I took Cormac McCarthy camping with me: five nights together on Lake Superior’s rugged north shore. That is, I took McCarthy’s The Road with me. For those who might find the wasteland of a McCarthy world too bleak to navigate, might I suggest, for an added spark, an immersive reading experience? While a postapocalyptic novel is generally not forest-bathing fare, try it in a setting of Superior isolation, amidst a politically unstable—i.e. current—world order. I dare you. If McCarthy’s not-so-shadowed truths, read in a thin flicker of firelight, don’t scare the shit out of you, nothing will.
“Cold unforgiving bedrock…a blackness to hurt your ears with listening; sightless and impenetrable, without depth or dimension”…The Road opens with the chill of a northern Ontario night. No, unlike McCarthy’s, mine is not a land destroyed, a colourless place of ash and smoke, a demise of humanity’s design. Beauty abounds here; in igneous outcrop, in the ancient interaction of lake and land, on forested floor. But it’s a wild beauty for all that. You don’t come to this place unprepared; the bush can be quick to reclaim her own. And you don’t venture into The Road expecting to be entertained. We’re talking about the end of the civilized world here. In scenes so hauntingly, horrifically, rendered it’s impossible to look away. Which is the point.
Stripping the main characters of name, McCarthy forces us to walk The Road not through their identities, but through our own, in a common search for salvation. Mineral-rich description weaves us into the tapestry of other times, even as we sit in the illusionary safety of our own. But security won’t be found sitting on the sidelines.
Dogged must be the path, for there is much to lose. Not the material—an apocalypse is a great equalizer—but ourselves. “They came upon themselves in a mirror and he almost raised the pistol. It’s us, Papa, the boy whispered. It’s us.”
Figurative references, “carrying the fire”, are mirrored in the literal. Survival hinges on what the man carries to help light their way and keep them warm: a lighter, a flint, a candle, a flare pistol. Even a lamp, left behind in a bunker by those who prepared but didn’t survive: the passing of a flame. And another McCarthy truth: hope, for humanity.
The man dreams of his late wife, the late world, and tells the boy “when your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up. Do you understand?”
Do we, waiting in our temporary bunkers, settled and sated? Sleepwalking through the landscape of 2025, bystanders again? Stark parallels abound, but this novel is no weary slog of despair. It’s a powerful commentary: on love, grief, tenacity, and triumph. And the redemption to be found at the end of The Road.
— Karen E. Moore is a Canadian writer whose work has appeared in Grain, Dreamers Creative, Fahmidan, Beyond Words, Slippery Elm, among others, and has been short/ longlisted for multiple international awards/contests. Previously a musician, she’s still in her studio weaving melodies, just using a different medium. Connect with Karen at www.kemoore.ca
You can read Karen E. Moore's story "Our Reflections in Flames" in Issue 304 (Summer Creative Nonfiction 2025). Order the issue now:
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