Road Kills

“Well, at least it was quick.”

Swiped from Steve the Vagabond and Silly Linguist's Facebook page.

On the Road is Jack Kerouac’s most famous book for whatever reason but I found The Dharma Bums more coherent and a better representation of what Kerouac was about. (As Truman Capote famously said of On the Road, which was written continuously on a long scroll of paper, “That’s not writing; that’s typing!”) 

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road works because the author’s odd, is-that-really-a-word? vocabulary enhances the Uncanny Valley unease of his post-apocalypse world. (Recall how this worked for the then-celebrated/now-forgotten 1980s post-apocalyptic Riddley Walker.) The ending was aw-gedouttahere unbelievable but after so many pages of relentless misery, you’ll take it. 

Still, for all that goes down, The Road wasn’t nearly as brutal as McCarthy’s 1984 masterpiece Blood Meridian. Those who have read that one recognize it as the most horrific horror novel ever. That it isn’t in the Horror section of the book store makes sense when you read it. McCarthy’s monsters-in-human-form are far, far removed from the turbo-charged Halloween beasties of Stephen King and Dean Koontz, et al.