10 books like Blood Meridian

The Things They Carried has become a classic book of the Vietnam War.

It is a personal view into the lives of the men who struggled and died during that misguided war. O’Brien uses the idea of “the things they carried” both literally and figuratively. These are young men, most still only teenagers, who must carry huge amounts of gear into war. They come back burdened with so much more—things no longer be seen except by others who carry the same, their comrades who were there with them.

The stories are filled with pathos, humour, honesty, and tragedy. It helps us to understand and feel compassion for the generation of men who fought in that war.

Mythology plays a large part in my stories and one book, The Iliad by Homer inspired me to write my trilogy.

From the opening line “Sing, O goddess, the anger [mênis] of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans”, I knew straightaway the story was special. The Iliad transported me to a time where gods, demi-gods mingled with humans, weaving magic, corruption, destruction, and ruination.

Each character, such as Achilles, Menelaus, Agamemnon, Hector, Paris, Helen, Priam including lesser-known ones, created the myth of the Trojan War. Did such a war happen? From archaeological discoveries, it does appear the war was based on numerous battles over the centuries at the site of Hissarlik, the modern name of Troy/Wilusa, in Turkey.

I chose this for characters and setting. Larry McMurtry was one of the greatest American writers and a chronicler of life in Texas, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Lonesome Dove, the story of two aging Texas Rangers on a final adventure together.

McMurtry immerses the reader in his world, but more importantly he immerses his characters in that world. The relationships are amazing: between characters who face deeply personal and tragic life-or-death decisions, but also between characters and the novel’s savage, lethal world.

McMurtry’s stories are character-driven slices of life, but authors of plot-driven books can learn from McMurtry when it comes to characters and their world.

First published in 1959, Naked Lunch was shocking then, and it still retains its power today. Both in content and structure, Naked Lunch is powerful and wholly original.  In effect, it becomes more than a work of fiction, it becomes an experience. Burroughs invented a technique called the “cut-up method,” where he cut up his coherent storyline into paragraphs, scenes, and even sentences, then reordered them both randomly and editorially. The disorder thematically represents the chaos of existence and the universe, and it also disrupts the reader. Like the book or not, it shakes you into realizing that there are possibilities beyond the conventional.

Burrough’s language is honed to a razor’s edge, and I find that many of the sentences in Naked Lunch burn like fire. The meaning of the title as Burroughs explains it is to bare the naked truth of reality on the end of a fork. From… show more.

Harsh politics and tender poetic feelings: All the King’s Men is a classic novel about the rise and fall of a would-be dictator named Willie Stark. But it’s also about the personal lives of the people behind the power struggles—especially the bemused, poetic narrator, Jack Burden, who loses the love of his life, Anne Stanton, to the increasingly tyrannical Stark. As a teenager I fell in love with the love story. This novel convinced me of the power of combining the personal and the public, which I am working on in my new novel about the Black Panther rally in New Haven in 1970.

I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in college and it blew my mind. I’d never read anything like this outrageous tale of a journalist in search of the American Dream. The plot: Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone send Thompson to Las Vegas to cover, respectively, a motorcycle race and a district attorneys convention. Thompson, high on hallucinogenic drugs and ether, and with his attorney in tow, takes the notion of “new journalism” into a hilarious new dimension. Thompson was the kind of journalist I wanted to be: a truth-teller who made his own rules. I’ve since read the book about 25 times and it’s made me laugh every time.

I first read Sula for a college English class and remember the discussions of the book, often centering on the likeability of the title character. This annoyed me greatly because so much of the novel is about how being liked has so little to do with who you are or how you treat others. Sula figures this out very early in life, and she uses that awareness to wreak havoc on her gossipy and superstitious town. Lots of revenge tales traffic in spectacular reversals and gratuitous body counts, but Sula’s vengeance takes the form of sustained indifference to other people’s gazes and anxieties. It ends in tragedy technically, but in my reading, Sula gets the last laugh. 

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. 

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.”

The people in Sweet Mister are broken and derelict, strong and resilient, funny and terrifying. The book opens with overweight thirteen-year-old Shuggie (Sweet Mister) being forced to climb up a drain pipe to break into a building to steal drugs for Red, his mother’s treacherous, drug-addicted boyfriend. We follow through the eyes of Sweet Mister, who doesn’t know who his father is. It’s rumored to be the town’s wealthiest citizen. That rumor, more like fabrication, is told to him in the aftermath of Red’s rage, after he’s torn through the house like a tornado destroying everything in his wake, almost like a fairytale, spinning evermore intricately by Glenda, his adored mother, the most beautiful girl in Missouri. Shug is willing to believe it. Anyone besides Red.  

Shug is in love with his mother, and he wants a better life for her. Better than a life of stealing from other people,… show more.