Seeing Cormac McCarthy’s The Road at the top of the list for Entertainment Weekly’s The New Classics: The 100 Best Reads from 1983 to 2008 fascinates me. The 2006 book deserves all of the praise and attention it’s received since publication. Even Oprah Winfrey got it right for once when she ordered her minions to read The Road for her book club.

The Road tells the story of a father and son as they wander through an ash covered, post-apocalyptic America. McCarthy’s 2005 book No Country for Old Men – known better as a Coen brothers movie than a McCarthy novel – reads in hindsight like an appetizer for The Road. In the former book, McCarthy slowly dissects the American Dream and reveals the unpleasant possibility that it’s coming to an end, whereas in the latter book, he destroys America and shows us the possibility of what comes next. And what does come next? Well, a lot of despair, darkness and pain. Make no mistake about it, The Road is bleak; which is just fine for McCarthy, a writer who is notorious for never quite giving readers what they expect and want. For instance, outside of a “long shear of light and then a series of low concussions”, it is not clear in the book what caused the devastation. But really, it isn’t important what really happened – this is a journey story, one of survival.

More importantly, The Road is part of an interesting 21st century trend towards end of the world stories.

For a century looked at with so much optimism before it arrived, it’s amazing that this century’s entertainment has turned out to be so deadly and cynical. These are post-postmodernistic times, after all; a time of Remodernism and New Sincerity and the death of irony. But if this is true, why the increasing fascination with the apocalypse?

You have graphic novels like Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard’s The Walking Dead; television shows like Jericho; movies like 28 Days Later, Children of Men, Dawn of the Dead, Land of the Dead, The Happening, Right at Your Door, I am Legend, Doomsday, War of the Worlds, and Le Temps du loup; and books like Stephen King’s Cell, Max Brooks’ World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, David Wellington’s Monster Trilogy, Brian Keene’s The Rising and City of the Dead, and Jim Crace’s The Pesthouse. And this is only what I can think of off the top of my head.

Some of it is laughably bad, like The Happening – M. Night Shyamalan’s idea for a 30 minute Twilight Zone episode stretched out to a painful 91 minutes. In this exercise of banality, for reasons not exactly clear, plants in the northeastern parts of the United States begin pumping toxins that force people to kill themselves. Originally it’s believed to be a terrorist attack, but the idea of it being plants is introduced by a crazy guy who has a monologue about how hot dogs get a bad rap, and from there, our hero - the high school science teacher - is able to figure out the “rules” to avoid the toxins (for instance, one can outrun the wind or talk to the plants in a soothing way). And if that isn’t spooky enough for you, be prepared to witness a lot of shots of trees and grass swaying in the wind with ominous music.

Some of it is painfully grim, like Brian Keene’s City of the Dead, a dark zombie story on steroids that makes any of Romero’s zombie movies seem like relaxing holidays.

And a lot of it is excellent. The Walking Dead is not only a zombie story that never ends, but a multi-layered human drama that will break your heart and punch you in the gut every time you get too comfortable. Brooks’ An Oral History of the Zombie War book is so decidedly simple in execution and bursting with enough clever details to fill at least a dozen books on the subject that I’m certain there were thousands of writers slapping themselves on the foreheads wondering why they didn’t think of half of Brooks’ ideas first. The Pesthouse feels like a companion piece to The Road, except Crace takes the time to reveal some of the beauty and optimism within the mountain of heartache that takes up most of the book. Children of Men sports some of the best cinematic world-building I’ve had the pleasure to watch. 28 Days Later is a burst cultural version of the Romero’s original zombie trilogy.

I remember taking a Horror Fiction course at university, and a lot of time was spent deconstructing the basic horror models, such as the Wolfman/Beast (fear of our own potential for destruction), Frankenstein/Creature (fear of science) and Dracula/Vampire (fear of that handsome Eastern European guy stealing your girlfriend), etc. Zombies, of course, always amounted to our basic fear of death, but not death itself so much as our inability to confront it. When it comes to this plethora of apocalyptic narratives – with or without zombies – I’d argue that we are being presented with a reflection of our fear of being in the dark, or rather, a world without information.

And here we have to mention 9/11, probably the main reason for the resurgence of apocalyptic horror. Many people have memories of sitting at work and constantly refreshing websites to get the latest information, and they remember the uncomfortable silence between the expected phone calls from friends and loved ones and the reloading of websites. It was a day when our assumed entitlement to information reached a critical level, and a lot of people are still recovering from it, some even latching onto conspiracy theories as a way of discovering the “truth” behind the truth, which inevitably leads to an insatiable hunger for information.

We have become addicted to information – the noise that it provides – whether it be the truth, misinformation or disinformation; as long as the noise continues. You can find a lot of faults with I am Legend, especially if you’re a fan of the original source material, but even the most jaded viewer was moved by the awful beauty of a silent and desolate New York City. The monsters were pale in comparison to Dr Robert Neville’s failure to obtain information outside of the city, and thus keeping him isolated from human contact. Even The Happening takes the time to address the claustrophobic seclusion the breakdown of information provides so readily. King’s technophobic Cell offers a variation of a zombie scenario, but the biggest threat to the protagonists is how long it takes them to piece together what is happening in a world without communication. The Walking Dead’s ability to remain unpredictable is largely based on the protagonists’ inability to know if help is truly on the way. The underlying premise of Brooks’ World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is how – ten years after the zombie war – the information is put together and presented.

The Road is frightening because of the overwhelming amount of unknown factors. The father and son are traveling south to where it may or may not be warmer, to the sea that may or may not have life, walking on roads that may or may not have cannibals waiting for them, starving with little to no hope of finding more food, and slowly dying from exposure.

There is no information, no noise, and thus, no hope.

And Entertainment Weekly – with an emphasis on entertainment – made it the number one book published in the last 25 years. Perhaps sometimes we have a little too much information.

This is TOO SOON.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 at 5:42 pm and is filed under Movies, Too Soon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.