Teacher & Oprah Recommend “Postapocalyptic tour de force”

Chris L., the latest winner of the kwiry It’s On Us Promotion, was talking to his teacher about a Science Fiction Paper he was writing for his Creative Writing class and the teacher recommended the book The Road, by Cormack McCarthy as reference.  Chris texted it to kwiry so he could remember to check it out and is now the lucky winner of the book courtesy

McCarthy is also the author of the book No Country For Old Men, made into a recently acclaimed movie.  The Road was also part of Oprah’s book club, reminiscent of a past winner. This book sounds like a dark one……

Violence, in McCarthy’s postapocalyptic tour de force, has been visited worldwide in the form of a “long shear of light and then a series of low concussions” that leaves cities and forests burned, birds and fish dead and the earth shrouded in gray clouds of ash. In this landscape, an unnamed man and his young son journey down a road to get to the sea. (The man’s wife, who gave birth to the boy after calamity struck, has killed herself.) They carry blankets and scavenged food in a shopping cart, and the man is armed with a revolver loaded with his last two bullets. Beyond the ever-present possibility of starvation lies the threat of roving bands of cannibalistic thugs. The man assures the boy that the two of them are “good guys,” but from the way his father treats other stray survivors the boy sees that his father has turned into an amoral survivalist, tenuously attached to the morality of the past by his fierce love for his son. McCarthy establishes himself here as the closest thing in American literature to an Old Testament prophet, trolling the blackest registers of human emotion to create a haunting and grim novel about civilization’s slow death after the power goes out.  (Publisher’s Weekly via Amazon)