The Road was really poorly written, but it did have an emotional resonance. It was beautiful in some ways, but it was a pretty crappy novel that didn't deserve

The Road was really poorly written, but it did have an emotional resonance. It was beautiful in some ways, but it was a pretty crappy novel that didn't deserve a fraction of the attention it received. I'm still a bit baffled as to why it received that much attention. I picked it up at random off my gf's bookshelf last year, and read it in a day. It was quite simplistic. Calling it reductive would be giving it undue credit. If you write a novel that aims to distill a genre into its own __prototype methods, you should leave the reader with a feeling that you're doing something more important and artful than simply cashing in on the existing archetype. Perhaps, like, a critique of the archetype itself embedded in the work would give the reader something more to think about. [edit] I'd also just call attention to "Earth Abides" by George R. Stewart (1949). This pulpy, pathos-ridden, amazing jerk-off sci-fi fantasy of being the last person on earth already hits pretty much all the major themes. If you're going to write the dark and traumatizing version of it with a boy in tow, how about adding something to the genre rather than collecting accolades based on an unproven assumption that by reducing it to parts you have somehow expanded upon it?