The Haunting Art of Cormac McCarthy

I was going to write about humor on this perfect spring day, but I can't find my Dave Barry books. So I reached at random into my Great Sentences folder and pulled out the opening of The Road, about as far from humor as it's possible to get. Even when what's being described is the lifeless, lightless world that remains after an unspecified apocalypse, McCarthy's prose is worth studying. Its stark imagery, no-nonsense sentence structure and punctuation, and subtle sound effects evoke the setting so vividly that I shudder every time I read it. But I keep reading. The novel opens with this riveting passage:

"When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkenss and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the days of it and the years without cease."