The best books in the tradition of William Faulkner

Alden Bell Author Of The Reapers Are the Angels
By Alden Bell

Who am I?

As a writer, I’ve been deeply influenced by Southern literature—especially the work of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. Even though I’m not from the South myself, I am drawn to Southern writers’ immodesty. I believe much of contemporary literature is too timid. It is about the mundane, the everyday.  It does not elevate; instead, it diminishes.  Much of the literature of the South is biblical in its sensibilities.  It is unafraid to deal with the big universal issues with language that is equally big and universal.  It does not pander to modesty or postmodern selfconsciousness. It is audacious. It’s the kind of writing that made me want to write.

I wrote...

The Reapers Are the Angels

By Alden Bell

Book cover of The Reapers Are the Angels

What is my book about?

For twenty-five years, civilization has survived in meager enclaves, guarded against a plague of the dead. Temple wanders this blighted landscape, keeping to herself and keeping her demons inside her heart. She can't remember a time before the zombies, but she does remember an old man who took her in and the younger brother she cared for until the tragedy that set her on a personal journey toward redemption. Moving back and forth between the insulated remnants of society and the brutal frontier beyond, Temple must decide where ultimately to make a home and find the salvation she seeks.

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The Books I Picked & Why

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

By Cormac McCarthy

Book cover of Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

Why this book?

There is something about this book that is behind everything I write. McCarthy inherits from Faulkner that grand, majestical perspective of an author writing through the eyes of God—far above the earth and indifferent to whatever beauty or violence he sees. There is an inevitability to his stories and his language—as though he were simply recording a narrative that is fated and absolute. McCarthy, like Faulkner before him—and Melville and Conrad and Dante—writes at the level of myth. Yes, the book is about the scalp trade along the Texas-Mexico border in the nineteenth century, but it is really about the big abstracts: humanity, good, evil, the apathetic universe.

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Sula

By Toni Morrison

Book cover of Sula

Why this book?

Morrison taps into Faulkner’s gorgeously perverse relationship with Sigmund Freud. Her characters seem post-moral, driven by instinct, fundamental desire, and a willingness to tread in the liminal spaces of society where few will follow. The story is a Southern gothic fairytale about two girls whose lives are inescapably entangled against the backdrop of a town obsessed with suicide, violence, and sexual calamity. This book makes you feel lost in the woods—like an abandoned child from a tale by the Brothers Grimm.

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In the Rogue Blood

By James Carlos Blake

Book cover of In the Rogue Blood

Why this book?

Mixing Faulkner’s gothic language with McCarthy’s sense of history, Blake writes a story of two brothers torn apart by circumstance and their experiences in the Mexican-American War.  Blake captures that sense of aimless wandering that echoes Faulkner’s stories—the rootless characters meandering across the country, not only unsure of their destinations but maybe even indifferent to them. To me, one of the most profound twists in the book is that the brothers don’t seem to care which side of the war they participate in. They are itinerants whose purpose in the world is simply circumstantial; they are instruments of universal forces that they neither question nor understand. 

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Smonk: Or Widow Town

By Tom Franklin

Book cover of Smonk: Or Widow Town

Why this book?

Franklin’s book is one of the key inspirations for my book, The Reapers Are the Angels. Combining a frontier western sensibility with Faulkner’s wicked gothic brutality, Franklin tells an engrossing tale of a young prostitute who finds herself mired in a world of outlaws, perverts, dandies, and murderers. Frantically running back and forth between high comedy and guttered grotesquerie, this story feels like it’s just barely clinging to its own rails—and that sense of dangerous tipping is what feels so thrilling about it. What Franklin inherits from Faulkner is a wide-eyed beguilement with degeneracy—or what Conrad would call a “fascination of the abomination.”

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The Death of Sweet Mister

By Daniel Woodrell

Book cover of The Death of Sweet Mister

Why this book?

Woodrell bridges the gap between Faulkner’s Southern gothic and the noir crime stories of Raymond Chandler and James Cain. This book features all the Oedipal perversion and body horror that reminds us of Faulkner, but this story of a sensitive boy and his debauched mother is also hardboiled and gritty as hell. For such a short book, this novel drops you down a very dark and a very deep well. 

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