I’d been hearing a lot about Cormac McCarthy‘s novel, The Road, before it won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for best novel. I purchased it recently, and during a long train journey read the book in one sitting. I would describe this novel as literary horror, with an emphasis on horror. The post-apocalyptic world that McCarthy describes, in which a man and his son scrabble to live in a burned, used-up world, is bleak, desolate, hopeless. It is a story about the fact that humans endure despite the odds, even though there is no good reason why they should strive to do so. The biological mechanism, even in the worst of…