and what now feels like forever ago (but was really just 15 years ago). I remember absolutely loving it. A bleak, dystopic novel of just… going forward. Always moving forward. Always going. One foot in front of the other.

And I do find myself like Cormac McCarthy. I loved No Country for Old Men, and All the Pretty Horses. But, on re-reading this just before going to Atlantic City for the AC Beer and Music Fest, I found myself…. having conflicting thoughts on it. At first, it felt like I was re-reading a favorite old book, but further I went through it (and its a super quick read), I found myself… not caring. Not loving it anymore. Some of it is the style, I know a lot of people are put off by the writing style of the book, the bleak isolated speech, the poor punctuation, grammar, the screenplay like dialogue but without directions, etc. And on my first read, it worked, I liked it, and at the start of re-reading it – I too liked it, but then it grew tiresome on me. And I think, all the more because it all just feels ‘pointless’.

When I looked up my GoodReads initial rating of it, I gave it ***** (5 out of 5). Crazy. But that was definitely in my phase of “Everything is either 5 stars or 1 star” mindset of looking at things. Not so much due to naïvety of thinking everything was either a classic or not, but just for simplicity sake when using the app. I tended to be the same with Untappd and other similar rating apps. Also in the fifteen years since, I think I got a bit more nuanced in my own thoughts, appreciation, and love for reading. I’ve been a voracious reader ever since middle school, and I typically for the last half dozen years have been reading about a hundred books per year. So I’ve certainly grown some since my initial reading of this.

I think some of my biggest take-aways is also a thing of growth in myself as a person, because the entirety of the book feels like a “why bother” now. With how absolutely bleak it is, it feels just pointless. Existentially pointless. For all intents and purposes humanity is done for. And thats ultimately the point of the novel, to drive home just how bleak it is, but that the Man keeps pushing onward, even when his wife couldn’t, even when his Son doesn’t think he can,  you ‘have to’. But I even question the point of thinking ‘you have to’ in a world like this. What do you live for? Its not really tackled in the book outside of the “because you have to’ omnipresence behind each page. Its not even directly stated. Characters don’t state things like that in the book. The Man just has the vague sense of ‘you must always keep moving no matter how bleak and horrible and terrible it is’, but its never explicitly said – not that it HAS to be explicitly said, I can draw inferences, but, a discussion, some character, some growth, some introspection, something would be interesting or nice or at least add substance to this. I can draw the inference of ‘you must always keep moving’ by page 10, so the remaining 276 pages are like a footnote to the initial thought.

I feel like my review will come off as extremely harsh, and probably far harsher than I even intend it to be. There is still a part of me that enjoys this work – but I think its for the overarch of it, not for the actual writing, prose, or the book itself. Its my interest and intrigue in the genre, its the way the story gets my mind to drift and think of how I would write a similar dystopic novel; so my interest and enjoyment of this (on the re-read) is more based on how I vaguely feel as a ‘whole’ to the entire process, to what I feel deep down, and not so much to the writing itself. I want to still really enjoy it, I want to dive deep into the book, but I’m afraid its not deep, its a shallow dive into a pond that looks deep from up high. Maybe thats where my frustration grows, and why I give a scathing review here. I genuinely think I’m being a bit too harsh on Cormac McCarthy here, and for his fans and lovers, I apologize for that. Maybe its just in re-reading this and what I remembered and feeling let down as an older man. Maybe its reading too many other book reviews and my critique level is so much higher than it was before. Maybe I’ve grown away from him. I still have No Country for Old Men on my “to re-read” list for the year. So who knows when we get to that, and if my opinions will change.

Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy in 1973 (photo courtesy of Wikipedia ).

Cormac McCarthy (born Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr. ; July 20, 1933 – June 13, 2023) was an American writer who authored twelve novels, two plays, five screenplays, and three short stories, spanning the Western and postapocalyptic genres. His works often include graphic depictions of violence, and his writing style is characterised by a sparse use of punctuation and attribution. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American novelists. [1] [2] [3] McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode Island , although he was raised primarily in Tennessee . In 1951, he enrolled in the University of Tennessee , but dropped out to join the U.S. Air Force . His debut novel , The Orchard Keeper , was published in 1965. Awarded literary grants, McCarthy was able to travel to southern Europe, where he wrote his second novel, Outer Dark (1968). Suttree (1979), like his other early novels, received generally positive reviews, but was not a commercial success. A MacArthur Fellowship enabled him to travel to the American Southwest, where he researched and wrote his fifth novel, Blood Meridian (1985). Although it initially garnered a lukewarm critical and commercial reception, it has since been regarded as his magnum opus , with some labeling it the Great American Novel . McCarthy first experienced widespread success with All the Pretty Horses (1992), for which he received both the National Book Award [4] and the National Book Critics Circle Award . It was followed by The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998), completing The Border Trilogy . His 2005 novel No Country for Old Men received mixed reviews. His 2006 novel The Road won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. Many of McCarthy’s works have been adapted into film. The 2007 film adaptation of No Country for Old Men was a critical and commercial success, winning four Academy Awards , including Best Picture . The films All the Pretty Horses , The Road , and Child of God were also adapted from his works of the same names, and Outer Dark was turned into a 15-minute short. McCarthy had a play adapted into a 2011 film, The Sunset Limited . McCarthy worked with the Santa Fe Institute , a multidisciplinary research center, where he published the essay “ The Kekulé Problem ” (2017), which explores the human unconscious and the origin of language . He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2012. [5] His final novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris , were published on October 25, 2022, and December 6, 2022, respectively. [6] Cormac McCarthy – Wikipedia Article

Book Review: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Back of cover blurb, as per GoodReads:

A searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece. 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. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other. The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation. The Road – GoodReads Back of Cover Blurb

The Road is uneven and repetitive—sometimes mimicking Melville, at other times Hemingway—but rather than forming a cohesive fusion, it appears more like a patchwork creation: stitched from disparate parts into a clumsy, mismatched entity, then awkwardly animated by McCarthy’s lofty status among Hollywood filmmakers and insular award circles.

Recall the ’96 Sokal Affair, where NYU Professor Alan Sokal submitted a deliberately obtuse and jargon-laden paper to various scientific journals, which was published because it pandered to their biases despite being utter nonsense. This incident demonstrated the profound failure of these esteemed adjudicators to discern the quality of arguments, driven largely by politics rather than merit. This skepticism towards gatekeepers of knowledge extends to the literary domain, where works like The Road receive acclaim seemingly more for their alignment with prevailing tastes than for any substantive merit. McCarthy, unlike Sokal, may not have intended deception, but his style is marked by an emptiness dressed up in a manner that conveniently invites praise.

Many praise McCarthy for his straightforward prose, which I could appreciate if it mirrored the deliberate and measured style of Hemingway. However, what I encountered in The Road was different:

“He took out the plastic bottle of water and unscrewed the cap and held it out and the boy came and took it and stood drinking. He lowered the bottle and got his breath and he sat in the road and crossed his legs and drank again. Then he handed the bottle back and the man drank and screwed the cap back on and rummaged through the pack. They ate a can of white beans, passing it between them, and he threw the empty tin into the woods.

Then they set out down the road again.”

Yes, the writing is simple. Yet, is it precise and purposeful? Hardly. The Road often reads more like a monotonous inventory of actions rather than a thoughtfully crafted narrative. In its verbosity and redundancy, it loses the very essence of what it attempts to convey. This isn’t simplicity; it’s needless complication masquerading as minimalism.

McCarthy’s stylistic choice in The Road aims to elevate the mundane through simplicity—a technique often seen in postmodern literature, which seeks to make the familiar seem novel again and underscore the significance of everyday occurrences. However, McCarthy does not transform the context but merely restates it, resulting in a narrative devoid of distinct personality, disconnected from the plot, and revealing little about the characters.

The intention may be to depict the characters’ profound exhaustion, so great that they seem disengaged from their own existence. But must the portrayal of tedium be so tedious itself? Skillful writers can imbue the ordinary with wonder, yet The Road’s starkness strips it of beauty and its aimlessness deprives it of poignancy.

When McCarthy abandons the terse style reminiscent of Hemingway, he unexpectedly veers into Melville’s territory of dense, florid prose:

“The man thought he seemed some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a traveling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves.”

The transition between styles is jarring, with no coherent effort to meld them. Elsewhere, McCarthy’s repetition of “dead ivy,” “dead grass,” and “dead trees” drones on monotonously until he abruptly shifts to describe them as “shrouded in a carbon fog,” a phrase that could belong in a lackluster cyberpunk collection.

Consider another instance:

“It’s snowing, the boy said. A single gray flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire like the last host of christendom.”

Here, McCarthy attempts to channel Melville’s grandiose, religious symbolism, presenting himself as a decrepit seer akin to the prophetic figures in Moby Dick. Yet, while Melville’s integration of theology feels profoundly omnipresent and awe-inspiring, McCarthy’s feels forced and minimal, akin to superficial decor in an otherwise sparse room. McCarthy never reaches the profound otherworldliness of Melville’s lines such as, “There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within.”

McCarthy often layers his elaborate metaphors thickly, seemingly striving for a unique literary voice. However, the result more often resembles the melodramatic scribblings in a ‘Team Edward’ notebook abandoned after a high school poetry class:

“. . . Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?

Dark of the invisible moon. The nights now only slightly less black. By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.

People sitting on the sidewalk in the dawn half immolate and smoking in their clothes. Like failed sectarian suicides. . . .”

His introduction of these lines feels robotic, almost as though penned by a sardonic Asimovian robot. Wry Observation: It’s almost believable that he is one, given his apparent detachment from beauty and human emotion. Sharp Comment: Yet, he seems to disregard Asimov’s first law, as his clumsy prose inflicts suffering upon the reader’s ears.

Occasionally, amidst mundane descriptions, such as scraping paint with a screwdriver, McCarthy inserts an obscure technical term that baffles more than it enlightens. These terms don’t seem to fit the world he’s created or emerge from any specialized knowledge possessed by his characters, rendering them meaningless within the narrative.

A fundamental piece of advice for any novice writer is to avoid using complex vocabulary unnecessarily—it comes off as self-indulgent and does little to enhance the story. It would be different if these terms were part of a deliberate stylistic choice, but here, they feel like jarring bits of jargon that disrupt the flow of the text—just more debris for the reader to navigate.

As I progressed through the book, its unrelenting grimness became more tiring than compelling, and its credibility waned. The structure of isolated sentences posing as entire chapters, brief two-word fragments punctuated as though profound, and the undifferentiated, monosyllabic mutterings akin to a vagrant talking to himself—all contribute to a sense that the novel is overdone and absurd.

The book confronted me like a towering, inebriated man in a bar, challenging me to mock his typo-laden tattoo—and I couldn’t help but laugh. I’m not sure if my coworkers or fellow bus riders knew what ‘The Road’ was about (this was long before any film adaptation), but they might have guessed it to be a wildly comic adventure involving a bus full of nuns concealing a disguised convict, chased by a klutzy southern sheriff and his sidekick, complete with a donkey for extra laughs.

Without diving into specifics, the book’s infamous ending feels arbitrarily attached, failing to resonate with or conclude any of the emotional journey built up prior. It wraps up neatly, almost too neatly, which seems to validate McCarthy’s own admission on Oprah that he “had no idea where it was going” as he wrote it. And indeed, it shows, Cormac.

From the excerpts, you might have picked up on another glaring issue—the book’s punctuation, or rather, the lack thereof. The most sophisticated punctuation mark McCarthy employs is the occasional comma. It’s not as if the text is composed of simple, clear-cut sentences either. McCarthy indulges in compound clauses and fragmented sentences, yet he refrains from using any conventional marks to structure them.

Moreover, McCarthy avoids using quotation marks in the dialogue and seldom attributes lines to characters, leaving readers to puzzle out whether a line is spoken or merely a part of his ‘poetic license’. This requires us to first determine if someone is speaking at all, and then to decipher who might be speaking. While Melville eschewed quotation marks in a chapter of Moby Dick in a nod to Shakespeare, he recognized that this was a playful affectation suited to a comically absurd scene—a subtlety McCarthy’s approach sorely lacks.

Not only are the structure, grammar, figurative language, and basic descriptions sorely lacking, the characters themselves are equally flat and monotonous. The interactions between the father and son are painfully repetitive:

Father: Do it now.

Son: I ‘m scared.

Father: Just do it.

Son: Are we going to die?

Father: No.

Son: Are you sure?

Father: Yes.

In the absence of dialogue tags, this conversation unfurls in a continuous line, indistinguishable one from the next. After meandering or fleeing from threats, the conversation typically concludes with:

Son: Why did (terrible thing) just happen?

Father: (Stares off in silence)

Father: (More silence)

This encapsulates their entire relationship: stagnant, unevolving, and nonsensical. Despite their constant companionship, there’s an inexplicable distance between them, reminiscent of a suburban parent and child who seldom interact and share little in common. McCarthy fails to explore or explain this disconnect, despite the characters’ continuous and close interactions.

Moreover, McCarthy revealed to Oprah that the book reflects his relationship with his own son, which perhaps explains why the emotional tone feels so disconnected from the dire setting. It’s as if he equated his own distant paternal relationship with the extreme survival struggles faced by those in catastrophic situations, resulting in a narrative that could be seen as an act of privileged self-pity.

The characters are underdeveloped, and their reactions often feel forced, like those in a poorly scripted horror movie. The boy, perpetually terrified, serves mainly to amplify every crisis, resembling a cliché fright scene more than a genuine human response. In horror, subtlety often trumps overt dramatization; a quiet, unsettling reaction can be far more powerful than overt hysteria. For example, a child who doesn’t scream upon finding a dead infant, suggesting a chilling adaptation to a horrific norm, could have been profoundly impactful.

Instead, we get a child who reacts as though each horror is a new shock, despite having experienced similar horrors repeatedly. The characters don’t seem to develop emotional resilience or suffer from PTSD; their responses feel more like teenage angst than authentic distress. A truly compelling narrative might have explored a father’s struggle to prevent his son from becoming desensitized to their brutal world, rather than portraying a child inexplicably untouched by his harsh reality.

Every time a challenge arises in this book, the characters collapse internally and resign themselves to despair. In reality, people typically respond to immediate dangers with action—either fighting, fleeing, or freezing—not by succumbing to self-pity, which is a luxury reserved for moments of safety and reflection.

There’s an utter lack of joy or hope in this narrative. Yet, in even the most dire situations, humans find ways to persevere, often through small victories, rationalizations, or even delusions. The concept of ‘The Fire’ in the book, which the father uses to justify their survival, feels less like an authentic motivational force and more like a convenient plot device. It seems McCarthy couldn’t conceive a believable reason why his characters would strive to survive, reducing their journey to a mechanical following of ‘The Plot’.

This book presents a world devoid of possibilities, which is less a portrayal of reality and more a grim literary exercise. Despite aiming to evoke deep emotional responses, the continuous bleakness prevents any real connection. There’s no contrast in this monochrome narrative; it’s like a canvas painted black where additional strokes only blend into the darkness, lacking tension or depth.

Labeling this as tragedy porn might be harsh, but not unfounded. It equates the banality of suburban life with extreme human suffering, allowing readers to superficially align their mild discomforts with profound tragedies. Thus, a bored housewife or a man estranged from his father might see their own mundane grievances mirrored in these extreme circumstances, feeling validated in their emotional responses.

This indulgence allows the privileged to equate their insulated pain with the acute suffering of others, often seen briefly in adverts between their favorite TV shows. It’s a modern form of invisible colonialism where the affluent can feel connected to global suffering without ever experiencing real deprivation or danger. They perform conscientious acts—recycling, using organic products, conserving water—as superficial penance, comforting themselves with their supposed solidarity with humanity.

And here I am, feeling disheartened by all this, which makes me as hypocritical as any other comfortably distant observer of global tragedies. Reading this book didn’t make me empathize with its contrived angst; it only highlighted how disconnected it is from real despair, much like my own detached existential musings are from those truly struggling.

This detachment is emblematic of a broader trend among American authors, and their navel-gazing works rarely attempt to engage with the world at large. In the infamous Oprah interview, McCarthy’s inability to discuss his craft or explore deeper ideas was evident; he responded to questions with dismissive laughter and vague shrugs, perhaps betraying a lack of deeper insight into his own work.

From this perspective, it’s understandable why he secured the Pulitzer. Awards often reflect underlying political currents, and selecting McCarthy seems like an affirmation of a certain self-centered American viewpoint that some believe remains pertinent. However, the global community continues to evolve, often sidelining American literary contributions, casting doubt on the likelihood of a Nobel prize for McCarthy or any other American writer in the near future.

This book seems to be an ode to American self-importance, a trait increasingly out of step with a globally interconnected, homogenous world. It serves as a marker for one of two outcomes: it could either signify the demise of a dwindling philosophy, succumbing to internal discord and narrow-mindedness, or herald a necessary transformation into something more globally competitive and relevant. After all, resting on past laurels can only get you so far.

But then, the Pulitzer committee is renowned for picking unadventurous winners–usually an unremarkable late entry by an author past their prime. As William Gass put it: “the prize is simply not given to work of the first rank, rarely even to the second; and if you believed yourself to be a writer of that eminence, you are now assured of being over the hill”.

Genre aficionados will recognize a disheartening pattern in this book, much lamented by the likes of LeGuin: the phenomenon of a well-known literary author dabbling in genres like fantasy or sci-fi. These authors enter with their mainstream literary credentials to supposedly show the regulars ‘how it’s done’, yet they often lack a deep understanding of the genre’s nuances and history. As a result, they churn out content that might have seemed stale decades ago. Fortunately for these authors, their usual literary critics, unfamiliar with genre specifics, might find these retreads novel, simply due to the author’s fame.

For this effort, McCarthy might earn two stars for delivering a passable, albeit clichéd, sci-fi adventure narrative, but this is offset by a star for his troubling portrayal of human suffering. While I haven’t explored McCarthy’s other works and may do so to see if his acclaim is warranted, this particular book doesn’t support his lauded reputation. It presents a case of an author outgrowing editorial control and, with the freedom to write as he pleases, demonstrating that he may have nothing left of significance to say.

I will begin to wrap-up with a quote by David Foster Wallace:

Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are merely lists … Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what’s always distinguished bad writing–flat characters, a narrative world that’s … not recognizably human, etc.–is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world … most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? David Foster Wallace

Cormac plays to the strengths of the genre with The Road. He plays to the collective knowledge we all have of dystopia, dystopic nature, apocalypse, and post apocalypse, but thats basically where this ends. Its bare bones, both for a reason, and because theres nothing more he could do with it. The problem is we cry out for more, and we cannot be given it. We’re not even given backstory, nothing more than the “you must keep moving forward”, always “move forward”. In a post-9/11 world, in a post-COVID world, in a world that has seen what we all have seen, with a history of all that we have seen – the words “you must keep moving forward” ring very true – but also ring very hollow. These are platitudes in the dark that don’t put any meat on the bones. And we crave meat and potatoes and something to stick it all together, not just the bones, and all Cormac McCarthy has to offer us here is the bones.

My GoodReads Rating: ** (My initial GoodReads Rating: *****) My LibraryThing Rating: **1/2 Global Average GoodReads Rating: 3.99 (as of 4.18.24).

Wrapping This All Up

Yes, I think I went down a long tangent of a road, critiquing this still very heavily. Do I think I “missed the point” of the novel? I don’t think so, I think I understand it. Its existential, its barebones, its bleak, its dark, its macabre, its somber. But it never really rises above that. For 286 pages its poetic, like a poetic nightmare. The prose is written for awards, I think thats a chief concern and annoyance with the actual writing. More than the “avant-garde” writing of grammar and punctuation and no “he said” “she said” dialogue notes. For how bleak and miserable it is, and how we are to take this man as a grizzled man who is surviving and can’t be bothered to give his thoughts on anything, to see big “10 dollar” and “50 dollar” words, feels… like the writing is never really “aimed for us”. But over us. Right now, how many of you know what ‘crozzled’ means? (Its in the book.) (Quick spoiler, here’s what it means as per Dictionary.com: Adjective. crozzled (comparative more crozzled, superlative most crozzled) Shrunken or shrivelled from exposure to heat . )

I still want to enjoy it, and I think I can, perhaps its a “right frame of mind” kind of reading, or maybe just have to turn off my critique mind, and just go in and read it. Who knows. Will I give it a re-read? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe I will in 2035 when we are facing a real apocalypse, who knows.

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Book Thoughts from Bed

A place for book reviews and recommendations.

Book Review: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Road is Cormac McCarthy’s epic, Pulitzer Prize-winning story of a man trying to keep himself and his son alive in a bleak post-apocalyptic world.

This post may contain Amazon Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn a small commission from qualifying purchases at no additional cost to you.  (This in no way affects the honesty of my reviews!) All commissions will be donated to the ALS Association. 

I read The Road as part of the 2022 Thoughtful Reading Challenge. March’s challenge was to read a book by an Irish-American author in honor of Irish-American Heritage Month. I had been hesitant about reading The Road because of its subject matter and reputation, but I’m so glad I finally got over my angst. That’s the great thing about a reading challenge – it can get you out of your comfort zone!

When the story opens, “the man” and “the boy” (we never learn their names) are traveling south on a road, trying to reach the coast. They are in the mountains, where everything is burned out and covered with ash and sooty snow. Nothing is alive except some human survivors, it’s perpetually cold and the sun is always behind a curtain of haze.

The man and his son have been survivors of the apocalypse for many years, and they have been reduced to pushing a shopping cart filled with their meager belongings, scouring empty houses for canned food, and sleeping in the woods in the cold, damp leaves.

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They can’t trust anyone – people have gone feral and are preying on other survivors. They are wholly dependent on each other for survival. And this is the crux of the story.

At its heart, The Road is about the strong love between the father and the son, and the great lengths a father will go to protect his son and keep him alive in the face of terrible odds.

Sometimes I wondered if the father was doing the right thing. By keeping his son alive, was he just condemning him to a joyless life of misery? Maybe the long journey symbolized his unflagging hope that there was a place in the wasted world where he and his son could carve out a decent life?

As a parent, I found myself frequently thinking about what I would do if I were in the father’s shoes, and I concluded that I would do the same (although I never liked camping, so I wouldn’t last very long). It’s hard to blame a parent for savoring every moment he can with his child, and hoping they’ll find a better life down the road.

It was interesting to compare this post-apocalyptic world to something like The Walking Dead, where they can still grow food and just need to outrun really slow-moving zombies to survive. Although the source of the destruction isn’t revealed, it seems to have been a nuclear war. And it threw the world into a cold, gray winter that the author described so well that I was often surprised when I looked up from the book and saw sunlight streaming in my window. I’m pretty sure this is what the end of the world will look like. (Sorry, zombies)

Cormac McCarthy’s prose is poetic, and he wrote the interactions between father and son so simply and yet so powerfully. It’s easy to see how The Road won a Pulitzer. I highly recommend it and want to read more of McCarthy’s novels. Any suggestions?

How about you? Did you read a book by an Irish-American author this month? Please tell us all about it in the comments section.

**Reminder: April’s challenge is to read a book about the outdoors or that mostly takes place outside. And the bonus challenge is to donate new children’s books to a local charity.

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13 thoughts on “ Book Review: The Road by Cormac McCarthy ”

I read this book several years ago and it remains one of my all time favorites. Very well written. I would highly recommend it .

Like Liked by 1 person

There are many roads we travel, and many seem bleak. Yet, we search for reasons to believe. I’ve read both The Road and No Country for Old Men. I’m also glad that I did. I recommend you read the latter, but it’s a gruesome tale. Peace, to you, Michelle!

So true. You continue to teach me into my old age, coach. 🙂

I read The Road years ago and I still think of it often. Have you read Station Eleven? Can’t remember the authors full name but that is another post apocalypse book that has also stayed with me. I started watching the movie/mini series. I always say that this genre doesn’t appeal to me but…

Hey Deb! Yes, I read and really liked Station 11. I reviewed it a while back. Paul actually subscribed to HBO just so he could watch the series, but I didn’t watch it with him. He said it’s pretty good. Hope you liked it.

Your review of The Road definitely convinced me to add it to my 2022 reading list. Thanks Michelle for always providing an honest review! 😀

You’re welcome! I’m eager to hear your opinion of it!

I read The Road years ago – still think of it often – what a powerful book. I agree with your comments about parenthood. It’s hard not to imagine doing absolutely everything we could to keep our kids alive and bring them to a better place.

My recent “Irish author” book was 56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard, a fabulous crime writer from Cork. It is set during the early days of the pandemic when Ireland’s strict COVID lockdown provides the perfect opportunity for a young couple’s budding romance… and more. Highly recommended!

I read Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy and it was well-written but a sad memoir of a woman who had a rare childhood cancer that she manages to survive but then never escapes from pain of the disfigurement it brings. Discovering that the author eventually dies of a heroin overdose at the age of 39 was rough. Not the ideal read, but no regrets in reading it.

I’m sure The Road is a powerful read too, and I appreciate your review, as always. But I think I’ll search for something cheerful with my next read. I sure could use it!

That sounds like a tough read. Hope you find a cheerier book to read next.

I read The Road several years ago, and while I thought it was a great read, it was difficult to say I “enjoyed it”. I liked your thoughts about looking at it as a story about the lengths a parent would go to for their child. Which was inspiring. But the end times scenario was a bit dark for me. That being said, I would still say it is a great read.

Thanks for agreeing to read one of my favorite books! I read it years ago and loved it. I don’t own many books but this one I did. That is, until a friend of ours came to visit and took it with him (Pete)! He liked it too. I really enjoyed reading it a second time and found it just as powerful. It is bleak, stark, and dark but ultimately it’s a story of love. As you said, McCarthy’s writing style is so powerful that it makes the reader feel as if they are in the story as well. You can see the gloom and feel the cold and wet. He says so much in so few words. That’s a true gift and it reminds me of Hemingway’s style.

What I also think is impressive about this book is that it is about basic survival. There’s no room for fluff or anything other than the bare necessities. And McCarthy adopts this theme in to his writing style. There’s no names, no chapters, heck there’s not even apostrophes except for when needed for clarification. It’s bare bones writing for a bare bones story and the effect is perfect. It’s not a “feel good” story but it is a read that leaves quite a powerful impression.

I’ve also read Blood Meridian and No Country For Old Men by McCarthy but this is by far my favorite. One of these days I’m going to get to All The Pretty Horses.

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Reviews of The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

by Cormac McCarthy

Critics' Opinion:

Readers' Opinion:

• Speculative, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Alt. History
• Dealing with Loss
• War Related

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About this Book

• Reading Guide

Book Summary

A searing, postapocalyptic novel by the author of the much loved Border Trilogy .

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. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other. The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.

Excerpt The Road

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a ...

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Pulitzer Prize 2007

Media Reviews

Reader reviews, bookbrowse review.

As a prophetic vision of the end times, McCarthy's interpretation would leave the fire and brimstone prophets of old quaking in their sandals. As a parable or allegory, The Road offers rich veins of interpretation, precisely because it lacks a clear message, leaving it up to the reader to interpret it as they see fit... continued

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Beyond the Book

Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island. He attended the University of Tennessee in the early 1950s, and joined the U.S. Air Force, serving four years, two of them stationed in Alaska. McCarthy then returned to the university, where he published in the student literary magazine and won the Ingram-Merrill Award for creative writing in 1959 and 1960. McCarthy next went to Chicago, where he worked as an auto mechanic while writing his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, published in 1965. Outer Dark was published in1968, followed by Child of God in 1973. From 1974 to 1975, McCarthy worked on the screenplay for a PBS film called The Gardener's Son , which premiered in 1977. In the late 1970s, McCarthy moved to Texas, and ...

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Read-Alikes

• Genres & Themes

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A gripping narrative of the infamous hunt which drove the buffalo population to near extinction--the story of a moment in our history in which mass destruction of an animal population was seen as the only route to economic solvency. And the intimate story of how that hunt changed two people forever.

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The road ending explained: what happens to the boy.

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The Road:5 Differences Between The Movie And The Book (& 5 Things The Movie Got Right)

10 realistic apocalypse movies that will keep you up at night, the 10 darkest "end of the world" depictions in post-apocalyptic movies.

• The Road ending is as bleak as the rest of the movie, with the father dying slowly from a wound as his son watches.
• The Boy may find salvation in the ending when a family offers to take him in, but their intentions are ambiguous.
• Both the book and the movie of The Road are dark, but the book's horrors are even more unpalatable for the screen.

The Road ending is just as bleak as the rest of the post-apocalyptic drama. Director John Hillcoat adapted Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road in 2009. Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee star as a father and son (credited only as “Man” and “Boy") trying to survive after an unspecified extinction event has wiped out most of the population. The Road follows the man and the boy as they head southwards through the barren wasteland in search of the coast and warmer climes, scavenging what little food they can find and having terrifying encounters with marauders and cannibals along the way.

The man tries to protect his son as best he can, but keeps a gun loaded with their last bullet and ensures the boy knows how to take his own life, since death isn't the worst fate for the boy in the post-apocalyptic 2019 shown in The Road . By The Road ending, the pair finally arrive at the coast. However, the man is shot in the leg with an arrow by a paranoid survivor. He kills his assailant, but slowly succumbs to his wound and a worrying cough he’s been plagued with as his son watches him die.

It's rare for an acclaimed book to be translated into a film note for note. That almost happened in the case of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Almost.

The Road Has A Deliberately Bitter-Sweet Ending

The boy may have found salvation by the road ending.

The final scenes of The Road’s ending offer a glimmer of hope — at least according to some. A couple of days after the boy’s father dies he’s approached by a man ( played by Prometheus' Guy Pearce and credited as “Veteran”) who is travelling with what appears to be his wife (Molly Parker), their two young kids, and their pet dog. They tell the boy they’ve been following him and his father for some time and ask if he’d like to accompany them, offering a light at the end of the grim tunnel that is the experience of The Road .

Some have a much darker interpretation of this potentially hopeful ending for The Road movie.

However, some have a much darker interpretation of this potentially hopeful ending for The Road movie. It’s posited that Guy Pearce’s character and his companions are actually cannibals rather than the saviors they seem to be and have been following the boy until his father died in hopes of securing their next meal. That said, The Road’s ending is fairly ambiguous, so whether its younger protagonist meets a bleak end or goes on to survive another day of the Mad Max -type apocalypse in the care of a new family is up to the viewer to decide.

There are many scary apocalypse movies involving big monsters and adverse weather events, but ones with a touch of realism are often the scariest.

The Road Movie Is Bleak But Has Nothing On The Book

Cormac mccarthy's story is much worse.

While The Road movie adaptation is certainly bleak, the book is actually much worse. For example, there's a passage in which the two main characters pass a group of cannibals who are roasting a human baby on a spit. It's necessary for studios to make plenty of changes when it comes to book-to-movie adaptations, and The Road wasn't exempt. That being said, The Road is considered a somewhat faithful adaptation.

The death of Viggo Mortensen's character was borderline unwatchable in the movie, but it's even sadder in the book's ending.

Most changes weren't made to change the plot, but in order to make the ending of the movie more palpable for audiences. A notable example of this elsewhere is the infamous sewer orgy from Stephen King's IT novel being cut from every on-screen adaptation. An example from The Road includes the death of the Father. The death of Viggo Mortensen's character was borderline unwatchable in the movie, but it's even sadder in the book's ending.

While both the movie and the book see the Boy staying with the Father three days after his death, in the book the Father actually dies in the woods after attempting to set up a campsite, never getting to see the coast. The horrors of the Marauders are also downplayed in the movie. For example, in the books, some had catamites (sexual slaves of a pubescent age used for degradation and harassment). All in all, these changes were necessary, as some elements of The Road as a book were just too unappetizing to appear on the big screen.

End of the world movies are often unsettling, but some post-apocalyptic films like The Matrix depict futures that are especially dark.

The Meaning Of The Road Ending

The finale of the movie is either uplifting or nihilistic.

The Road ending is undeniably bleak. However, the entire movie is one with a lot of depth, and there's clear thematic meaning behind the the journey the Man and the Boy take, as well as the Boy being found on the beach after watching his father pass away. A key theme of The Road is loss. The Man is tormented throughout by visions of his wife, and how she took her own life. Even in the harsh and unrelenting world the Man and the Boy now inhabit, losing her still plagues the Man's mind.

With the death of his wife, the Man's personal world has collapsed, and the same is then true for the Boy once the Man dies at the end.

This is also true of the Boy, though f or Kodi Smit-Mcphee's character , the loss is of his father during the ending of The Road. Despite the Boy's pleading, the Man ultimately passes away due to his wounds and a possible infection. For the first time in the movie, the Boy is truly alone, his emotional state mirroring the mostly-empty post-apocalyptic world around him. It's not just the wider world that's gone for the Man and the Boy. With the death of his wife, the Man's personal world has collapsed, and the same is then true for the Boy once the Man dies at the end.

Then, of course, there is the question of the meaning behind the family finding the Boy in the final scenes of The Road ending. The meaning of this moment can be read in two different ways, depending on what the viewer thinks happens next. If they take the pessimistic view, that the family have bad intentions for the Boy, then this moment could be said to thematically represent that there's always something left to lose — an incredibly bleak message for an equally bleak movie.

Ultimately, due to the ambiguous nature of the film, the meaning of The Road ending is down to interpretation

However, should the viewer interpret the ending of The Road more optimistically, then the deeper meaning behind the family finding the Boy could be that it's possible to find reasons to hope even in the darkest of times. Ultimately, due to the ambiguous nature of the film, the meaning of The Road ending is down to interpretation, but there's no doubt it leaves viewers with much to process and mull over by the time the credits roll.

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Based on Cormac McCarthy's novel of the same name, The Road centers on a father and son who attempt to make it to the coast after a global apocalypse wipes out all plant and animal life on Earth. The Road was directed by John Hillcoat and stars Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee.

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The Road to Freedom by Joseph Stiglitz review – against Hayek

The former world bank economist argues that neoliberalism paves the way for populism

I n 1944 the Austrian-born economist Friedrich Hayek, displaced to Britain, was disquieted by his leftwing academic peers. As Hayek saw it, their political philosophy committed the same error as the fascism that was ravaging his homeland. He wrote that the desire to plan an economy centrally was – in what became the title of his most famous book – The Road to Serfdom: “many who sincerely hate all of nazism’s manifestations are working for ideals whose realisation would lead straight to the abhorred tyranny”. Hayek cast fascism not as a reaction to progressive success, but as its natural endpoint.

Joseph Stiglitz, a former chief economist of the World Bank and adviser to Bill Clinton, tackles this idea head on in The Road to Freedom, his rejoinder to Hayek’s work and that of his libertarian fellow traveller Milton Friedman. As Stiglitz sees it, rather than too much government leading to tyranny, the shift to neoliberalism has reduced freedom and “provided fertile ground for populists”. Social democracy, with its greater role for the state, generates freer, robust societies that are resilient to authoritarians like former president Donald Trump.

The mistake Hayek and Friedman made, repeated by their latter day fans on the right – Stiglitz lumps them all together in a basket of climate-denying, Covid-rubbishing, Fox-News-watching ignoramuses – was in not truly understanding freedom. Freedom for one person can come at the expense of another – indeed a certain amount of coercion can expand the total amount of freedom, Stiglitz argues. Hayek and Friedman understood this principle when it came to national defence and the protection of private property, but it should be expanded to include the environment, public health and investments in infrastructure that make us all richer.

Stiglitz takes this a bit too far. Criticising the lack of urban planning in Houston, for example, he points to a sex toy shop located in the car park of a mall that also hosts a private school. The laissez-faire approach, he says, creates negative externalities – the phrase economists use to label harms imposed on third parties. In this instance, the freedom to buy products for use by consenting adults comes at the expense of others’ freedom not to be made aware of those activities. Stiglitz is clearly trying to address market excesses, but risks justifying a world of curtain-twitching puritanism.

At the same time, he points out the psychological constraints the market imposes on freedom. Advertising and social media limit our perspectives, reducing our ability to make choices just as much as laws and the power of the state do. Liberating us from these restrictions requires regulating others’ freedom, curbing their power to deceive us or to promote their polarising and distorted version of reality.

The supposedly freedom-enhancing role for coercion that he establishes in the first few chapters is, however, gradually forgotten, as the book becomes a recitation of familiar arguments in favour of social democracy and the role of government in mitigating market failure. There is little novel or surprising in this analysis.

Ultimately Hayek’s predictions were almost exactly wrong. The postwar welfare states did not lead to tyranny: the latter half of the 20th century saw freedom’s frontiers expand. Not only did censorship diminish – obscenity and blasphemy laws were overturned, for instance – but the civil rights movement, feminism and gay liberation all ensured more people were able to access traditional liberal rights. The most troubling feature of Stiglitz’s analysis, on the other hand, is that he may well be right. The neoliberal period has paved the way for the ascendancy of illiberal democrats, authoritarians like Trump, who have undermined or attempted to overthrow democracy. But do these people, with their apparent distaste for rules and restrictions, really not understand freedom? Or do they simply not care, seeing it as just another inconvenience standing in their way?

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Ride the Snake Road

Beamo roamer's hardcore jaunt to the wasteland.

LeRoy Wow Wolf-Wise Press ( 310pp ) 978-0-9640747-2-9

Clarion Rating: 4 out of 5

A man on the edges of a dystopian society seeks riches in the exciting novel Ride the Snake Road .

A pseudo-Western thriller set in an immersive dystopian landscape, LeRoy Wow’s novel Ride the Snake Road is set eleven hundred years after a nuclear event, Doomtime.

In Zarkaria, which sits on the territory of the former United States, citizens struggle to survive while the “rich Big Men” run their counties. In this setting, Beamo is a scavenger. When he memorizes and then destroys a map leading to the legendary Lost Fort Knox gold in the former Area 51, it places him in danger: the Big Men in his home, Crans County, want the Lost Fort Knox gold themselves. Thus, Beamo works with Tee, a former friend, and the Sawbird Gang to reach the abandoned military base first.

The stylized prose includes quick-witted conversations replete with inventive slang terms, like “highiq” or “lowiq” to indicate intelligence (or the lack thereof). Heavy dialects heighten its immersiveness, though they are also hard to penetrate at times—indeed, one Sawbird Gang member, Sass, speaks in near riddles. Still, intricate worldbuilding renders Beamo’s story both vibrant and grounded: as he and the Sawbird Gang travel west, they encounter dangerous terrors like Mutant Angels, skull-faced former humans who evolved due to nuclear fallout; the Minis, who were genetically modified before Doomtime into primitive, small-brained predators; and the harrowing traps set by ancient Americans in Area 51. Combined with the long trip’s natural hardships (Beamo and the Gang search for food and shelter, avoid diseases, and have to work to stabilize their group’s precarious hierarchy), such travails vivify the setting and heighten the stakes for Beamo—in particular, after his feelings for Tee’s alluring sister, Little Bit, increase, feeding into his desire to protect her.

While the plot is straightforward, it also meanders at times. It delves into Beamo’s backstory too often, zooming in on his past friendship with and estrangement from Tee, as well as on his relationships with his late parents. Such interludes help to flesh him out, but they also interrupt the book’s action and impede its momentum. Still, the Gang’s travels remain high stakes, even when their particulars are relegated to the book’s background. There’s a palpable sense of danger throughout that makes the adventure engrossing.

A thrilling novel set in a futuristic, post-nuclear West, Ride the Snake Road is about survival, legacies, and the dogged persistence of human civilization.

Reviewed by Leah Block May 9, 2024

Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.

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By William Kennedy

• Oct. 8, 2006

Cormac McCarthy’s subject in his new novel is as big as it gets: the end of the civilized world, the dying of life on the planet and the spectacle of it all. He has written a visually stunning picture of how it looks at the end to two pilgrims on the road to nowhere. Color in the world — except for fire and blood — exists mainly in memory or dream. Fire and firestorms have consumed forests and cities, and from the fall of ashes and soot everything is gray, the river water black. Hydrangeas and wild orchids stand in the forest, sculptured by fire into “ashen effigies” of themselves, waiting for the wind to blow them over into dust. Intense heat has melted and tipped a city’s buildings, and window glass hangs frozen down their walls. On the Interstate “long lines of charred and rusting cars” are “sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber. ... The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.”

McCarthy has said that death is the major issue in the world and that writers who don’t address it are not serious. Death reaches very near totality in this novel. Billions of people have died, all animal and plant life, the birds of the air and the fishes of the sea are dead: “At the tide line a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as eye could see like an isocline of death.” Forest fires are still being ignited (by lightning? other fires?) after what seems to be a decade since that early morning — 1:17 a.m., no day, month or year specified — when the sky opened with “a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.” The survivors (not many) of the barbaric wars that followed the event wear masks against the perpetual cloud of soot in the air. Bloodcults are consuming one another. Cannibalism became a major enterprise after the food gave out. Deranged chanting became the music of the new age.

A man in his late 40’s and his son, about 10, both unnamed, are walking a desolated road. Perhaps it is the fall, but the soot has blocked out the sun, probably everywhere on the globe, and it is snowing, very cold, and getting colder. The man and boy cannot survive another winter and are heading to the Gulf Coast for warmth, on the road to a mountain pass — unnamed, but probably Lookout Mountain on the Tennessee-Georgia border. It is through the voice of the father that McCarthy delivers his vision of end times. The son, born after the sky opened, has no memory of the world that was. His father gave him lessons about it but then stopped: “He could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own.” The boy’s mother committed suicide rather than face starvation, rape and the cannibalizing of herself and the family, and she mocks her husband for going forward. But he is a man with a mission. When he shoots a thug who tries to murder the boy (their first spoken contact with another human in a year) he tells his son: “My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you.” And when he washes the thug’s brains out of his son’s hair he ruminates: “All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.” He strokes the boy’s head and thinks: “Golden chalice, good to house a god.”

McCarthy does not say how or when God entered this man’s being and his son’s, nor does he say how or why they were chosen to survive together for 10 years, to be among the last living creatures on the road. The man believes the world is finished and that he and the boy are “two hunted animals trembling like groundfoxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.” But the man is a zealot, pushing himself and the boy to the edge of death to achieve their unspecified destination, persisting beyond will in a drive that is instinctual, or primordial, and bewildering to himself. But the tale is as biblical as it is ultimate, and the man implies that the end has happened through godly fanaticism. The world is in a nuclear winter, though that phrase is never used. The lone allusion to our long-prophesied holy war with its attendant nukes is when the man thinks: “On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world.”

They keep walking, the man coughing blood, dying, envying the dead. They are starving, stalked by the unseen, by armed thugs who travel by truck, and in terror they see an army of “marchers” who appear on the road four abreast and epitomize what the apocalypse has wrought: “All wearing red scarves at their necks. ... Carrying three-foot lengths of pipe with leather wrappings. ... Some of the pipes were threaded through with lengths of chain fitted at their ends with every manner of bludgeon. They clanked past, marching with a swaying gait like wind-up toys. Bearded, their breath smoking through their masks. ... The phalanx following carried spears or lances tasseled with ribbons, the long blades hammered out of trucksprings. ... Behind them came wagons drawn by slaves in harness and piled with goods of war and after that the women, perhaps a dozen in number, some of them pregnant, and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites illclothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each.”

And the boy asks, “Were they the bad guys?”

“Yes, they were the bad guys.”

“There’s a lot of them, those bad guys.”

“Yes there are. But they’re gone.”

The overarching theme in McCarthy’s work has been the face-off of good and evil with evil invariably triumphant through the bloodiest possible slaughter. Had this novel continued his pattern, that band of marching thugs would have been the focus — as it was with the apocalyptic horsemen of death in his second novel, “Outer Dark,” or the blood-mad scalp-hunters in his masterpiece, “Blood Meridian,” or the psychopathic killer in his recent novel, “No Country for Old Men.” But evil victorious is not this book’s theme. McCarthy changes the odds to favor the man and boy, who for a decade have survived death by fire and ice, and also cannibalism, which has become the most grievous manifestation of evil’s waning days. In the cellar of an antebellum home they discover naked slaves of a new order, people who were ambushed on the road and then kept alive as food. One man’s legs and thighs have been cut away, his hips cauterized by fire; and he lives on. When six of the cannibals return to the house the man and boy barely escape the same fate. Hiding, afraid to breathe, the father tells the boy it’s going to be O.K. He says that often.

The boy asks: “We wouldn’t ever eat anybody, would we?”

“No. Of course not. ...”

“No matter what.”

“No. No matter what.”

“Because we’re the good guys.”

“And we’re carrying the fire.”

“And we’re carrying the fire. Yes.”

“The Road” is a dynamic tale, offered in the often exalted prose that is McCarthy’s signature, but this time in restrained doses — short, vivid sentences, episodes only a few paragraphs or a few lines long, which is yet another departure for him, coming after “No Country for Old Men,” published last year. That was also tight and fast, an extremely violent thriller with the energy of his sentences and a philosophical sheriff lifting it out of the genre; but in the McCarthy canon that book seems like a Graham Greene “entertainment” alongside ambitious work like “The Road.” He is said to have other novels in unfinished drafts, so perhaps he will revert to grandiloquence in those to come. But on the basis of “No Country for Old Men” and “The Road” it does seem that he has put aside the linguistic excesses and the philosophizing for which he has been both venerated and mocked — those Faulknerian convolutions, the Melvillean sermonizing — and opted for terse dialogue and spartan narrative, a style he inherited from another of his ancestors, Hemingway, and long ago made his own.

The accessibility of this book, the love between father and son expressed in their quicksilver conversations, and the pathos of their story will make the novel popular, perhaps beyond “All the Pretty Horses,” which had a love story and characters you might befriend and not run from, and which delivered McCarthy out of cult status and onto the best-seller list. “The Road” is the most readable of his works, and consistently brilliant in its imagining of the posthumous condition of nature and civilization — “the frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night.” Money and gold mean nothing, nor do government, education, books, politics, history, friends, home. The pilgrimage is plotless but it races with tension, a sequence of enemy encounters or sightings, the perpetual danger from the killing weather, huddling under blanket and tarp, endlessly gathering firewood, confronting mysteries the dead world presents to a man seeking (and finding) water and food in the deserted houses, barns and boats that survived the firestorms. The father is ingenious in understanding how the natural and fabricated worlds function; and also lucky, as he modestly tells the boy.

But that luck is providential, for “The Road,” in addition to being a nonpareil vision of an apocalyptic landscape, is also a messianic parable, with man and boy walking prophetically by rivers, in caves, on mountaintops and across the wilderness in the spiritual spoor of biblical prophets — Isaiah, Elijah, Elisha, John the Baptist, to name a few. Elijah, herald of the Messiah, who will return on the Day of Judgment, turns up as a destitute straggler who looks like “a pile of rags fallen off a cart,” and the boy insists on feeding him. He says his name is “Ely.” In one of the longest conversations in the novel the father talks to Ely about being the last man on earth and says that nobody would know it.

“It wouldnt make any difference,” Ely says. “When you die it’s the same as if everybody else did too.”

“I guess God would know it. Is that it?” the man asks.

“There is no God,” Ely says.

“There is no God and we are his prophets.”

When the man suggests the boy is a god, Ely says: “Where men cant live gods fare no better. You’ll see. It’s better to be alone. So I hope that’s not true what you said because to be on the road with the last god would be a terrible thing. ... Things will be better when everybody’s gone.” As a kicker to his doomsaying he adds that even death will die. “He’ll be out in the road there with nothing to do and nobody to do it to. He’ll say: Where did everybody go?”

Who knew Elijah did stand-up?

The man and boy keep heading south and do reach the ocean, which the boy heard was blue, but it is as gray with ash as the rest of the world — a dead sea. And the Gulf Coast is as cold as Tennessee. When they capture a man who stole their goods the father leaves him naked on the road to freeze. The boy protests but the father chides him: “You’re not the one who has to worry about everything.” And then the 10-year-old messiah, who is compassion incarnate, and carrying the fire, gives up his secret. He says to his father: “Yes I am. I am the one.”

The good guys remain elusive as the father sickens, and he talks of the boy inevitably being alone on the road. The boy asks about another boy he saw walking alone. Was he lost?

“No,” the father says. “I dont think he was lost. ...”

“But who will find him if he’s lost? Who will find the little boy?”

“Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again.”

Goodness is an anomalous subject for McCarthy, especially in the language of a children’s book. He has given his own kinetic language to the narrating minds of morons, cretins, madmen, psychotic murderers; and in “Blood Meridian” to a satanically articulate god of war who rides with scalp-hunters and is the supreme evil opposite of the good boy messiah. Those narrators all became oracular presences on behalf of evil, but this father and son remain only filial familiars, brave and loving and good but tongue-tied on what else they are or are becoming. The boy refuses to speak his thoughts or dark dreams to his father; the father is as inarticulate on his Promethean son as he is on his own obsession with their forced march. But the father was right about goodness: it arrives on cue as a deus ex machina that has been following the pair and swiftly enfolds the boy savior into a holy family, maybe a holy commune, where they talk of the breath of God passing “from man to man through all of time.” Then McCarthy ends with an eloquent lament: a vision of mountain trout that “smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional” in a time gone when the world was becoming; and what had been was “a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again.” And all things “were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”

Brief and mystical, this is an extremely austere conclusion to the apocalyptic pilgrimage. Of the boy’s becoming, or his mission — redeeming a dead world, outliving death? — nothing is said. The rhythmic poetry of McCarthy’s formidable talent has made us see the blasted world as clearly as Conrad wanted us to see. But the scarcity of thought in the novel’s mystical infrastructure leaves the boy a designated but unsubstantiated messiah. It makes us wish that that old humming mystery had a lyric.

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Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell Hardcover – June 28, 2022

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A NEW YORK TIMES  BESTSELLER

Former Republican political operative Tim Miller answers the question no one else has fully grappled with: Why did normal people go along with the worst of Trumpism?

As one of the strategists behind the famous 2012 RNC “autopsy,” Miller conducts his own forensic study on the pungent carcass of the party he used to love, cutting into all the hubris, ambition, idiocy, desperation, and self-deception for everyone to see. In a bracingly honest reflection on both his own past work for the Republican Party and the contortions of his former peers in the GOP establishment, Miller draws a straight line between the actions of the 2000s GOP to the Republican political class's Trumpian takeover, including the horrors of January 6th.

From ruminations on the mental jujitsu that allowed him as a gay man to justify becoming a hitman for homophobes, to astonishingly raw interviews with former colleagues who jumped on the Trump Train, Miller diagrams the flattering and delusional stories GOP operatives tell themselves so they can sleep at night. With a humorous touch he reveals Reince Priebus' neediness, Sean Spicer's desperation, Elise Stefanik and Chris Christie’s raw ambition, and his close friends’ submission to a MAGA psychosis.

Why We Did It is a vital, darkly satirical warning that all the narcissistic justifications that got us to this place still thrive within the Republican party, which means they will continue to make the same mistakes and political calculations that got us here, with disastrous consequences for the nation.

• Print length 288 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Harper
• Publication date June 28, 2022
• Dimensions 6 x 0.97 x 9 inches
• ISBN-10 0063161478
• ISBN-13 978-0063161474
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Tim is a supremely gifted storyteller who writes with brutal honesty and stylish gallows humor about the GOP’s toxic mix of opportunists, joy riders, and grifters who enabled Donald Trump’s rise and guaranteed his enduring grip on the Republican Party. Tim takes a scalpel to the malignant tumor smothering American democracy by dissecting his own friends and onetime colleagues. The most valuable contribution of Tim’s book may be the anthropological examination of just how little separates a ‘normal’ Republican from an activist working to overthrow a free and fair presidential election. — Nicolle Wallace

Tim’s smart and witty takes on the current madness of our political times has been my balm of Gilead. In this book, Tim examines what makes some people abandon their principles to align with the current center of power and what makes others hold fast to their convictions in spite of finding themselves suddenly on the outs. As a former Republican partisan, Tim breaks it all down in precise bombs of truth and keen insight into some of the more awful truths of human nature when it comes to the allure of power. — Jane Lynch

Mea culpa and tell-all, Tim Miller’s Why We Did It reveals why and how a generation of Republican politicos bent the knee to a president so many of them privately feared and despised. — David Frum

From any dark experience springs something hopeful and good. In the Trump years, that bright side has been Tim and his compatriots who took up arms to fight the MAGA scourge. Before this book, I understood why the crazies and kooks went along with Trump, but now I fully grasp why smart, supposedly ‘normal’ Republicans did, too. Tim’s observations are clear-eyed, wise, brutally honest, and darkly hilarious. Everyone should read this book, especially fellow Democrats who want to better understand our political foes. — James Carville

When the history of this era is written, the dominant question will likely be, How did this happen? Tim Miller’s Why We Did It offers a crucial insider’s answer to that question. It’s a must-read report from the belly of the beast detailing how the unimaginable becomes inevitable. Looking back at a career in politics and being horrified at what you were part of is not the most fun exercise in life. Tim examines his role with clear honesty, sadness, and an amusing sense of the absurd. This is a big, important book. Read it. — Stuart Stevens

About the Author

Tim Miller is an MSNBC analyst and writer-at-large at The Bulwark . He was the communications director for Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign and the spokesman for the Republican National Committee during Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper (June 28, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0063161478
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0063161474
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.97 x 9 inches
• #33 in Political Parties (Books)
• #126 in History & Theory of Politics
• #169 in Political Commentary & Opinion

About the author

Tim Miller is an MSNBC analyst, writer-at-large for The Bulwark, and host of “Not My Party” on Snapchat. He has written on politics and culture for Rolling Stone, The Ringer, Playboy, and The Daily Beast. Tim was communications director for Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign and spokesman for the Republican National Committee during Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. He has since left the GOP and become one of the leaders of the “Never Trump” movement. He lives in Oakland, CA with his husband and daughter.

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Book Review: With surgeon-like precision, Alan Murrin dissects human relationships in The Coast Road

The Donegal native’s debut novel builds to a finale of quiet devastation

• John Walshe
• May 11, 2024

Alan Murrin may be living in Berlin, that most cosmopolitan urban metropolis, but he has clearly not left his Donegal roots behind. Murrin grew up in the fishing town of Killybegs, which he has thinly disguised as the fictional village of Ardglas in his searing debut novel, The Coast Road .

The town is an important character of its own here, with most of its inhabitants either regretting never escaping its clutches, feeling they have never ...

• Book Review

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All 11 Fight Scenes In Road House 2024, Ranked

• Hard-hitting fight scenes with expert precision make the new 'Road House' a thrilling watch for action lovers.
• Elwood Dalton's ruthless tactics and tragic past add an edge to the chaotic violence in the remake.
• Director Doug Liman makes the fight scenes leap out from the screen.

Just like the original movie starring Patrick Swayze, the new remake of Road House features plenty of brilliant fight scenes. The 1989 version of Road House is the ultimately guilty pleasure movie, packed with scenes of lowlife scum getting summarily beaten down by a stoic bouncer. The remake recaptures this crowd-pleasing feel, but it also features fight scenes which are laced with incredible tension. There are plenty of differences between the two movies, not least Dalton's UFC past in the 2024 version, but the remake is just as chaotically violent.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Elwood Dalton, a former UFC champion who retired after killing an opponent in the ring. Rather than cobbling together an unsatisfying life scaring underground MMA fighters out of their winnings, Dalton takes a job as a bouncer at a rowdy bar in the Florida Keys. Road House has been receiving positive reviews , and its hard-hitting fight scenes are a big reason why. Director Doug Liman previously worked on the action thrillers The Bourne Identity and Edge of Tomorrow , and he makes Road House 's fight scenes leap out from the screen.

Road House is available to stream now on Amazon Prime Video.

Road House Review: Doug Liman's Remake Is Bigger, Louder & Slightly Dumber Than The Original

Dalton breaking jack's fingers, dalton can incapacitate people with surgical precision.

Dalton often shows signs of his incredible understanding of human anatomy, presumably learned from years as a professional fighter. He knows exactly how to inflict the most damage with the absolute minimum effort, and this is how he turns the table on Jack when he pulls a gun on him. Jack thinks that waving a gun at Dalton will be enough to force him into his car, but Dalton doesn't break a sweat. He tells Jack very calmly that all he needs to do is break his index finger and his middle finger, and he follows through.

Dalton's Throat-Punch Kill

Dalton stops holding back after brandt's men burn down the book store.

One other instance of Dalton using his knowledge of the human body is when he kills Vince with a single punch to the throat. He explains that he's probably broken his hyoid bone and collapsed his trachea, but either result will stop him being able to breathe. It's an uncharacteristically cold-blooded moment from Dalton, and it suggests that mentally he could be back on the path to the dark place that saw him kill one of his opponents in the ring. This moment could be a tribute to the original Road House , in which Dalton rips out a man's throat.

Dell Being Killed By The Crocodile

Dell thinks he has the upper hand on dalton, but he ends up being eaten.

Dell doesn't take his initial loss to Dalton lightly. As soon as he's out of the hospital, he tries to run Dalton down in his car. When that doesn't work, he ambushes Dalton on his boat, aptly named "the Boat," with a shotgun in his hand. Just as Jack finds out, having a gun doesn't necessarily give you the advantage over Dalton in a fight. Dalton quickly disarms Dell and knocks him overboard. He tries to rescue him before a crocodile snaps him up, but he's too late. As everyone in Glass Key knows, "crocs hide their food."

Dalton & Ellie Fighting Brandt On His Boat

The waves level the playing field.

As Brandt tries to escape from his burning yacht, he takes a smaller speedboat with Ellie alongside as a hostage. Dalton commandeers Knox's boat and tracks him down, and he teams up with Ellie to fight Brandt as the boat is tossed around by the ocean. The waves add some extra jeopardy to the fight, but Brandt is no real fighter. If it was a regular fight on flat ground, Dalton probably could have killed him in seconds. He loses control of the boat before too long and gets catapulted into the bar, setting up Road House 's ending .

18 Best Jake Gyllenhaal Movies, Ranked

Billy breaking up a fight at the road house, dalton's apprentice learns how to take out the trash.

Rather than taking on every rowdy customer who comes to the bar, Dalton decides to train Billy and Reef as bouncers so that they can deal with the everyday troublemakers. They could hardly ask for a better teacher, as shown by how quickly their skills develop. Dalton is surprisingly hands-off in his approach. He tells Billy exactly what to do when a fight breaks out and one man has a concealed knife. Billy takes a big step back and pops him in the nose. Dalton can leave later knowing that the Road House is in safe hands.

Dalton's Career-Ending UFC Fight

Road house's ufc scenes use real-life fighters and pundits.

Director Doug Liman uses POV shots in Dalton's darkest moments, and his fight with Harris is the darkest of all.

Conor McGregor isn't the only UFC fighter in Road House . Jay Hieron plays Jax "Jetway" Harris, Dalton's opponent in his championship bout. Road House drip feeds the story of Dalton's fight throughout the movie. Eventually, it becomes clear why the event haunts Dalton's dreams. Dalton kills Harris in the ring by refusing to stop. Director Doug Liman uses POV shots in Dalton's darkest moments, and his fight with Harris is the darkest of all. The spectacle of the big occasion makes Dalton's trauma even worse. The cameras flash around him as he begins to understand what he has just done.

Post Malone's Bareknuckle Boxing Fight

The rapper is surprisingly convincing in his cameo.

Post Malone is one of the most surprising members of the Road House cast , along with Conor McGregor. He plays Carter, a bareknuckle fighter in the movie's first scene. Fittingly, the movie opens with a punch to the face, as Carter takes down a much larger opponent. The ring announcer claims that Carter has taken down six challengers in a row, but he backs down from fighting Dalton when he recognizes who he is. Road House starts with a bang , immediately signaling its intention to be just as action-packed as the 1989 original.

Knox Destroying The Bar With A Golf Club

Conor mcgregor's introduction shakes things up.

As soon as Conor McGregor is introduced as Knox, strutting boldly down the street in the nude, Road House kicks into another gear.

As soon as Conor McGregor is introduced as Knox, strutting boldly down the street in the nude, Road House kicks into another gear. He throws his weight around with Brandt's crew before strolling into the Road House like he owns it with a golf club in his hands. Knox brings a whirlwind of chaos with him, smashing glasses as he almost dances his way through the bar. He seems to enjoy violence and pain, and he picks fights with bystanders just to cause a nuisance. He even tears through the netting which protects the band.

Knox & Dalton's First Road House Fight

Dalton meets his match at last.

After Dalton decides that Knox's antics have gone too far, he steps in to confront him. Despite the chaos all around them as an all-out bar fight ensues, Knox and Dalton remain utterly focused on one another. Their fight is the first time that Dalton truly seems like he's in danger. Even being stabbed in the abdomen and hit by a train is less threatening than Knox tossing him behind the bar and slamming his fists through glass bottles as if they are made of tissue paper. Dalton walks away from the Road House, seemingly defeated.

Road House 2024 Soundtrack Guide: Every Song & When They Play

Dalton taking down dell's gang at the road house, dalton finally shows what he's capable of.

Dalton's legend precedes him everywhere he goes , and this builds him up to be a fearsome warrior before he ever even throws a punch. Carter quits his fight as soon as he sees Dalton in the ring, and Billy says he is a big fan as soon as he meets him. Dalton has a lot to live up to, and his first fight scene shows that he's worthy of the hype. He asks Dell if he has medical insurance first, and then he brutally dispatches him and his four friends. Dalton's bone-cracking, head-smashing skills are put on display for all to see, but he never breaks a sweat.

Dalton & Knox's Final Showdown

Road house's final fight is also its best.

Dalton and Knox's second fight is a beautifully choreographed mixture of MMA mastery and sheer power.

Road House saves the very best for last. Knox and Dalton's final fight is just as incredible as the first one, but Dalton no longer reins in his killer instincts. Their fight is a beautifully choreographed mixture of MMA mastery and sheer power. They tumble around the ruins of the bar, grappling on the floor for a while, before both tiring and going blow-for-blow with the power of two heavyweight boxers. When Dalton seems finished, he draws on something extra to fight back and brutally stabs Knox with two broken pieces of wood. Road House 's post-credits scene shows Knox alive, setting up a potential rematch for the pair.