I just finished pic related

If you weren't a normie idiot that should be obvious.
I seen worse things browsing /b/ than anything in the Road

I've heard the way the dialogue is done is good, is this true?

It's good as part of McCarthy's laconic style.
It wouldn't necessarily be good for someone else.

You're retarded because you view the world through an "us and them" dichotomy.

I really felt the intensity of certain moments, like the cannibalised fuckers in the basement and the slaver march. The depressive atmosphere was really present, haven't read it in a few years though.

>Garbage prose
What are you even talking about m8

>plot
Oh boy

Thanks

You're looking for something like apocalypse porn. I just want good literature. Stay on /b/, it's full of creative 7th graders, you'll love it.

>I seen worse things browsing /b/ than anything in the Road

OP btfo

true

Nothing wrong with it by itself, but it's a shame people talk about it instead of Cormac's bigger and better stuff. Same style, same spark, more depth, more heart.

You are a twat

there you go, OP

now if ever in your life you find yourself asking the question "am I an idiot?" you can reflect on this thread as empirical proof that you are indeed an idiot

I read this, BM, and the beginning of Suttree. McCarthy has the ability to write very greatly and could definitely write almost anyone on Veeky Forums under the table if he wanted to. Unfortunately, his style sometimes becomes almost self-parodic, veering into excess. And in The Road, his style can be pretty great at times, but the dialogue and situations sometimes become hilariously stiff, cliched, and wooden. He goes too far with trying to create the edgy grimdark atmosphere, and depending on how sentimental you are, you may either laugh at/not be impressed at the moments supposed to be the most dramatic, or be extremely touched/shocked by them. I think this is why this book polarizes so many people, since it walks on a fine line between trying to be extremely serious and being so serious it's dull, humorless, and boring. For "normies", it's amazingly heartrending, edgy, grim, and powerfully affecting. For others, it may be just yawn-worthy.

I for one liked it, although also think it suffered from trying too hard to be very unrelentingly serious at parts. Not perfect, but a pretty great book IMO. I'm also confused how you could say it has garbage prose, at least some parts were good:

>In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.

>normies
Fucking hate it - so this is a secret weirdo club?

"Normal people don't understand me."

I've read a few Cormac McCarthy books and his prose style is just not for me. It's either self-consciously stripped down (The Road) or self-consciously "literary" (Blood Meridian) but either way it screams "I AM WRIIIIITING" -- the only thing of his I've ever liked was the screenplay to The Counselor, which nearly everyone hated, so I'm a shithead I guess? I thought it was a brilliant dark comedy.

Hey dude just so you know when the world does end and everything is fucked to shit there really won't be much to do outside of cannibalism, stealing and walking a lot

maybe you'd know this if you got off your fucking xbox once in a while

> calling Cormac McCarthy's prose bad
> not appreciating the densely thick atmosphere or the subtleties of the relationship between Pa and his son
> not appreciating one of the more authentic depictions regarding the post-apocalypse with no gimmicks

Hey but OP I bet you thought The Book of Eli was cool huh

It's cool if you're not into McCarthy's books, user. He genuinely isn't for everyone. I think people just got rubbed the wrong way about OP as he basically criticised (without any elaboration on why he felt that way) a very popular book on Veeky Forums as smugly as possible.

Although I also think it depends on where you start. Have you tried Outer Dark or Child of God? They're both very short reads and they're the books that had me hooked from the get-go. It has his distinctive stripped-down sparsity while also subtly revealing more about each character the further you go. Maybe try those two books sometime if you want.

The prose is unreadable. The dialogue is some of the driest I've ever read in literature.

It's his worst book imho. Worth reading as it's rather short and has some speak in the father/soon relationship, but still not McCarthy's best novel.

It's a damn shame his most popular works are his worst. Type him in and the first book that comes up is The Road. What the hell happened actually? I remember reading BM and then going to The Road and the difference in density and depth was jarring. It was like I was reading a mild imitator.

It's because he has a frame of reference to work with, and can just decorate the already established worlds. Blood meridian is the best because you already have a general image of the Wild West and the bad things that happened, no country was good because he had to just set it in the present, but the road was speculation and just guess work

No I don't think that's it. There's a distinct watering down of style and thematics with his newer books. He went from a violent, mythic, Faulknerian streak to what almost feels like gloried thriller, almost like he purposely aimed for popular appeal. Also I actually found The Road better than No Country.

how new

>Fucking hate it - so this is a secret weirdo club?
How fucking new are you?? This isnt /r/books

fuck off normie

>mfw the amount of plebs in this thread who don't know realize they're normallest fags of all

CORN

"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."

" Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark."

"Garbage prose" - Veeky Forums

The dialogue is shit, brother

The Road really is one of if not his least impressive novel in prose work, just having a few exceptions like you listed.

>It was like I was reading a mild imitator

Falling into self parody is a pitfall with most 20th century American writers with a strongly identifiable prose style, don't ask me why. Specifically thinking of Hemingway, Delillo, Pynchon, Hunter S Thompson, Tim Robbins, Saul Bellow, Bukowski, and McCarthy of course.

Maybe it's the culture of advertising, the forming of a "brand"? The self-consciousness of a big, young country, the need to fix an identity? Precociousness rewarded too much, leading to a petrification in juvenile forms long after maturity should have set in? Or would that be confusing effect with cause, the cause being the protestant work ethic and general middle class need to make a living compared to more aristo european writers who can afford to not publish until their mid 30s?

I don't really know, it's just somethin I've noticed.

I personally can never enjoy McCarthy wholeheartedly due to his unfortunate resemblance to This quote from "On a book entitled Lolita" by Nabokov:

>Some of the reactions were very amusing: one reader suggested that his firm might consider publication if I turned my Lolita into a twelve-year-old lad and had him seduced by Humbert, a farmer, in a barn, amidst gaunt and arid surroundings, all this set forth in short, strong, “realistic” sentences ("He acts crazy. We all act crazy, I guess. I guess God acts crazy.” Etc.).

Mentally disabled people shouldn't attempt to discuss literature. This is why the board is pretty much dead.

Not this user, but this is not a matter of being new or not.
The simple fact that someone would refer to "normies" should simply disqualify any opinion they have. You must be 12 or 14 to distinguish the world between "normies" and non normies. It shows you know nothing about life literature or the human experience in general.