When a novel changes you....

I just finished Cormac McCarthy's novel "The Road'' and I don't know if I'm the same person I was before I read it. It's a slim novel and sparse in its language.
A man and his son are walking down a road, heading south. We're not told how old the boy is, but I'm guessing somewhere between 8 and 10. That's about it for plot.

But the world in which they trod their lonely road is a wasted, ruined post-apocalyptic world. The sun is obscured by ash and haze. Winter always seems to be coming. What people are left are not to be trusted. Desperation makes people do dark and obscene things. And they walk, the man and his boy, scrounging for food, pushing everything they have in a shopping cart.
We're with them every heartbreaking, pain-making step. The father and son talk, trying to hang onto decency in a world in which that quality, like every city they walk through, has been blasted away.

I read the book and I wonder if I have the skills and the courage needed to protect my own son in those circumstances. We're the good guys, the father says. We keep going. This book is haunting, and I'll never forget its power and I don't know if I'll ever forgive the author for what his words have cost me.