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And the boy asks, "Were they the bad guys?"

"Yes, they were the bad guys."

"There's a lot of them, those bad guys."

"Yes there are. But they're gone."

The overarching theme in McCarthy's work has been the face-off of good and evil with evil invariably triumphant through the bloodiest possible slaughter. Had this novel continued his pattern, that band of marching thugs would have been the focus - as it was with the apocalyptic horsemen of death in his second novel, "Outer Dark," or the blood-mad scalp-hunters in his masterpiece, "Blood Meridian," or the psychopathic killer in his recent novel, "No Country for Old Men." But evil victorious is not this book's theme. McCarthy changes the odds to favor the man and boy, who for a decade have survived death by fire and ice, and also cannibalism, which has become the most grievous manifestation of evil's waning days. In the cellar of an antebellum home they discover naked slaves of a new order, people who were ambushed on the road and then kept alive as food. One man's legs and thighs have been cut away, his hips cauterized by fire; and he lives on. When six of the cannibals return to the house the man and boy barely escape the same fate. Hiding, afraid to breathe, the father tells the boy it's going to be O.K. He says that often.

The boy asks: "We wouldn't ever eat anybody, would we?"

"No. Of course not. ..."

"No matter what."

"No. No matter what."

"Because we're the good guys."

"Yes."

"And we're carrying the fire."

"And we're carrying the fire. Yes."

"The Road" is a dynamic tale, offered in the often exalted prose that is McCarthy's signature, but this time in restrained doses - short, vivid sentences, episodes only a few paragraphs or a few lines long, which is yet another departure for him, coming after "No Country for Old Men," published last year. That was also tight and fast, an extremely violent thriller with the energy of his sentences and a philosophical sheriff lifting it out of the genre; but in the McCarthy canon that book seems like a Graham Greene "entertainment" alongside ambitious work like "The Road." He is said to have other novels in unfinished drafts, so perhaps he will revert to grandiloquence in those to come. But on the basis of "No Country for Old Men" and "The Road" it does seem that he has put aside the linguistic excesses and the philosophizing for which he has been both venerated and mocked - those Faulknerian convolutions, the Melvillean sermonizing - and opted for terse dialogue and spartan narrative, a style he inherited from another of his ancestors, Hemingway, and long ago made his own.

The accessibility of this book, the love between father and son expressed in their quicksilver conversations, and the pathos of their story will make the novel popular, perhaps beyond "All the Pretty Horses," which had a love story and characters you might befriend and not run from, and which delivered McCarthy out of cult status and onto the best-seller list. "The Road" is the most readable of his works, and consistently brilliant in its imagining of the posthumous condition of nature and civilization - "the frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night." Money and gold mean nothing, nor do government, education, books, politics, history, friends, home. The pilgrimage is plotless but it races with tension, a sequence of enemy encounters or sightings, the perpetual danger from the killing weather, huddling under blanket and tarp, endlessly gathering firewood, confronting mysteries the dead world presents to a man seeking (and finding) water and food in the deserted houses, barns and boats that survived the firestorms. The father is ingenious in understanding how the natural and fabricated worlds function; and also lucky, as he modestly tells the boy.

But that luck is providential, for "The Road," in addition to being a nonpareil vision of an apocalyptic landscape, is also a messianic parable, with man and boy walking prophetically by rivers, in caves, on mountaintops and across the wilderness in the spiritual spoor of biblical prophets - Isaiah, Elijah, Elisha, John the Baptist, to name a few. Elijah, herald of the Messiah, who will return on the Day of Judgment, turns up as a destitute straggler who looks like "a pile of rags fallen off a cart," and the boy insists on feeding him. He says his name is "Ely." In one of the longest conversations in the novel the father talks to Ely about being the last man on earth and says that nobody would know it.

"It wouldnt make any difference," Ely says. "When you die it's the same as if everybody else did too."

"I guess God would know it. Is that it?" the man asks.

"There is no God," Ely says.

"No?"

"There is no God and we are his prophets."

When the man suggests the boy is a god, Ely says: "Where men cant live gods fare no better. You'll see. It's better to be alone. So I hope that's not true what you said because to be on the road with the last god would be a terrible thing. ... Things will be better when everybody's gone." As a kicker to his doomsaying he adds that even death will die. "He'll be out in the road there with nothing to do and nobody to do it to. He'll say: Where did everybody go?"

Who knew Elijah did stand-up?

The man and boy keep heading south and do reach the ocean, which the boy heard was blue, but it is as gray with ash as the rest of the world - a dead sea. And the Gulf Coast is as cold as Tennessee. When they capture a man who stole their goods the father leaves him naked on the road to freeze. The boy protests but the father chides him: "You're not the one who has to worry about everything." And then the 10-year-old messiah, who is compassion incarnate, and carrying the fire, gives up his secret. He says to his father: "Yes I am. I am the one."

The good guys remain elusive as the father sickens, and he talks of the boy inevitably being alone on the road. The boy asks about another boy he saw walking alone. Was he lost?

"No," the father says. "I dont think he was lost. ..."

"But who will find him if he's lost? Who will find the little boy?"

"Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again."

Goodness is an anomalous subject for McCarthy, especially in the language of a children's book. He has given his own kinetic language to the narrating minds of morons, cretins, madmen, psychotic murderers; and in "Blood Meridian" to a satanically articulate god of war who rides with scalp-hunters and is the supreme evil opposite of the good boy messiah. Those narrators all became oracular presences on behalf of evil, but this father and son remain only filial familiars, brave and loving and good but tongue-tied on what else they are or are becoming. The boy refuses to speak his thoughts or dark dreams to his father; the father is as inarticulate on his Promethean son as he is on his own obsession with their forced march. But the father was right about goodness: it arrives on cue as a deus ex machina that has been following the pair and swiftly enfolds the boy savior into a holy family, maybe a holy commune, where they talk of the breath of God passing "from man to man through all of time." Then McCarthy ends with an eloquent lament: a vision of mountain trout that "smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional" in a time gone when the world was becoming; and what had been was "a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again." And all things "were older than man and they hummed of mystery."

Brief and mystical, this is an extremely austere conclusion to the apocalyptic pilgrimage. Of the boy's becoming, or his mission - redeeming a dead world, outliving death? - nothing is said. The rhythmic poetry of McCarthy's formidable talent has made us see the blasted world as clearly as Conrad wanted us to see. But the scarcity of thought in the novel's mystical infrastructure leaves the boy a designated but unsubstantiated messiah. It makes us wish that that old humming mystery had a lyric.

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The Road - By Cormac McCarthy - Books - Review

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And the boy asks, "Were they the bad guys?" "Yes, they were the bad guys." "There's a lot of them, those bad guys." "Yes there are. But they're gone." The overarching theme in McCarthy's work has been the face-off of good and evil with evil invariably triumphant through the bloodiest possible slaughter.

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Cormac McCarthy has been-as one 1965 reviewer of his first novel, The Orchard Tree, dubbed him-a "disciple of William Faulkner." He makes admirable use of Faulknerian traits in his prose, and I'd always assumed he inherited his punctuation style from Faulkner as well. But in his very rare 2008 televised interview with Oprah Winfrey, McCarthy cites two other antecedents: James Joyce and forgotten novelist MacKinlay Kantor, whose Andersonville won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955. Joyce's influence dominates, and in discussion of punctuation, McCarthy stresses that his minimalist approach works in the interest of maximum clarity. Speaking of Joyce, he says,

James Joyce is a good model for punctuation. He keeps it to an absolute minimum. There's no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks. I mean, if you write properly you shouldn't have to punctuate.

So what "weird little marks" does McCarthy allow, or not, and why? Below is a brief summary of his stated rules for punctuation:
1. Quotation Marks:
McCarthy doesn't use 'em. In his Oprah interview, he says MacKinlay Kantor was the first writer he read who left them out. McCarthy stresses that this way of writing dialogue requires particular deliberation. Speaking of writers who have imitated him, he says, "You really have to be aware that there are no quotation marks, and write in such a way as to guide people as to who's speaking." Otherwise, confusion reigns.
2. Colons and semicolons:
Careful McCarthy reader Oprah says she "saw a colon once" in McCarthy's prose, but she never encountered a semicolon. McCarthy confirms: "No semicolons."

Of the colon, he says: "You can use a colon, if you're getting ready to give a list of something that follows from what you just said. Like, these are the reasons." This is a specific occasion that does not present itself often. The colon, one might say, genuflects to a very specific logical development, enumeration. McCarthy deems most other punctuation uses needless.
3. All other punctuation:
Aside from his restrictive rationing of the colon, McCarthy declares his stylistic convictions with simplicity: "I believe in periods, in capitals, in the occasional comma, and that's it." It's a discipline he learned first in a college English class, where he worked to simplify 18th century essays for a textbook the professor was editing. Early modern English is notoriously cluttered with confounding punctuation, which did not become standardized until comparatively recently.

McCarthy, enamored of the prose style of the Neoclassical English writers but annoyed by their over-reliance on semicolons, remembers paring down an essay "by Swift or something" and hearing his professor say, "this is very good, this is exactly what's needed." Encouraged, he continued to simplify, working, he says to Oprah, "to make it easier, not to make it harder" to decipher his prose. For those who find McCarthy sometimes maddeningly opaque, this statement of intent may not help clarify things much. But lovers of his work may find renewed appreciation for his streamlined syntax.
Related Content: Werner Herzog Reads From Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses Seven Tips From William Faulkner on How to Write Fiction David Foster Wallace Breaks Down Five Common Word Usage Mistakes in English Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Cormac McCarthy's Three Punctuation Rules, and How They All Go Back to James Joyce

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Cormac McCarthy has been-as one 1965 reviewer of his first novel, The Orchard Tree, dubbed him-a "disciple of William Faulkner.' He makes admirable use of Faulknerian traits in his prose, and I'd always assumed he inherited his punctuation style from Faulkner as well.

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MacArthur Fellow Cormac McCarthy is one of those rare writers who has managed to perch on the fence between literary and popular fame. Helped in no small part by the brilliant film adaptations of his novels No Country for Old Men and , McCarthy's books have found a broader audience than they might have, and have thus penetrated and influenced both literary and popular culture.

McCarthy's broad appeal is partly due to his rugged and wild plots - his novels are rarely domestic, and instead follow alienated individuals through rough wastelands and all-American deserts. His characters are rifle-wielding or horse-riding outcasts attempting to assert their wills on an uncaring modern world. Often, they stumble across some quiet, inevitable, and fundamental manifestation of evil and break themselves against it.

But it's McCarthy's inimitable style that has cemented him as one of the best American novelists of the past hundred years. Often described as 'dreamlike', McCarthy's prose relies on vivid, direct, almost scriptural language stripped of all but the most necessary punctuation. If language is a lens (and it is), McCarthy's is both wide-angle and macro, both blurred and sharp. In its explicit and startling directness, McCarthy's language draws attention to itself as something between the reader and the plot, landscapes, characters, and actions he describes. It's paradoxical and lovely.

But how can you achieve similar feats in your own writing? Let's look at what Cormac McCarthy can teach us about writing fiction.

Take control of grammar, spelling, and punctuation

There's a great tip from Strunk and White's Elements of Style that McCarthy seems to have firmly internalized:

The question of ear is vital. Only the writer whose ear is reliable is in a position to use bad grammar deliberately; this writer knows for sure when a colloquialism is better than formal phrasing and is able to sustain the work at a level of good taste. So cock your ear.

- William Strunk Jr., E.B. White, Elements of Style

The point here is simple: confident writers are not slaves to grammar, spelling, and punctuation; they make it work for them. Of course, to do this, you need to be a master of all three, as well as have the reliable ear that Strunk and White celebrate.

Thankfully for him, McCarthy is such a master; taking the torch from William Faulkner and James Joyce, McCarthy often uses nouns as verbs, ignores commas, coins new words, and avoids speech marks altogether. Take, for example, this passage from the incredibly bleak novel The Road:

He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.

- Cormac McCarthy,

The rolling rhythms of these unbroken sentences rely upon McCarthy's penchant for archaic sentence structure ('Darkness implacable' for example), his wide vocabulary (I had to Google 'intestate'), and the fiery, almost religious rhetoric he uses to paint the world he's describing. We see there are no commas slowing the tempo, and his use of 'running' as a noun and 'sorrow' as a verb grant the passage a strange, unusual power. In The Road, these flouted rules also bear thematic weight; after all, in the novel's post-apocalyptic world, rules have been long forgotten and the invocation of them would seem impossibly quaint. This is an America full of cannibals, suicides, and ruined cities - the old rules and the order they upheld are no longer relevant.

Understanding the rules of grammar puts you in a position to flout them. Click To Tweet

Like McCarthy, you too can be a writer who is not afraid to take risks and flout rules; but remember, just because you can, it doesn't mean you should. McCarthy's bold style and his dismissal of standardized rules are employed for several reasons, not just because he felt like it. Always know what you're doing and why you're doing it. As Strunk and White stress, the best way to learn when it's appropriate to flout rules is to gain an ear for why and when they apply.

Let your style match everything else

This is a big one. While McCarthy has something of a signature style, he also tends to write about the same settings and themes. I like to think that if McCarthy ever wrote a domestic comedy-of-errors set in Renaissance England, his style would change dramatically.

As it is, McCarthy loves America, he loves deserts, he loves the notion of a primeval land and its people being dragged painfully into modernity. He worries about things like alienation, the (im)possibility of true independence from social or religious doctrine, and enjoys focusing in on his characters as they make life-or-death decisions that will define their lives forever. Like Faulkner (who he is frequently compared to), he's interested in what happens when flawed, rough-around-the-edges Americans stumble across violence, brutality, and evil. And everything about his style complements these themes and interests.

How? Well, let's look at this passage from Blood Meridian:

It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog's, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets.

- Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West

You'll notice that the text has an archaic feel to it - words like 'afire' and 'forth' elevate the narration without feeling farcical, and the sheer length of some of the sentences combined with the reliance on 'and' mimics Biblical scripture, particularly the early pages of Genesis. McCarthy's fascination with the desert's creatures only hammers the Biblical feel home - it is as if we're hearing about the animals of Noah's ark, or perhaps a bestial version of Genesis's account of Cain and Abel's lineage. The 'constellation' of eyes edging the 'ring of light,' as well as the reference to 'the stars in their sockets,' further adds to the cosmic, spiritual tone, and helps indicate to the reader the cryptic space between the earth - occupied here by man and lizard and tarantula - and the lost-but-glimpsed heavens.

How is this relevant? Well, for one, the narrative here is clearly concerned with a burning bush of sorts ('a lone tree burning on the desert') and a 'solitary pilgrim'. The quoted text is evidently the precursor to coming acts of spiritual or religious significance. But beyond that, McCarthy's style speaks to the setting - just like McCarthy's prose, the desert and its sky are broad and horizontal and monotonous, encompassing everything from stars to lizards. These are blurred, indistinct, primeval spaces - and, this being America, the land carries too the baggage of a new Eden, of Puritanism, of manifest destiny. These religious histories cannot be separated from the land, and so they are inseparable from McCarthy's style.

Make your voice an extension of the story you're telling - tap into settings and themes. Click To Tweet

McCarthy's style here isn't for the sake of it. It matches the themes of the novel (I won't ruin Blood Meridian if you haven't read it, but the novel examines violence in religious and nihilistic contexts), is tied intrinsically to the plot's setting, and, through the explicit, self-referential directness of his punctuation-less prose, draws attention to the distances between text and reader in a way that nods to one of the book's dominant themes: the void between heaven and earth.

Make your characters suffer

Another wildly successful American writer, Kurt Vonnegut, famously advised short story writers:

Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

- Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction

McCarthy seems to have really taken this advice to heart (though few of his characters could ever really be described as 'sweet' or 'innocent'). Novels like No Country for Old Men, Blood Meridian, and will inevitably leave readers numb by the time they close - suffering is meted out liberally and indiscriminately. Whether its children getting their throats cut in Blood Meridian or cannibals savaging one another in The Road, there's no lack of chilling brutality in McCarthy's grim worlds.

Hurting your characters benefits your novel in two main ways: the first is plot advancement. All but the most experimental or boring plots rely on conflict to propel the action onward; after all, if everyone in your book remains fine throughout, the reader begins to wonder why the book was written in the first place.

Secondly, suffering deepens and develops your characters and the world they inhabit. By putting your characters in horrible situations, we get to see how they respond, whether they break, whether a hidden strength or a vindictive paranoia emerges, whether they fight, and how they pick themselves up. Similarly, if your characters spend half the book suffering, the reader realizes that the world these characters inhabit is perhaps not a nice place. McCarthy picks up on this - while the human cattle locked in the basement and the couple hanging from the barn roof in The Road are not main characters, their suffering deepens the world they inhabit, painting it in increasingly dark colors that, in turn, reflect upon and deepen the main characters who must survive in such a world.

Suffering progresses the plot and explores your characters. Use it liberally. Click To Tweet

This leads us to a final benefit of suffering: it encourages empathy. We only care so deeply about the man and the boy in The Road because we have seen how they respond to suffering and because their endurance has earned our attention. We see how the terrible life the man has lived has changed him into the kind of person who says this to his infant son:

Listen to me, he said, when your dreams are of some world that never was or some world that never will be, and you're happy again, then you'll have given up. Do you understand? And you can't give up, I won't let you.

- Cormac McCarthy,

Of course, the lesson to take away here isn't 'fill your book with as much suffering and misery as possible'. Anyone can throw together a few hundred pages of non-stop groin-kicking or eye-gouging, but this does not a good book make. After all, it's not the bad thing itself that's important, but rather what that bad thing reveals about the characters affected or how it moves the plot forward. What you should be thinking about is how your characters are going to change in reaction to the bad things that happen and how those bad things will affect the world and the context of the story.

The man himself

McCarthy remains something of a recluse - he's notoriously camera-shy and has given only a few interviews over the course of his career. The few journalists who've met him confirm that McCarthy is a man who seems to prefer talking about anything but himself and his work.

This makes it a bit difficult to take any lessons directly from the ( pretty) horse's mouth, but there are a few tidbits to cling to. The first may be a bit disheartening to our more writing-obsessed readers: have wide-reaching interests and dozens of hobbies. 'Of all the subjects I'm interested in,' he said during an interview with the New York Times, 'writing is way, way down at the bottom of the list.' McCarthy didn't even start reading serious literature until he was twenty-three and in the air force.

The takeaway here seems to be that it's always good to have something to write about - it's all well and good loving books and writing, but unless you're passionate and knowledgeable about other things (McCarthy claims he had 'every hobby there was' as a child), your writing might come across as flat, unengaging, or unconvincing.

You're probably getting the impression that McCarthy isn't your standard literary writer. He even does away with the traditional writer's insecurity: 'I never had any doubts about my abilities,' he says in the same New York Times interview. 'I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.' This self-assuredness certainly goes some way to explaining his bold and experimental style.

Finally, there's some meat on these bones: McCarthy insists that all literature should 'deal with issues of life and death.' He even dismisses Marcel Proust and Henry James: 'To me,' he says, 'that's not literature.' It's worth thinking about how this seriousness is reflected in his Biblical style and in the themes he chooses to approach in his fiction.

Where now?

There are few writers working in America today who are as stylistically distinctive as Cormac McCarthy. If anyone can teach writers the value of a distinct voice, it's him. In his bleak and hazy worlds, we can observe how style meets substance, reflecting all the while themes, geography, and plot. Whether you're wondering how much to hurt your characters, how to bring all the aspects of your book together, or are simply struggling beneath the whip of authoritarian grammar rules, McCarthy can help you out.

As ever, the best way to absorb Cormac McCarthy's lessons is to read his books. The uncharacteristically cheery All the Pretty Horses, the first novel in his Border Trilogy, is often touted as the most accessible of his novels (he has not published any short stories - apparently, 'Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing').

What do you think about Cormac McCarthy? Somber genius? Arrogant cynic? Irritating macho man? Which of his novels are you favorites? Have you gleaned any wisdom from his works? Let us know in the comments. Or check out The 3 Golden Rules Of Writing A Western for more advice on these themes, and What '17776' Can Tell You About Improving Your Craft for a very different example of how style can reflect and enhance content.

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What You Need To Know About How Cormac McCarthy Can Improve Your Writing

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MacArthur Fellow Cormac McCarthy is one of those rare writers who has managed to perch on the fence between literary and popular fame. Helped in no small part by the brilliant film adaptations of his novels No Country for Old Men and , McCarthy's books have found a broader audience than they might have, and have thus penetrated and influenced both literary and popular culture.

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Cormac McCarthy Interview on the Oprah Winfrey Show