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cayenne503 's review for:
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
I picked up this book after seeing it recommended numerous times as a great dystopian survival story. I am disappointed. There are 3 problems I have with this book. The biggest problem is the dialogue: the decision to omit quotation marks and the lack of voice when the characters speak. Far too many times to count I had to reread a passage of conversation to decipher who was saying what. I wish I had counted how many times they said “Okay” to each other as a full sentence.
The next problem I have is the diminishing sense of danger. For the first half-ish of the story it really felt harrowing and I was probably as relieved as the characters when they found that first cache of food. Then they kept traveling and came near death and found another plentiful cache and rebounded. Then again. Then all their stuff got stolen but they recovered it almost immediately and basically without incident. Sure are a lot of things going right for a post apocalyptic wasteland. (Speaking of which, I wish I had any lore about what brought about the end of the world, though I can understand why it would be left out)
Finally, two egregiously broken literary rules: Chekov’s gun and deus ex machina. The pistol was mentioned on practically every page. It was used as a threat a couple times. It was never fired. No, I don’t think the flare gun counts as payoff. And then the ending— what the heck! So abrupt and it turns out that there was just a dude waiting for the boy to come to the road so he could save him and whisk him off to, comparatively, happily ever after? That’s it?
The next problem I have is the diminishing sense of danger. For the first half-ish of the story it really felt harrowing and I was probably as relieved as the characters when they found that first cache of food. Then they kept traveling and came near death and found another plentiful cache and rebounded. Then again. Then all their stuff got stolen but they recovered it almost immediately and basically without incident. Sure are a lot of things going right for a post apocalyptic wasteland. (Speaking of which, I wish I had any lore about what brought about the end of the world, though I can understand why it would be left out)
Finally, two egregiously broken literary rules: Chekov’s gun and deus ex machina. The pistol was mentioned on practically every page. It was used as a threat a couple times. It was never fired. No, I don’t think the flare gun counts as payoff. And then the ending— what the heck! So abrupt and it turns out that there was just a dude waiting for the boy to come to the road so he could save him and whisk him off to, comparatively, happily ever after? That’s it?