A Book for Every Bomb Shelter

This is a book to read in one sitting between 12 and 4am. And despite this narrow scheduling request, Cormac McCarthy's The Road will expand your view of time.  I visited the future and saw the now as history via this tale of life after wholesale devastation. 

It might also deliver a challenge you'd probably rather not accept: To guess who are the good guys and the bad guys in our midst. That is, to size others up as the man and the boy scraping by in McCarthy's barren world must do. "When it all goes down," I heard a voice asking yesterday, "would this waiter try to cook me?"

The paranoia can even bleed into the present: In the Deliverance vein, this book can make you afraid to go wherever your fate may be decided by bends in another's spirit. However, The Road isn't about living in fear or running away from threats. With courage, the man and the boy take their survival into their own hands. Sure, they pick their battles: depending on what they're facing, they'll hide, threaten back if threatened, or pursue. They don't give in. But looking only at how they interact with others, they might be seen as having a comparatively easy time compared to what could have come their way. They never end up locked in a basement, and no one chops off their extremities for lunch. They have a gun, yet never directly confront a gun-toting adversary. You could even say they're never overmatched, but that'd be missing the point: They're overmatched from the start, being forced to survive in an environment that has nothing much but water to give in support of life.

And now the obligatory comparison to Stephen King's The Stand. In The Stand, humanity is neatly cleaved into the majority claimed by The Incident and the minority that survives unharmed. Surely, many must have died in The Road's Incident, but most simply wind up with the carpet pulled from underfoot. In this way, McCarthy's image of When It All Goes Down proves scarier by displaying the frenzy that will ensue if sometime when humanity is suddenly handed a broken planet. It lets the reader jump straight to "What would I do?" without having to start with "If I survive..." and then assume the truth of personal survival. Having everyone around and hungry leads to a spike in ravagement and competition compared to The Stand, an existence where to enter a home and find a jar of beets is a nearly unheard-of luxury.

Thus McCarthy ups the ante with an Econ 101 approach: Choke off supply (in the grand sense) with a cataclysm leaving increasing demand in its most base forms, then watch supply continue to fall as the knives come out. The fairly well-stocked good guy/bad guy populations of The Stand, divided by the Rocky Mountains, never develop the constant mortal threats which haunt The Road's survivors. Though both communities in The Stand fall victim to backstabbing, neither sees it coming and, overall, life requires a sub-Road level of vigilance. In The Road, resting while seated back to back, wisps of smoke (or abstaining from fire), and rearview mirrors for walking express the suffocating paranoia. Though the man and the boy would never harm each other, they know that any other human they encounter should be initially treated as potentially lethal. Without this pervasive terror, The Stand is actually the story of a good guy population trying to prevent a state of affairs similar to that of The Road.

Of course, it's hard to compare The Stand and The Road this way, chiefly because the supernatural in King's plot is responsible for the division of Incident survivors and their subsequent lack of over-shoulder glances, not the Incident itself. They're both great reads. But one way--possibly the only meaningful way--the two books can be compared is in their perceived utility as a post-Incident handbook. Even if When It All Goes Down proves to be a scourge closer to King's Tubeneck than McCarthy's Big Bad Burn, I'd rather have The Road in my backyard bunker.