[ali_m]

I think there's a beauty in the bleakness. Some of the descriptions are just so vivid, like a charcoal sketch.

> He came forward, holding his belt by one hand. The holes in it marked the progress of his emaciation and the leather at one side had a lacquered look to it where he was used to stropping the blade of his knife. He stepped down into the roadcut and he looked at the gun and he looked at the boy. Eyes collared in cups of grime and deeply sunk. Like an animal inside a skull looking out the eyeholes. He wore a beard that had been cut square across the bottom with shears and he had a tattoo of a bird on his neck done by someone with an illformed notion of their appearance. He was lean, wiry, rachitic. Dressed in a pair of filthy blue coveralls and a black billcap with the logo of some vanished enterprise embroidered across the front of it.

The line about how the "holes in [his belt] marked the progress of his emaciation" is seared into my brain forever.

[the_af]

Well, you know what they say about tastes... I just don't find McCarthy's style compelling, at least not in The Road.