Mini Lit Review: The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

I just finished this much-ballyhooed novel and, honestly, it's going in the pile of books for resale to the Half-Price Books outlet (along with half a dozen cheesy romances, some hideously crafted chick lit, and some painful self-important attempts at science fiction).

Top Ten Reasons Why I Didn't Like The Road

1. It was RIFE with sentence fragments.
2. It was peppered with contractions missing their apostrophe.
3. The dialogue is written in the irritatingly popular "quotation-mark-free" style.
4. When not inching the plot forward along with the movement of father and son across the wasteland, the author describes the grey, ashy, dead world over and over and over; I got tired of him beating the same dead, old grey mare. (Writing exercise 101: how many ways can you describe a post-apocalyptic landscape? Now, cram them ALL into one thin novel and reap the rewards.)
5. Bleak, bleak, bleak storyline ends with a somewhat unbelievable redemption which feels like a complete cop-out.
6. I should've known better than to fall for an Oprah endorsement again. Every book club selection she makes is depressing: life is mainly sucky, but here's a little 5% ray of hope to bring a tear to your eye.
7. Bursts of gore, like something out of a George Romero movie, were potent and off-putting when joined with this tale of fatherly love. I like a good horror story as much as the next guy, but the horrific episodes felt like cheap shots. I haven't read any other McCarthy novels, but apparently gore is his schtick.
8. The narrative of the journey gets interrupted for hodge-podge philosophical ponderings and the occasional blurb of wording that can only be described as an attempt to hide poetry within the prose; it's as if he's saying, "I'm too cool to actually be a poet, but isn't this turn of phrase stunning?"
9. None of the characters have names, which just bothers me.
10. Did I mention the sentence fragments, lack of apostrophes, and the dialogue without quotation marks???