Evan's Reviews > The Road

He palmed the spartan book with black cover and set out in the gray morning. Grayness, ashen. Ashen in face. Ashen in the sky.

He set out for the road, the book in hand. Bleakness, grayness. Nothing but gray, always.

He was tired and hungry. Coughing. The coughing had gotten worse. He felt like he might die. But he couldn't die. Not yet.

The boy depended on him.

He walked down the road, awaiting the creaking bus. It trundled from somewhere, through the gray fog. The ashen gray fog.

He stepped aboard, spartan book in hand. No one spoke. They were all ghosts. Tired, wrinkled, rumpled, going wherever. Not knowing why. Just going.

He opened the book and read. He began to see a pattern, a monotonous pattern of hopelessness. Chunks of gray hopelessness. Prose set in concrete, gray. Gray blocks of prose. He read.
He recognized images from films long since past, and books from authors of yore. Many science fiction writers, many movie makers. He thought he saw a flash, something familiar. Perhaps it was only one of his nagging dreams. A dream of what once existed, but he did not know. Wasn't there once, he wondered, a story called "A Boy And His Dog," by, who? Ellison, maybe? Was that the name? It seemed right, but his mind was unreliable. It had not been reliable in awhile. People forget. Yes, they forget.

And here, a fragment, "The Last Man on Earth," "The Omega Man," "Dawn of the Dead," "Planet of the Apes," "The Day After," "The Twilight Zone." Yes, that one, the one about the man and the books. The broken glasses. Cannibals, people in rags, charred bodies, emptiness, grayness. "On the Beach" popped into his mind. His gray, dulled mind. "The Andromeda Strain." Dessicated bodies. Dusty, leathered, ashen bodies.

The rain, the snow, the white, the cold, the gray. The endless white. The endless gray. "Escape from New York..." The titles seemed endless, but they blended in his wearied mind. Had he not read and seen all this a thousand times before? What was he to make of this book he held, this spartan black book, this cobbling of all that had come before, all set forth again? Was this original, he wondered? He continued to read. But he was tired, flagging. Rain, tin food, wet blankets, shivering, twigs and fire and cold. Always cold, and gray. And walking, slowly. Always walking down the road. And hiding. Hiding and walking. Ceaselessly. And atrocities. Savagery. Road warriors, the bad guys. Did this also not seem familiar? The man wondered, but his mind, like those of most of the masses, often forgot. He thanked an unseen God for this forgetfulness, for it made it easier for him to read, uncritically, unknowingly. The author, McCarthy, no doubt also must have been relieved that no one cared anymore. Plagiarism belonged to the dead past. A quaint notion of a bygone day. Not a concern, in these gray times. The times of sampling. Of plunder.
My concoction is out of a tin can, he might have thought. But he did not. Tin food, prepackaged. Cans waiting to be plucked and plundered.

He opened the literary beenie weenies, and served them to the world. And the world ate, hungrily ate. And believed, that beenie weenies, on their empty stomachs, tasted like the greatest gourmet dish they had ever tasted. For they knew not any better. Their gray matter just did not know.

And they went on down the road.


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(KR@KY 2009, amended only very slightly in 2016)
NOTE: This review was written about, and during, bus rides to work while reading this book. To date, it is my most popular review on Goodreads, and for that I thank everyone. It appeared on the Publisher's Weekly website in an article on best parody reviews on Goodreads. Thanks to everyone who agreed with me and to also those who disagreed and vigorously defended the book.