New Cormac McCarthy Book Releases Tuesday

I nearly fell out of my chair when I saw Janet Maslin’s review of a new book by McCarthy, “The Road,” on the front page of the Times’ Arts section this morning.

With a four-year wait between “The Crossing” and “Cities of the Plain,” and then seven years before last year’s “No Country for Old Men,” I was going to start looking sometime around 2010.

Well I know where I’ll be tomorrow morning.

Publisher’s Weekly writes, “Violence, in McCarthy’s postapocalyptic tour de force, has been visited worldwide in the form of a “long shear of light and then a series of low concussions” that leaves cities and forests burned, birds and fish dead and the earth shrouded in gray clouds of ash. In this landscape, an unnamed man and his young son journey down a road to get to the sea. … McCarthy establishes himself here as the closest thing in American literature to an Old Testament prophet, trolling the blackest registers of human emotion to create a haunting and grim novel about civilization’s slow death after the power goes out.