6. The Road
The Book: With a refusal to hold your hand on complicated subjects and his quotation mark key gathering dust, Cormac McCarthys very particular writing style is a hard one to crack. Sometimes, like in his Borders trilogy, it can be a real challenge to get your head around, but when it works, its masterous. The Road, a post apocalyptic fable, is the pinnacle of McCarthys brilliance. Heavily episodic, the complete lack of chapters hammered home the desolation presented for the father son pair in a post-apocalyptic world.
Why It Shouldn't Have Been Adapted: John Hillcoat gave it an admirable attempt in the 2009 adaptation, with bleak cinematography and stirring performances from Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee. The issue was that the film couldn't quite capture the novels consistently haunting feeling of terror. This issue there is less a slight against the filmmakers and more praise for the very nature of the book. A faithful adaptation wouldn't work as a film, but, on the converse, changing anything alters the tone drastically. McCarthy, though, himself isn't unfilmable, as No Country For Old Men proved.