Cormac McCarthy looms like Melville's Father Mapple above the sinful landscape of America.

	"THE ROAD" By Cormac McCarthy Knopf ($24)

From the operatic violence of 1985's "Blood Meridian" to the unstoppable crime wave of last year's "No Country for Old Men," McCarthy, 73, has delivered a vision of a nation damned by its bloody heritage.

He eased back a bit with his Border Trilogy ("All the Pretty Horses," "The Crossing" and "Cities of the Plain"), the books that brought him a wider audience in the 1990s, but even these tales of two cowboys coming of age in the vanishing West were tinged with a looming sense of loss.

Now, the debt has come due and the wolf has broken down the door. Vanishing America has vanished for good.

McCarthy's short, searing new novel is a world of nuclear winter, killed by fire and constant ash fall where the only fresh food is human. "The Road" is a descendant of those apocalyptic novels of the Cold War, like "Canticle for Leibowitz" or "On the Beach," but far darker.

A nameless man and his young son, starving, filthy and in rags, move slowly south in a dead America, hunting warmer climates near the sea. Their only equipment are a ripped plastic tarp, a shopping cart with a wobbly wheel and a pistol with two bullets, possibly one for the boy, then one for the father if the cannibals catch them.

It's been some time since the nameless destruction laid waste to civilization, long enough for groups of marauding flesh-eaters to organize and drive "the good ones" like the father and son into hiding or flight.

McCarthy's realization of hell on earth, told in his spare, hard prose, leaves no space for hope. He is relentlessly consistent, to the point of monotony.

"The Road" is a workout, too bleak and pitiless for some readers, but if and when extinction rolls around again, it will look a lot like McCarthy's version, a world where "by day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp."

But even he grudgingly understands that humanity, something he calls "the fire," is hard to extinguish even when facing total depravity. It's as close to hope as he will get.

McCarthy-ites will embrace "The Road," a return to form for the author after last year's over-the-top "No Country for Old Men," but the less-committed will either be appalled by the horrific descriptions, made more disturbing by McCarthy's cold understatement, or grow tired of the unremitting desolation.

In the body of apocalyptic literature, "The Road" is an ice pick ready to jab its softer companions for not being strong enough.

When the end comes, McCarthy is saying, nobody gets a break.