NUCLEAR DREAMS

"Years later he'd stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He'd not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation. He let the book fall and took a last look around and made his way out into the cold gray light."
—The Road by Cormac McCarthy, page 157

A postapocalyptic nightmare world. A wasteland of survival and sin. A father and son journeying toward "the coast" as "winter" sets in. Heading south. Pagan sacrifices of the blood cults. Cannibalism. Murder. Human chattel stored away as living food for the "elite." The weak preyed upon by the strong. The individual preyed upon by the mob. The burden of children. Extra mouths to feed in the midst of extreme scarcity.

The book is tight and taut. The sameness of the scenes—father and son huddled together in the cold and dark of lightless black, under their tarp and blankets and handmade masks, attempting to sleep; or walking the road in the gray of the day, clouds and rain and snow and ash; or avoiding people, "harvesting" canned and dried goods from houses and businesses long ago picked over and scavenged—lend this novel its claustrophobia. The lack of other people, the isolation of the two protagonists, the extinction of most animals and many plants, the perpetually colorless and monotonous landscape, and the paranoia really focus the story upon the relationship between the father and son. We don't know much about the catastrophe that preceded the temporal space of the story, but it is certainly nuclear in origin. The fact that people have survived in a world thrown back into tribalism for years as refugees is testament to the adaptability of humans to their environments.

The novel has haunted me since I began it. I simultaneously want the nightmare to end and want the story to continue. The former will soon with only seventy more pages to go, the latter will fade off into the gray ghosts of nuclear dreams. I only hope that we wake up.