If you’d have asked me two weeks ago when The Road was published, I would have guessed the 50’s. There’s something about the apocalyptic, vaguely post-nuclear landscape of The Road that strikes me as deeply rooted in the visceral fear of nuclear annihilation that pervaded the 50’s and 60’s. I, however, could not have been more wrong. My second book of 2026, “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy, was published in 2006.

If you’re unfamiliar with this book (I swear I thought it was a classic that people had to read in high school, but I graduated high school well before this book was published), it tracks the journey of the two main characters – The Man and The Boy – as they traverse an apocalyptic landscape. The world of the book has been ruined by some non-specific, species-ending cataclysm. The Man’s experience of the terminal event was a series of flashes of light in the night followed by deep thumps, but it’s never described beyond that in any detail because the specifics of the event are irrelevant to the story. Whatever happened, the world is weathering something akin to a nuclear winter. Civilization and wilderness alike are burned away. Buildings and cars are melted. Civil infrastructure is collapsed. Most people and animals are long dead. There is a pervasive layer of ash over everything. Ash falls from the sky with the weather. The sun rarely appears beyond the endless gray skies, and despite the obvious presence of fire and flame, the world is cold, harsh, and unforgiving.

The Man and The Boy are on a journey. After a harsh winter in a nameless place, they are following the road roughly southbound, hoping to find the coast and maybe some remnants of civilization. They journey alone, avoiding other survivors at all costs. This is wise: the other survivors of the cataclysm are desperate and often depraved, abandoning all morals and ethics in the name of raw survival. There are marauding bands of slavers and cannibals roaming the landscape, and the duo frequently encounter disturbing scenes of horror and violence. When The Man and The Boy do run into other humans, the interactions are tense, dangerous, and horrifying, the stakes impossibly high and the odds ever against them.

The cataclysmic landscape depicted by McCarthy is devoid of life. The nuclear winter has killed everything. There is no wildlife to speak of. There are no plants, no roots to forage, grasses to munch, or berries to pick. Time has elapsed since the disaster’s occurrence, and most of the remaining structures have been thoroughly looted and stripped of any useful resources. In addition to the dangers of other humans, The Man and The Boy battle a near-constant state of fatigue and starvation. They battle the elements, fighting their way through an assortment of unpleasant and unpredictable weather with few resources or materials. In a deeper sense, they battle for their humanity, trying to survive without succumbing to the pull of darkness that has driven so many to brutality and cannibalism.

The Road seems highly appropriate reading for 2026. We are living in a world on the edge. The United States, my homeland, is in disarray. The government is murdering civilians in the streets. Congress has all but abandoned their jobs. There is talk of war around the world, and talk of civil war. The climate catastrophe is unfolding at speed. Russia and China seem poised to seize the moment and upset the global order. The world feels very dangerous right now. A world like that portrayed in The Road is not an impossible outcome.

I’ve lived through a few disasters in my lifetime. In the early days of the pandemic, we faced serious resource shortages and supply chain disruptions, and everybody seemed to lose their minds. In the last century, I lived through a vicious ice storm that knocked out power to most of New England in 1998, living without electricity for two weeks.

More recently I’ve lived through several major hurricanes in Florida. Hurricane Ian disrupted gasoline and food supplies in my area for weeks. My gasoline reserves went faster than I thought; my generator was not as efficient as advertised, and I needed fuel to preserve what food we had left in the refrigerator and freezer. Venturing into the world was scary. There were thousands of people on the road, swarming depleted gas stations and empty stores. Looters and scammers flooded the area; people in the community were not shy about brandishing guns and displaying prominent warnings that looters would be shot on sight. There was chaos in the air. I wonder how long it would have been before people were fighting.

That said, I think most people in a disaster lean towards helpfulness. People in the ice storm helped one another. People often help one another after hurricanes here. I am always inspired and grateful to see power line workers driving from states away to come here and help in the wake of the storms. Humans are social animals, and cooperation is our strength. But we are complex animals. For every helper, there is someone coming out to hunt after the hurricanes. Fraud, theft, burglary, assault, and looting are not uncommon in the wake of storms, and that’s when civilization still exists. In the ashes of The Road’s world, it’s hard to imagine anyone rebuilding civilization. The unfortunate survivors seem destined to a life of hardship, chaos, and violence.

And yet they persist.

The Road is a masterful story, rich and meaningful, deeply human. I could re-read this book a dozen times and pick out something new in the text each time. It is spare, unblinking, harsh, and strangely beautiful. It is thought-provoking and strangely inspiring. It is a story story, a piece of literature, one of those books that will stick with me for a very, very long time. I highly recommend this book.