“The Road” by Cormac McCarthy
I’m cold
I know
You know?
I know
I know
You knew?
Yes
Yes
I’m scared
Yes, I know
Ok
Ok
Its cold (sic)
We have to go
I know
Ok
Ok
Can we help him?
No
We have to go?
Yes
Ok
Ok
“The Road” by Cormac McCarthy was easily the worst fucking book I have ever read in my life.
It had no point.
All of the dialogue was just like I wrote up above. You couldn’t tell after 3 lines who was talking to whom.
Let me tell you how it went:
It’s gray. It’s cold. They start a fire. They sleep. They walk. It’s gray. They see a dude. They hide. It’s cold. They start a fire. They’re in the woods. Now it suddenly becomes a town. They’re cold. They start a fire. It snows. It’s gray. They see a kid. They hide. It’s cold. They’re hungry. They run out of food. They find food. It’s cold. They go to a new town. It’s all burned down. There’s a house. The wall paper is peeling. It’s gray. They start a fire. They sleep. They wake up. The man coughs alot. They talk, but you can’t tell who’s saying what. They start a fire. They find some food. They find an old newspaper. There’s a spoon. They take the spoon. They lose the spoon. They’re starving again. They talk about suicide. The man has a dream. It’s cold. They walk some more. It’s still cold. There’s no punctuation. They have incredibly long run on sentences that never seem to want to end, and the whole time you’re thinking to yourself, “why doesn’t this fucking guy use apostrophes?” and then you’re like, “because he’s a pretentious prick and most people are stupid assholes so they think if Oprah recommends it, it must be good” but it never was any good, and you just want it to end all the time, and it’s depressing, and you actually start skimming, then flipping ahead, and then you don’t even read all of the dialogue, then you read none of it, then it ends. (That was what the guy writes like. Silly, awful run-ons)
I’ve been reading the reviews of this book on Amazon, and I find myself almost insulted. By the way people describe this book, it’s “Paradise Lost,” or “Lord of the Flies.” Let me put it to you this way: It. Is. The. Worst. Book. I. Ever. Read.
They made a fire 107 times. McCarthy makes mention of it each time. The cold? 190 times. Walking more? 173. That was the story.
I kept asking myself, “What am I missing? What made all these reviewers and critics love it so much?” Like I said, somehow I’m actually angry. Am I such an ill-informed lout that I can’t see Pulitzer material? Was I so blind as to miss the “Haunting tale of a father’s love for his son” ?
None of that was in there. It’s the same repetitive shit, with no character development, no descriptors (other than that it was cold, oh, and gray) there’s no essential struggle. It’s just the same thing, over and over, and over and over, and over and over and over and over and over.
I started skimming ( as I alluded to previously) and realized: I wasn’t missing a THING.
I stopped reading the “dialogue” and realized I wasn’t missing a THING.
Oh, here’s more dialogue:
We cant (sic)
Why?
Because
Because what?
Because we cant (sic)
Are you sure?
Yes
Yes?
Yes
Ok
Ok?
Yes
Good. We have to go
We do?
Yes
Ok
Ok?
Yes.
I’m scared
You cant be (sic)
I wont be (sic)
Cant be
Wont be! (sic)
Ok
Ok?
Yes
Ok.
Why did we leave him
We couldnt take him (sic)
I saw him!
I know
You dont believe me (sic)
Yes I do
No you dont (sic)
I’m cold
I know
Its cold (sic)
I know
Ok
*”Sic” means “Thusly so” in Latin. It denotes misspelling when you’re quoting someone else, as in, when they make mistakes when they write something.
That was it man. It was awful. I kept PRAYING for some redeeming qualities, but all I could think about was Oprah chiding James Frey for the book he read because some people got pissed that his semi-autobiographical work of FICTION, had FICTION in it.
Fuck Oprah.
Fuck Cormac McCarthy.
Fuck “The Road”
Fuck man. I wasted 300 pages of time.
This is by far the best post you’ve written. So brutal. So. Honest.
i didn’t write it. dogpound hooked it up, but i’m sure he’ll appreciate you saying that he is a better writer than me ;-)
I don’t think I have ever laughed so much at a book review in my life.
Agreed. The end.
Yay! I’ve scoured the web to find one person that thought this book blew. Talk about Emperors New Clothes! What the fuck was that? I did the same thing, reading then scanning, then stopping at the parts where you ask yourself what is wrong with this sick old fuck? Ooooh scary deliverance style boy raping cannibles take over the world. Really? Bullshit Bullshit Bullshit. Your review was Spot On.
Wait till you see the movie. It looks horrible in the sense that you’ll need therapy after watching it. This book made me want to punch a baby.
I’ve read the rare interview with McCarthy. He’s a cynical old fart who’s primarily concerned with himself and has a pretty low opinion of his own work.
How do I know he has a low opinion of his own work?
Because of how he handles movie deals based on his work. He sells the rights and afterward just doesn’t care. He takes the money and ‘goes to sleep’. It’s “Someone else’s project”.
Why? Because he already has his money, and he already has his fanfolk who won’t care if the story is raped to fit the screen.
To him, it’s just a product produced for suckers. All about the payolla.
I agree wholly with this review.
I read it a year ago so it’s not as fresh in my mind, but my thoughts on this piece of crap were along the lines of:
“Oprah doesn’t know shit about books.”
“This book sucks.”
“What caused this apocalypse and why won’t Cormac McCarthy tell me?”
And when I finally reached the end and the father died and the son was rescued but faced certain death anyway, I remember thinking: “I wasted money on this?”
It would have been more satisfying if the son and father had been eaten slowly by the numerous cannibals they met.
This book sucked and I try to warn as many people as possible not to read it.
i hear that bacon salt is pretty awesome, though. oprah is good for something after all
And I disagree with this post.
The run on sentences are not a problem when you know how to follow along with what’s being said. William Faulkner did it all the time as well. It’s the author’s style of prose writing.
Same with the dialogue. It’s really not that hard to understand who is talking.
And if you didn’t read the whole book and didn’t pick up on the themes then it’s your loss. Next time finish a book before talking shit.
I see we have a member of the other 50% of the population. This book splits people right down the middle: 50% say it sucks a wang (which it does) while the other 50% seem to think this book itself is the second coming of jesus.
Let’s review some comments:
“This book is Jesus.”
“Without this book, I wouldn’t have been able to change my life in a positive way.”
“McCarthy just wrote a new Bible”
“Cormac is Jesus”
“This is the best book ever written. I am now required to stop reading anything new. My life is downhill from this moment”
“I just queefed; I’m that excited.”
You see, as it is incumbent upon a speaker to be understood (his listeners shouldn’t have to guess what he’s speaking about), so to is it incumbent on a writer to be understood. More than understood, the book has to be interesting. This wasn’t.
A story about a father and sons relationship and the goodness of their relationship, in the hope that during a world in chaos that goodness will prevail spiritually and physically.
Maybe your father beat you when you were young and you hate post-apocalyptic tales, I don’t know, but if that doesn’t interest you then what does?
All I was able to pick out about the book, with it’s themes of cold, and gray, and depression… was that….
Shit… I dunno… you got me on that one Serpico. My father beat me whenever I didn’t read post-apocalyptic tales. And whenever I didn’t watch “The Breakfast Club.”
He’s a strange man like that.
is it strange that this makes me hard?
As stories about father and son relationships go, it was a piece of crap.
Maybe in a two dimensional world inhabited by two dimensional sons and two dimensional fathers, it was the bee’s knees. In my dimension, though, it was worthless.
What dimension are you from?
Might I implore you to shut the hell up? The book was terrible, and I finished it. Style or not, those sentences turned into abominations. The over-usage of AND, and HE SAID any time the dad finished a sentence pissed me right off. I give him credit, the way he described some things was great, it may have been one of the few things I could give him credit for. But it was just crap! I mean, the first freaking page presented me with a statement that about brought me to pissing on the book, and setting it on fire! Only for my assignment did I stay strong and continue reading. If not for that I would have gladly chucked the book. YES! The story is a great IDEA. The dad and his son struggling along a post-apocalypitc wasteland makes for an incredible story. The themes were good. But the way the author presented them ruined it.
I skimmed the book at the bookstore; usually that only gives me an idea of whether I’d like to buy it or not, but in this case I felt like I’d read the whole book, because every page I stopped on was the same damn thing.
McCarthy has one of the worst, most tedious prose styles I’ve ever seen. He sometimes has strong storylines and characters, in which case the book can make a decent movie — because the viewer won’t have to plod through the awful overwrought prose.
Meant to add — some of the positive reviews make me think the reviewers have never read, or even heard of, any of the hundreds of (better) post-apocalypse novels written in the last sixty years.
A Canticle For Leibowitz, Earth Abides, Down to a sunless sea…. all way better.
Agree w/ your educated post.
Oh, and Kevin…. it’s weird, yes.
Same thoughts as most in this post…that “book” sucked…I believe the author wrote in on a dare.
Can I write some shit that these fools will think is great?
Yeah, they all un-educated hill-billies anyway.
Yes, stupid, morons who have never read, seen, done or accomplished anything.
Yeah, they’ll be mesmerized by my dark writig style…it’s goth
Yeah goth, and they all dumb ass, tweeting fools w/out a Passport
Haha, you poor, poor people missing out on one of the best books I have ever read!!
May I ask how old yous are?
Perhaps its lack of experience, or maybe yous all like to moan about things but the point of Mc Carthy’s novel, ‘The Road’ has been totally lost in your flicking of pages and lack of understanding.
Obviously yous enjoy clear-cut, straight to the point, Mtv age novels, I feel sorry for the whole lot of yous!!
May I ask what part of the English language has “yous” as a word? Get the fuck out, bitch. Jersey sucks major dick, and so do you.
LOL @ yous. Really?!? You are going to argue that this book (which, admittedly I didn’t really like- I got it, I just didn’t like it) is awesome and you use the word yous? Are you a native English speaker? If not, maybe that explains why you liked The Road.
Really? I’ll out-read, and out-command you in the English Language any day. I can dance around the Etymology of the words he’s used in this “Masterpiece.” Really, it’s a Masterpiece of Shit.
It has no redeeming qualities, and if you liked it, it’s probably because you’re watching Oprah instead of working for a living.
Well, I’m 48. I’ve been reading books since 1966. I enjoyed “Gravity’s Rainbow”, I’ve enjoyed Petrarch and Cervantes, and I’ve enjoyed stories far grimmer than “The Road”. So, it doesn’t have to be simple in either style or concept. I get what McCarthy was trying to do with his style; I just think it was a bad idea.
Makes me want to read “Riddley Walker” again.
Now, I hope we’re done with the insults. (Please note that if you must use it, the word is “youse”, not “yous”.)
I’ve come to the conclusion that this was a successful episode of trolling, and we all fell for it.
HUZZAH!
This is typical of MC fans in the blogosphere. His book sucked rancid monkey balls, so you have to make stupid assumptions about people who are unashamed to admit that it did, in fact, suck rancid monkey balls.
Fine, I’ll make what’s probably a more accurate assumption about his rabid fans:
You have crappy taste, lady. I bet your writing (if you actually do any) sucks even worse than McCarthy’s.
Cormac McCarthy: wooden idol of literary poseurs everywhere.
Ah, “The Road”. How do I absolutely fucking loathe this piece of shit excuse for a novel? Let me count the ways… Vile, pretentious,supremely unrealistic and flat-out stupid, every copy of this steaming pile of literary fecal matter should be burned or shredded as nesting material for rodents. All right, some grubby consumptive schmuck(The Man) and his filthy, parasite-infested kid(The Boy) toddle around in A POST-APOCALYPTIC WASTELAND,pushing a shopping cart full of rags and debris. Asshole McCarthy can’t be bothered to explain what happened to bring on this apocalypse, so we just have to take it on faith that it was real bad and stuff. All plant life is dead. All animal life(with the exception of one mangy dog) is also, but there are still a fair number of cannibalistic humans wandering about. The Boy had a mom who talked like Primaat Conehead but she checked out at some time in the past. The Man and The Boy build lots of campfires and have endless monosyllabic conversations about how hungry they are and how cold it is…Sweet Jesus in a Coupe de Ville, please kill me now. I’ve got to give McRetard credit, however. after dispensing with plot, character development and dialogue, he doesn’t trouble his readers with punctuation, either. OY! Cormac McCarthy is a sham author, and “The Road” is a work of arch-phoniness. I’m certain that old bastard is chuckling grimly over his success at suckering Oprah and her idiot followers into swallowing his horseshit and swelling his bank account(and ego).
“Savage Tegu” you sound like a bitch on the rag, so STFU!
Sam- you sound like an idiot, but I don’t call you out on it.
Why don’t you go to the mythical land where all of you McCarthy fans stand around in a circle and masturbate to thoughts of his work.
Then drink some poisoned Kool-Aide. The rest of the world will miss you…. no wait, no we won’t.
What he wrote in a single post was worth more than CM wrote in that entire stinking book.
‘STFU’?
Ah, another McCarty fan.
Are you on the rag?
No
Sure?
Yes.
Sure?
Im scared
Ok
Ok?
Ok
Why?
We carry the torch
Why?
Because
Because?
Yes
Ok
YES! Finally, a person who sees the truth.
It is repetitive as shit. i read the Wikipedia article and still aced the test.
I still think that the world was destroyed by nuclear bombs, like Terminator, but unfortunately, McCarthy doesn’t tell us.
What are their names? Who writes books and doesn’t name their characters?
When I’m 75 and run out of money, I plan to write a book that goes nowhere, and has no quotations, and they say okay every few sentences. Success, here I come!
What I want to know is:
What in the hells did the man and the boy eat in the years after this unknowable disaster?
Answer: CM didn’t even bother to think about it. Any more than he bothered to think about what the specific cause of the disaster was. In his words, it was ‘irrelevant’.
You see, ‘The Road’ was a work of magical surrealism pretending to be a post apocalyptic novel.
If anyone dares to call it ’speculative fiction’, I’ll hurl. I swear it.
You couldn’t be more dead on in your review…I just finished this piece of crap about 10 minutes ago..what a complete waste of my time…NOTHING happens…nothing…
Not so. One thing happened: It ended.
Then I threw it away. I threw it away with more vigor, passion, and purpose than he put into writing it.
I had to read it, you see. The reviewers, the sites, they all claimed the novel was a ‘masterwork’. I just had to push through and figure out what the guy’s magic was.
I found out. His ‘magic’ was reputation and marketing. Nothing more.
The only redeeming quality that this book has is that it has zombies in it and the copy I found at my local library a few summers ago was an Oprah book and it made me happy to think that soccer moms and women who read everything that’s an Oprah book were reading about zombies in a post apocalyptic world.
I do agree that the writing and dialogue in the book was poorly written and I skimmed it.
It would have been nice if McCarthy actually did put some more plot in and told us just how the world got so apocalyptic and dismal aside from the very brief flashbacks that he did write about.
It would have been nice had McCarthy fleshed out his characters more but he didn’t and we as readers suffered for it.
I have read other books by McCarthy and I found them to be all action and flash but very poor writing and very blank characters that we do not know anything at all about.
I fail to see just how and why this book won the Pulitzer prize and why Hollywood is going to make a movie out of it that I’m sure people who mentally masturbate over this book in praise and McCarthy will flock to see?
I’m glad I did not pay money for this book.
Hilarious review. I couldn’t agree more. If ‘The Road’ is what passes for Pulitzer-worthy writing these days, then I will stick to Reader’s Fucking Digest, thank you…
On a more serious note, I wanted to like this book. Really, I wanted to like it. I love reading post-apocalyptic tales because they mesh with my jaded view of what lies in store for humanity. I figure I might at least pick up something useful from the genre, should such an end come sooner rather than later. At worst, I’ll be entertained for a few hours. Well, I was neither informed nor entertained by this waste of paper. This book blows.
In one sense, ‘The Road’ is like the other three McCarthy books I’ve read and re-read (Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, can’t remember the last one…Horses?), trying to figure what the hell I am missing that others aren’t missing. McCormack’s prose, in attempting to be ‘uncluttered’ and ’spartan,’ comes across as at once sickeningly artsy-fartsy-pretentious and a-baboon-wrote-this-simplistic-drivel. No character development. No backstory. No flow. No punctuation. No desire to turn the next page. Repetition, repetition. I mean, come on; punctuation exists for a reason. Avoiding its use does not make you look like you are such a singularly phenomenal author that you can cast aside basic stylistic formulae to show us how cool, advanced and liberated you are. It makes you look like a fucking idiot, and any story you wanted to tell us went out the window with all the apostrophes and quotation marks.
I’m sure there is a story in ‘The Road’ somewhere. It’s probably a pretty damned good story, at that. Unfortunately, since Cormack McCarthy has zero writing talent, ‘The Road’ is incapable of sharing that story with us. Damn, I want my hours back…
I’m glad people with your tastes are out there, mate. 80% done with a post-apocalyptic first draft. Remember my name for a couple of years; if you see it on a cover, pick up what you find. I’ll strive to please in every non-sexual way you can imagine.
Yes, I do love the Fallout series and yes, I strive to avoid every single cliche and stereotype related to it.
Can’t avoid the possible themes, though. I mean, how many themes are there in a world where pretty much every living person and every living animal and plant has been wiped out by nuclear winter?
I have read some horrible stuff in my days, but this one pissed me off so bad I wanted to reach out to Mr. McCarthy via his website to vent my frustration, possibly in a non-constructive manner, just to wash the crap of this book out of my system…. big mistake.
If you visit this pretentious pricks(<– no apostrophe to empphasize my writing prowess) website, you will find "The Cormac McCarthy Society" WTF???
The Society's stated purpose is "to further the scholarship and general appreciation of Cormac McCarthy's writing and to facilitate the gathering of scholars and enthusiastic lay readers alike who share a common interest in Cormac McCarthy and his work." … blah blah blah
Are you fucking kidding me?
On his contact page, its (<–no apostrophe, again to emphasize my writing prowess) even worse… The Cormac McCarthy Society respects the author's clearly expressed desire for privacy. However, should you wish to contact Cormac McCarthy, write to him care of his agent, Amanda Urban
So, instead of frustrating myself further, I went looking for others who felt "dirty" and cheating of precious time by having read this crap.
Thank you Dogpound for this review, I am glad I'm not alone on this one.
On second thought, I wish I had two copies of this book….. One to shit on, and one to cover it up.
I’ve felt so alone. Someone told me that I ‘hated art’ because I threw that book into the garbage rather than inflict it on someone else.
Let me see if I can be a ‘master’ too.
Did I write that?
I did.
why
why not
Am I bad?
Yes
Why
Why not?
Because
Because why
Im scared (sic)
Ok
Ok?
Ok. Im a master now (sic)
Why?
Why not
Man, that felt good. Thanks for the honest post. Let the pretention fanboys and wannabes suck it up.
RM Herrman- if you write it, I will read it. Seriously.
That’s not even a compliment though, because ANYONE could write a better book than McCarthy.
Still, if you put a book to paper, I’ll have you sign a copy for me.
Will do. I’m about a month from finishing the first draft, three from the polish, so maybe next year or the year after if everything goes well.
I just finished the book and it didn’t waste too much of my time because it was soooo FUCKING BAD that I skipped through about 3/4 of it. After the 20th gray, cold, hungry, tired, scenario I opted for speed reading. I went to Amazon to warn people away and was astounded with the “OMG this is the best book ever” reviews. Got scared that I’d slipped over into the Twilight Zone so searched “the road, worst book ever” and found out I’m not alone…….. no wonder Hollow Wood wanted to make a movie from it.
This book was at my reeding level. I licked the book. It was a page turner. I,m glad oprah winfried recommended this one. I reed the whole thing in less than 2 months!
I will shit upon the jews.
I will urinate on Jerusalem.