IT MAY SEEM a departure for Cormac McCarthy to take on postapocalyptic sci-fi, but The Road (Knopf, $24) bears all his trademarks. McCarthy's vintage characters—notably in his Border Trilogy, including 1992's All the Pretty Horses—tend to be outcasts in desolate country, yearning for a lost way of life. Here, the metaphors of alienation are all too literal: In the darkness of a relentless nuclear winter, a father and son are loners by default—they're practically the last people on earth. In a bleak, gripping riff on the road-buddy story—Mad Max meets Faulkner—the homeless pair journey through what was once, it seems, the southern United States, pushing a salvaged grocery cart and occasionally encountering tattooed "roadagents" who literally try to eat them. If it sounds like self-parody, I promise it's not. The Road is filled with McCarthy's famous nihilistic violence and moral essentialism. The tense narrative is pared down to the duo's basic quest for survival, making for some masterful suspense. Flashbacks to the "vanished world" are few but include terse, powerful elegies to biodiversity, green grass, and sunshine. "He dreamt of walking in a flowering wood where birds flew before them . . . and the sky was aching blue but he was learning how to wake himself from just such siren worlds." We know virtually nothing about why the bombs flew. We know nothing about the man, except that he is educated, wily, and very sick. All we know about the child is that he's old enough to know the alphabet and infused with almost mystical goodness. As the two march south through the creatureless country, both realize that the dead are the lucky ones. They keep going for each other's sake and also because they are driven, as the child articulates it, to find the good guys—if any still exist—and escape the bad. Hell may be other people, but, as McCarthy reminds us, there is no salvation without them, either. The Road is airless and chilling, its deadpan horrors leavened—a little—by a filial tenderness that tries and mostly manages not to veer into sentimentality: "Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire."

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