Flavorwire

Cormac McCarthy and Franz Kafka

Wait, hear us out. Yes, McCarthy’s work is famously filled with bloodshed and all-too-lucid descriptions of Southern sunbaked miseries and Kafka’s is chilly and surreal, but for us, the true takeaway from Kafka is a sense of personal alienation, of futility and cyclical struggle. And we got the same exact sinking feeling from On the Road and Blood Meridian, no matter how different their colors.