Guest Reviewer: Dennis Lehane

Dennis Lehane, master of the hard-boiled thriller, generated a cult following with his series about private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, wowed readers with the intense and gut-wrenching Mystic River, blew fans all away with the mind-bending Shutter Island, and switches gears with Coronado, his new collection of gritty short stories (and one play).

Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is. McCarthy may have just set to paper the definitive vision of the world after nuclear war, and in this recent age of relentless saber-rattling by the global powers, it's not much of a leap to feel his vision could be not far off the mark nor, sadly, right around the corner. Stealing across this horrific (and that's the only word for it) landscape are an unnamed man and his emaciated son, a boy probably around the age of ten. It is the love the father feels for his son, a love as deep and acute as his grief, that could surprise readers of McCarthy's previous work. McCarthy's Gnostic impressions of mankind have left very little place for love. In fact that greatest love affair in any of his novels, I would argue, occurs between the Billy Parham and the wolf in The Crossing. But here the love of a desperate father for his sickly son transcends all else. McCarthy has always written about the battle between light and darkness; the darkness usually comprises 99.9% of the world, while any illumination is the weak shaft thrown by a penlight running low on batteries. In The Road, those batteries are almost out--the entire world is, quite literally, dying--so the final affirmation of hope in the novel's closing pages is all the more shocking and maybe all the more enduring as the boy takes all of his father's (and McCarthy's) rage at the hopeless folly of man and lays it down, lifting up, in its place, the oddest of all things: faith. --Dennis Lehane

Off to cinnycat as a RABCK...enjoy!:)

thanks so much for this RABCK, flakes! I really appreciate it. I'm really looking forward to reading this! I'll write another entry when I'm done.

hmmm...not quite sure why Oprah picked this one. I didn't really see the magic that everyone else sees. I guess this is for readers who don't really read apoca-lit? I've read a couple of them I guess. This one is repetitive

This is reserved for debnance!

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Sending to debnance! thanks for the great trade!

I love reading books about end times. So at first I was eager to read this. Then I saw the author....Uh oh, violent Cormac McCarthy....So I thought I wouldn't read it. Then I saw all the positive reviews. So now I'm eager to read it again!

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Off in a small box to my brother tomorrow.

Received this book along with some others in a care package from my sister. I guess I'm a sucker for end of the world tales so I found this to be engrossing reading. I almost couldn't put it down. The setting is a stark, gray post-apocalyptic landscape where most everything is burned, melted, plundered, decaying. The earth seems almost completely depopulated and devoid of all animal and plant life. Ash swirls around covering everything and blurring the sun, moon, and stars. The specific cause of the calamity is never named. There is no mention of radiation so it's not the result of nuclear war. Perhaps it is a more natural culprit at fault, such as a meteor impact. The main characters are a father and young son, as the author says 'each the other's world entire'. They are walking down 'the road' in approaching winter pushing a grocery cart with all their possessions, scrounging for essentials, and heading south toward warmer climates and who knows what fate. Their encounters along the way are frightening, horrific, melancholy, and tinged at times with hope. You never really know what to expect on the next page. This book won a Pulitzer in 2007. It is being made into a movie to be released in late 2008. I want to see it.