“What you put in your head is there forever,” says one of the two main characters in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. They are, as I don’t need to tell you if you are one of the many who have read this Pulitzer Prize-winning best seller, a father and his young son struggling to stay alive while crossing a post-Apocalyptic America.

It’s a line that comes up when the father is trying to prevent the boy from seeing a particularly gruesome sight, one of many in the book (and, as horrible as it is, not nearly so horrible as one that occurs a few pages later).

I picked up the book while waiting for a delayed flight a few months ago, read about half of it in the airport, and wasn’t able to get back to it until a few days ago when I needed something to read while waiting for Terminator Salvation to begin. It seemed appropriate (though it also robbed that mindless movie of whatever dystopian impact it might have had).

I’m now about 75% of the way through it, and that may be as far as I get. Its literary merit is undeniable, but it is so awfully, unrelievedly grim that I’m afraid of it. The story can only get worse, and as I generally only have time to read before going to sleep at night, I hate to let it get into my dreams.

This is why I just never got around to reviewing the film Hunger, which concludes a week’s run at the Eastern Hills Mall Cinema today. I meant to: I have a screening DVD that has been sitting on my desk since before it opened. This acclaimed British/Irish co-production, winner of numerous film festival awards, charts in what I understand to be great detail the last six weeks in the life of Bobby Sands, the IRA member who in 1981 starved to death during a hunger strike in a British jail.

I hope anyone who was interested in seeing this movie got a chance to do so, and I apologize for not doing more to bring it to your attention if you didn’t. If you did see it, perhaps you can tell me whether it’s extended depiction of a man’s slow, painful death as excruciating as I have heard. But I’m just afraid to let those images get inside my head, forever.

The film version of The Road, originally scheduled to hit theaters last fall, was postponed for what has been reported as additional post-production work. It was directed by John Hillcoat, the Australian filmmaker who has been a longtime collaborator of Nick Cave (you may have seen their 2006 revisionist western The Proposition). I think he’s a fine choice who is unlikely to water down or sweeten the story any. A final cut was recently seen and praised by Tom Chiarella who wrote in Esquire that, while it is the most important film of the year, “You won’t want to see this one twice.”

I’m not sure if I’ll see it once. Meanwhile, here’s the newly-released trailer which, in the grand tradition of the Weinstein brothers (whose Dimension Films will release The Road on October 16), has been accused by fans of the book of misrepresenting the movie to drag in a more mainstream audience.