The Road isn't so much a bad book as an average dystopian scenario elevated by some generic stream of consciousness writing techniques. I don't read much long form literary fiction so I have no idea what else it was competing with for the Pulitzer, but I think its fairly obvious why to the average SF fan it seems bad: because its only ok.

All of Mc Carthy's well written prose can't hide the fact that he takes a bunch of well worn and in some cases very tired tropes (Cannibals? Really?) and uses them in uninspired and in some cases very tired ways. Even the father/son relationship at the heart of the book is marred by some truly bizarre dialogue that, instead of highlighting the book's strengths, undermines the stream of consciousness style by seeming ripped from the work of an amateur playwright.

That said, The real strength of The Road is that Mc Carthy stacks the deck against himself and then manages to rise above it just enough to deliver one of his patently bleak takes on human relationships as informed by elements of the western genre. It should be judged as such, not as a book to stand alongside such classics as A Canticle for Leibowitz.

This is nothing new, really. Mc Carthy is only one in a recent tradition of literary authors playing around with genre tropes, writing well constructed works of complete unoriginality, and getting lauded for doing something striking with the genre. As such Mc Carthy may have deserved the Pulitzer, but only because he did a good job of reinventing the wheel for a new non-genre savvy audience.

I read the Road by Cormac Mc Carthy over a year ago, so this isn't as fresh in my mind as it was before.

The Road is a bad book.

The writing style of the the Road is terrible. No punctuations, long run-on sentences, and no quotations to let you know who's speaking at any point in the dialogue.

The unnamed catastrophe remains unnamed for the entirety of the book and it's one of the reasons why I wanted to throw the book out my window. The story went nowhere and nothing was resolved.

There were hints of cool things happening like the soldiers marching along the road (presumably off to some battle) or the hordes of cannibals that littered the countryside (where are they all coming from?), but those things are never explored. It's just the story of two boring characters doing nothing.

Imagine if the Star Wars films were about watching R 2 D 2 and C 3 P 0 go about their business in the rebel bases instead of watching either the space battles or other more interesting characters.

That's what the Road was like. A strange world populated with interesting events and characters, but we are forced to watch the two least interesting characters experience these events from the periphery.

Don't read this book.

I actually liked this book. Granted, the writing style is unorthodox, but that's why I like it. This is very much a stream of consciousness book, and is very, very realistic. There isn't much plot development (or plot, for that matter), but then again, there shouldn't be. There is no plot because life has no plot. The event that caused the end of the world is never explained, because the main characters never learned it. That's why I like this book; there is absolutely no pandering to the Rule of Cool.