Content warning for discussions of violence, death, murder, cannibalism, children in peril and general themes of the apocalypse.
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A portrait of Cormac McCarthy, used as the back cover of his 1973 novel “Child of God.” McCarthy was the author of “The Road,” which was adapted into a graphic novel. Photo by David Styles/Wikimedia Commons.
“If you’re on the lookout all the time does that mean you’re scared all the time?”
I had this whole plan to make every Modern Monster article for this month be about the “Alien” movie franchise — “Alien April” if you will — and then I lost my laptop charger and have since been left “Alien”-less. I wasn’t going to disrespect the great Dr. Ellen Ripley by watching her heroics on my lowly phone, so I instead turned to a recently purchased graphic novel that I read just a few days ago.
Today I’m taking the “Apocalypse April” route in the form of a deeply disturbing graphic novel adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel, “The Road.” Every week, I find something spooky and bring it to your attention by talking about the way horror and fear affect our everyday lives in this column. This week I’m talking about the gruesome yet beautiful “The Road.”
I haven’t read McCarthy’s book and I don’t plan to. The visuals of Manu Larcenet’s graphic novel adaptation of “The Road” are so visually impressive and emotionally striking that I think reading the book would change my perspective too much. For as long as I’ve loved art, I’ve loved the art of comic inking, and Larcenet’s inking style matches the grim aesthetics of McCarthy’s world perfectly.
“The Road” is about an unnamed father and his young son — who we will be calling Father and Son for the purposes of this article. Father is middle-aged and balding, with a long beard and a desperate attitude. Son looks to be around 10 years-old, and he’s still too young and innocent to fully grasp the horrors of the world he’s inherited. He has some guesses, though.
Father and Son are making an attempt at surviving the apocalypse. The reason for this apocalypse is never explained, but it’s left the sky choked with ashes and the people without food. The pair are American, traveling as far south as they can in hope of finding both warmth and civilization, neither of which are guaranteed. Along the road they walk, they find bandits, murderers and cannibals who have thrown humanity to the wayside in favor of survival.
“The Road” is not a happy story. Amid the violence and the starvation, Father does his best to give Son the best life he can. He teaches Son what it means to be a “good guy” or a “bad guy.” He does his best to prevent Son from seeing the corpses and skulls found along the road and inside its nearby buildings.
When a bandit attacks Son, Father shoots the stranger without hesitation, spraying blood across Son’s face. “Are we still the good guys?” Son asks, just a few pages later. Father hesitates, but he says they are.
If you skipped the content warning at the top of this article, now’s the time to read it.
Much of the horror found in “The Road” comes purely from the environment. We see most of the book from Father’s perspective, but the horrors inside are as new to the viewer as they are to Son. On multiple occasions, Father finds evidence of death, including a truck filled with corpses stacked on top of one another. Whenever he sees death, he tells Son that there’s nothing there, but tells him to keep his distance anyway.
There are two occasions on which Son is exposed to the reality of the apocalypse that he’s in. The first is a basement populated with naked, desperate and starving people, along with rotting bodies. Some of them are missing limbs. Father can’t undo what Son has seen, but he can lock the basement door behind them to keep the misery inside.
The second horror that Son sees is much simpler but far more impactful. It’s the body of an infant left abandoned on a spit above the remains of a campfire. There’s no present danger, but Father picks Son up and runs. “I’m sorry,” Father says while holding Son. “I’m sorry.”
I’m reiterating all of this in the article because the horror in “The Road” isn’t just the misery and the death depicted on each page. It’s about a dad who’s trying to keep his son alive but fails to give him a life worth living. It’s about growing up and learning about how truly awful the world can be.
We don’t know if Son makes it to salvation. We learn that Father never will. At the very end of “The Road,” we see a shot of Son. The panels have more white than gray in them. He’s wearing his father’s goggles and holds his father’s gun. He’s tiny and malnourished. He’s still a little boy. But out of necessity, he’s become his dad.
This radical loss of innocence is a common theme in a lot of media, especially the stuff you’ve probably read in a high school English class, like “Lord of the Flies” or “Catcher in the Rye.” No one should experience what Father and Son went through, yet loss of innocence is still a part of everyday life. When someone experiences hardship, pain, suffering or grief, it shifts their perspective.
I’m sure a lot of college students can relate to this theme. I can. I’ve experienced a lot in my first year of college, and my thoughts on grand topics like relationships and society have all changed drastically. I’ve been trying to reflect on everything more often, and I can feel myself taking those final steps from Son to Father. Everyone makes this jump to adulthood eventually; it’s unavoidable. Despite Father’s best efforts, Son still sees death around him. Son is still left to wander America on his own, with Father’s teachings but without his help.
Father knows he’s dying. Without saying it outright, he gently prepares Son for the idea of moving on without him. Father knows that Son is still going to be aware of how tragic and horrible humanity is. Protecting his son from it is a mission that will only end in failure. And yet he still does his best to delay the inevitable. If I were responsible for the care of someone younger than me, I’d want to keep them from seeing the corpses too.