Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in the West is one of the most brutal things I have ever read. The lyricism of the prose is offset by wholesale slaughter and unrepentant murder. It’s so soaked in blood that I’m not surprised that McCarthy has decided to pen a post-apocalyptic novel. The following is an excerpt from the just-released The Road.

“The mummied dead everywhere. The flesh cloven along the bones, the ligaments dried to tug and taut as wires. Shriveled and drawn like latterday bogfolk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth. They were discarded to a man like pilgrims of some common order for all their shoes were long stolen.”

What’s with all the apocalyptic fiction all of a sudden? Is a brand-new doomsday zeitgeist upon us?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 4th, 2006 at 10:39 am and is filed under Literature, Apocalypse. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.