10 Dark Books Like Blood Meridian

The novel that was adapted into the Academy Award-nominated 2007 film of the same name, Ron Hansen’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford takes an almost documentarian approach to its subject matter, creating a “revisionist Western” that is a “thoughtful, artful reconstruction” (Kirkus Reviews) of the life and death of one of America’s most notorious—and most celebrated—outlaws. The result is a “terrific book” that turns “low history into high art” (Newsday).

“A combination of a South American Western and a noir,” this Landerneau Prize-winning book “has airs of Faulknerian tragedy in full Argentinian heat” (Lire). Rafael is born on the family farm on the lonely Patagonian steppe, “a setting both hostile and sublime” (Biblioteca Magazine). There, he finds that life is far from bucolic. Indeed, his family is at each other’s throats, and violence is never far away in this harsh, spare novel of life at its most difficult.

Tennessee native Cameron Judd is “a keen observer of the human heart as well as a fine action writer” (Publishers Weekly), and he brings both talents to bear in the first of his Tennessee Frontier Trilogy of books. The life of the fictional Joshua Colter crosses paths with history and legend in the form of Daniel Boone, Tecumseh, and the Boston Tea Party, among others, in a “story of courage, bloodshed, and a way of life that we cannot even imagine” (Valdosta Daily Times).

Winner of the Betty Trask Prize, this “absorbing and sometimes disquieting look inside the contemporary Muslim world” (Booklist) is the debut novel from celebrated Nigerian author Elnathan John. Written in a style “as unadorned as it is unflinching” (New York Times Book Review), Born on a Tuesday follows a young man named Dantala who lives among a gang of street boys and finds himself caught up in political and sectarian violence in this “stunning, important coming-of-age story” (Publishers Weekly).

Hailed by Stephen King as “a great novelist’s masterwork,” Power in the Blood tells a grisly tale of the American frontier through the eyes of three orphaned siblings who are separated and subjected to lives filled with grim cycles of violence. As fate brings the three siblings back together for one final cataclysmic event, it seems that their ordeals have only just begun in what the Chicago Tribune calls “a great page-turning, stay-up-late-into-the-night-saga,” ideal for fans of Cormac McCarthy.

“Triumphantly good, blisteringly original” (The Times), The Shepherd’s Hut takes readers on a dizzying quest for survival across the inhospitable saltlands of Western Australia, where the landscape is as likely to kill you as the criminals it harbors. Into this wasteland comes Jaxie Clackton, fleeing a single, terrible moment that has reshaped his life forever. Now a fugitive, his only hope lies in the torturous wastes around him in this “page-turning heartbreaker” (Emma Donoghue, author of Room) that has been hailed as one of the author’s best.

Many of the books on this list are set on the frontier—but urban centers can be just as brutal and just as inhospitable as any wilderness, as can be seen in this “unusually impressive first novel […] that can be read in one sitting but will linger in one’s mind long afterwards” (Chicago Daily News). In Such Dark Places follows a Midwestern photographer and lapsed Catholic living in the big city whose missing camera may contain the only evidence of a violent crime in this gritty tale of the New York slums.

“A Prayer for the Dying reads like the amazing, unrelenting love child of Shirley Jackson and Cormac McCarthy” raves Chuck Palahniuk, while Publisher Weekly calls it “a mesmerizing story and a brilliant tour de force.” Jacob Hansen is a Civil War veteran and the sheriff, undertaker, and pastor of the small town of Friendship, Wisconsin—a town beset by a terrible epidemic that threatens the lives and the sanity of its residents in this “new masterpiece of American literature” (Dennis Lehane).

Set in a dystopian America in the not-so-distant future, Brian Hart’s Trouble No Man “offers story-driving humanity that refuses to take a back seat to the well-crafted neo-western setting” (Booklist). It follows the pilgrimage of its protagonist, from a self-sabotaging teen in the '90s to a man on a mission in a dystopian frontier filled with violent militias in a book that calls to mind “the brutal realities of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian set among the primeval forests of the Pacific Northwest” (Kirkus Reviews).

Hailed as “the first great war novel of our generation” (Salon), Matthew Eck’s “haunting” debut “goes beyond the on-the-ground chaos of battle to capture the physical and psychological disorientation of modern war” (Publishers Weekly). Joshua Stantz is part of a small unit in an unnamed city in an unnamed desert country, who become separated from the rest of their forces. As they struggle to survive, readers are treated to a “contemporary version of The Red Badge of Courage in this tale of one young man’s trial by fire in the pandemonium of war in an age of high-tech weaponry and low-grade morality” (Booklist).