Cormac McCarthy’s first novel, “The Orchard Keeper,” was published 41 years ago, and after 10 novels, the latest of which is “The Road” (Alfred A.Knopf, 288 pages, $24), he is one of the very few serious American writers with a passionate following among both critics and readers. Mr. McCarthy doesn’t have fans so much as devotees who regard his books with reverence and consider him the last link to the tradition of the American novel going back to Hemingway and Faulkner.

It’s not difficult to see why. Compared to Mr. McCarthy, the work of so many prominent American writers appears academic and bloodless. Real blood seems to pulse through Mr. McCarthy’s fiction — more than the stories require, some would say, particularly in his apocalyptic western “Blood Meridian,” in which the gore is splattered so freely that a better title might have been “Red Desert.”

Mr. McCarthy’s style has evolved over the years from what Edmund White called “classy Southern gothic” to what might be termed, at its best, heightened poetic realism, and at its worst, self-conscious myth mongering. In “Cities of the Plain,” “The Crossing,” and “All The Pretty Horses,” Mr. McCarthy’s prose is so rich and gravid with metaphor that many have been willing to overlook his shortcomings — it’s doubtful, for instance, that he’s ever created a single creditable female character — and excesses.

In Mr. McCarthy country, no one knocks on the door of a lonely cabin in the wilderness to ask for a drink of water without getting a monologue on the meaning of life or death. Every Mexican pimp sounds like he had a copy of “The Portable Nietzsche” in his back pocket. Every other prostitute is named Magdalena. Characters you’d think might be as inarticulate as Tarzan say things like, “I came here as a heretic fleeing a prior life” (from “The Crossing”), and “Your world totters upon an unspoken labyrinth of questions” (from “Cities of the Plain”). And it doesn’t add to the credibility of his novels that his unnamed narrators are constantly asking questions like, “but what does this say of God?” — always a rhetorical question.

Nonetheless, there has been an unmistakable quality in Mr. McCarthy’s novels, a fierceness and clarity not to be found anywhere else. But in last year’s “No Country For Old Men” — the title was from Yeats, but the sensibility was pulp — there was a disturbing blip on Mr. McCarthy’s screen that has carried over to “The Road.” “No Country For Old Men” was what used to be called a ripping good crime yarn and was hugely popular, easily the most film-worthy of the author’s books to date. “No Country,” though, with its cold-blooded philosophical Russian hit men and cryptic Southwestern deputy sheriffs, was pretentious genre stuff — neither Hemingway nor Faulkner but high-falutin’ Elmore Leonard, and if any writer’s name besides Cormac McCarthy’s had been on the jacket, it would have been shuffled off to the “crime fiction” section. Graham Greene wrote both serious novels and what he called his “entertainments” — thrillers like “The Third Man” and “This Gun For Hire” that were often more resonant than his more literary novels. With “No Country” and now “The Road,” Mr. McCarthy is writing down to his audience.

“The Road” is about the bleakest book Mr. McCarthy has ever written.The story concerns a father and young son’s desperate attempt to stay alive in a postapocalyptic landscape. Was civilization destroyed by a war? Pollution? An asteroid hitting the earth? Mr. McCarthy is short on explanations, as if rooting the story in any specifics would somehow diminish the purity of the nightmare-like desolation. The man’s wife has killed herself before the story begins — women aren’t tough enough to survive in Mr. Mc-Carthy’s universe — and the reader who gets too deeply involved in the story may envy her. The world has turned to ash. “The grainy air.The taste of it never left your mouth … On the hillsides old crops dead and flattened.The barren ridgeline trees raw and black in the rain.”

The father and boy walk down a road through the barren countryside, dodging marauders and cannibals, scrounging to stay alive. Every random sound is a potential horror.

“Who is it? said the boy.

“I don’t know.Who is anybody?”

All this, one feels, is meant to be allegorical in a quasi-religious way, but it’s not easy to sustain that feeling in a world God seems to have abandoned.That Mr. McCarthy’s real inspiration is more George Romero movies than the book of Revelation is tipped by an occasional line of dialogue: “What in God’s name are you talking about? We’re not survivors. We’re the walking dead in a horror film.” In truth, a zombie or two might lighten up the story.

Like “No Country For Old Men,” “The Road” is written in terse English sporadically punctuated with exotic words. A row of corpses “were discalced to a man, like pilgrims of some common order for all their shoes were long since taken.” A lesser writer might have simply said that they were barefoot. “The Road” leaves you wondering why a writer capable of using “discalced” was drawn to material like this in the first place.

Allen Barra last wrote for these pages about Johnny Unitas.