The Road is quite beautifully written, and about as bleak as you could imagine, but like most 'literary' works dipping their toes into genre, it's a tired and unambitious retread of far lesser known, generally lesser-regarded, but ultimately more satisfying and original works: you could look to Earth Abides, by George R Stewart; A Canticle For Leibowitz, by Walter M Miller Jr; I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson; The Postman, by David Brin; or much of Ballard's early work—The Drowned World, The Drought, The Crystal World.

If you do fancy reading outside of the genre specific, and into literary writers making a better fist of venturing into the post-apocalyptic, you could do worse than Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, Emily St John Mandel's Station Eleven, PD James' The Children of Men, or Nevil Shute's On The Beach.