Here are 100 books that Crum fans have personally recommended if you like
Crum.
Shepherd is a community of 10,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission.
I’ve always been drawn to the natural world—not just its beauty but also its dirt, the earthiness and vitality of it. I prefer the company of animals to humans and the questions of curious children to the bland certainty of adults. I’ve worked as a teacher, news reporter, horse trainer, volunteer firefighter, and website designer. I try to pull bits of all these experiences together into my writing while also exploring the characters who fascinate me: flawed, compassionate protagonists who believe they must battle their demons alone and complex antagonists who think they have nothing to lose. There’s nothing so satisfying as a high-stakes challenge with an unpredictable outcome.
I chose not to put this 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner first on my list simply because everyone else already has.
I have loved Kingsolver’s writing from her very first non-fiction essays. So, what can I add? Except to say that this is a book for the ages: the enthralling journey of a southern Appalachian orphan. A tale of fortitude and redemption, the modern David Copperfield.
I’ve read it three times, finding more depth each time. Kingsolver balances pain, pathos, humor, insight, and resilience—all the facets of humanity—in the compelling character of Damon.
Demon's story begins with his traumatic birth to a single mother in a single-wide trailer, looking 'like a little blue prizefighter.' For the life ahead of him he would need all of that fighting spirit, along with buckets of charm, a quick wit, and some unexpected talents, legal and otherwise.
In the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, poverty isn't an idea, it's as natural as the grass grows. For a generation growing up in this world, at the heart of the modern opioid crisis, addiction isn't an abstraction, it's neighbours, parents, and friends. 'Family' could mean love, or reluctant foster…
I grew up in West Virginia and believed you had to leave the region to write. Only after I’d published my first novel did I discover books like these and many more. I have become a wide reader in our literature, with a special interest in novels that both tell the stories of individuals and families and explore the connection between resource extraction and poverty. It’s also a pleasure to read about regional successes as well as losses.
Kentuckian Harriet Arnow married the child of Jewish immigrants and lived much of her life in Michigan.
Her great American novel, Hunter’s Horn, however, is set back in Kentucky. Rich in local color, the novel’s main storyline centers on the hunt for the great fox known as King Devil.
The men’s challenge of catching the fox, though, is just the warp thread for a tapestry of conflict and interplay among industrialization, old folkways, popular culture, and the aspiration to join the larger culture. The novel, which also proves to be strongly feminist, ends with the resounding close of a trap, which is a warning to all of us.
In Hunter's Horn, Arnow has written the quintessential account of Kentucky hill people - the quintessential novel of Southern Appalachian farmers, foxhunters, foxhounds, women, and children. New York Times reviewer Hirschel Brickell declared that Arnow "writes...as effortlessly as a bird sings, and the warmth, beauty, the sadness and the ache of life itself are not even once absent from her pages".
Arnow writes about Kentucky in the way that William Faulkner writes about Mississippi, that Flannery O'Connor writes about Georgia, or that Willa Cather writes about Nebraska - with studied realism, with landscapes and characters that take on mythic proportions,…
I grew up in West Virginia and believed you had to leave the region to write. Only after I’d published my first novel did I discover books like these and many more. I have become a wide reader in our literature, with a special interest in novels that both tell the stories of individuals and families and explore the connection between resource extraction and poverty. It’s also a pleasure to read about regional successes as well as losses.
West Virginian Denise Giardina’s brilliant Great American Novel is the fictionalized account of the mine wars of 1920 and 1922 in the coal fields of southern West Virginia.
I love it for the mix of the lives of real (albeit fictional) human beings with actual history and allusions to labor figures and other American political struggles and strikes. Giardina, an ordained deacon in the Episcopal Church, grew up herself in a mining camp, and gives us a perfect introduction to the struggles of industrial workers of central Appalachia– and a grand epic of American life.
“Brilliant, diamond-hard fiction, heartwrenching, tough and tender.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review
Annadel, West Virginia, was a small town rich in coal, farms, and close-knit families, all destroyed when the coal company came in. It stole everything it hadn't bothered to buy—land deeds, private homes, and ultimately, the souls of its men and women.
Four people tell this powerful, deeply moving tale: Activist Mayor C.J. Marcum. Fierce, loveless union man Rondal Lloyd. Gutsy nurse Carrie Bishop, who loved Rondal. And lonely, Sicilian immigrant Rose Angelelli, who lost four sons to the deadly mines.
I grew up in West Virginia and believed you had to leave the region to write. Only after I’d published my first novel did I discover books like these and many more. I have become a wide reader in our literature, with a special interest in novels that both tell the stories of individuals and families and explore the connection between resource extraction and poverty. It’s also a pleasure to read about regional successes as well as losses.
Kentucky writer Robert Gipe’s graphic novel is about a teen-age girl growing up in Appalachia.
Dawn tells the story of her drug-dealing junk-food-scarfing Kentucky family and their dilemmas. Like Maynard’s characters, Gipe’s border stereotypes, or would, if Gipe didn’t know and respect his people so well. These are the descendants of the hunters of Hunter’s Horn and the battling miners of Storming Heaven.
There is also a strong political thread about Dawn's grandmother who is an organizer against mountaintop removal. The novel has the bonus of Gipe’s wry little black and white illustrations.
Dawn Jewell is fifteen. She is restless, curious, and wry. She listens to Black Flag, speaks her mind, and joins her grandmother's fight against mountaintop removal mining almost in spite of herself. "I write by ear," says Robert Gipe, and Dawn's voice is the essence of his debut novel, Trampoline. She lives in eastern Kentucky with her addict mother and her Mamaw, whose stance against the coal companies has earned her the community's ire. Jagged and honest, Trampoline is a powerful portrait of a place struggling with the economic and social forces that threaten and define it. Inspired by oral…
My father’s favorite first cousin Ava married Homer McCoy, a direct descendant of the Fighting McCoys. Homer’s aunt married a Hatfield, so my family is distantly related by marriage to both the Hatfields and McCoys. As a girl, Ava witnessed the aftermath of the feud: The elders in her household froze whenever they heard pounding hoofbeats in the night. She assured me that the reasons for the feud were far more complicated than escaped hogs or the derring-do of sociopathic veterans nostalgic for the bloodbaths of the Civil War. I started reading whatever I could find and visiting feud sites, trying to understand what had really gone on and why.
As a child, I always heard that the Hatfield-McCoy feud started because someone left a gate open and a hog escaped. Later, I read versions that portrayed the feud as a swashbuckling adventure story of murder and retribution, with a Romeo and Juliet romance thrown in. But Waller’s study treats the feud as a serious historical event with grave political and economic consequences. She outlines the genesis of the ugly and insulting stereotype of the Depraved Savages of the Southern Appalachians (popping up most recently in the bestselling Hillbilly Elegy) and the ways it was deployed to justify the region’s exploitation by timber and coal companies.
This well-researched book is the most authoritative account yet of the Hatfield-McCoy feud and its ramifications for the subsequent economic and environmental destruction of Appalachia.
The Hatfield-McCoy feud, the entertaining subject of comic strips, popular songs, movies, and television, has long been a part of American folklore and legend. Ironically, the extraordinary endurance of the myth that has grown up around the Hatfields and McCoys has obscured the consideration of the feud as a serious historical event. In this study, Altina Waller tells the real story of the Hatfields and McCoys and the Tug Valley of West Virginia and Kentucky, placing the feud in the context of community and regional change in the era of industrialization. Waller argues that the legendary feud was not an…
I was born and raised in the suburbs of eastern Pennsylvania, not far from the Appalachian Mountains, but a world away from the place the rest of the country calls “Appalachia.” Researching All This Marvelous Potential, my book about Robert Kennedy’s 1968 tour of eastern Kentucky, was a revelation. Appalachia is rich in Black history, and queer history, and labor history, and a national leader in education. I am a journalist and author. All This Marvelous Potential is my sixth book.
A welcome and necessary antidote to J.D. Vance’s drivel, Elizabeth Catte shatters stereotypes about Appalachia with a sledgehammer then crushes the pieces to dust under her feet. Contrary to much of what you hear and read about the place, Catte’s Appalachia is diverse, creative, entrepreneurial, energetic, and smart. The problem isn’t in Appalachia. The problem is outside it.
In 2016, headlines declared Appalachia ground zero for America's "forgotten tribe" of white working class voters. Journalists flocked to the region to extract sympathetic profiles of families devastated by poverty, abandoned by establishment politics, and eager to consume cheap campaign promises. What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia is a frank assessment of America's recent fascination with the people and problems of the region. The book analyzes trends in contemporary writing on Appalachia, presents a brief history of Appalachia with an eye toward unpacking Appalachian stereotypes, and provides examples of writing, art, and policy created by Appalachians as opposed to…
I'm the multiple, award-winning author of 4 novels and one novella, raised in Memphis, Tennessee, and now living in Southern California. The geographical distance gives me a laser-sharp, appreciative perspective of the South, and I celebrate the literary greats from the region. The South is known as the last romantic place in America, and I believe this to be true. The South’s culture, history, and social mores are part and parcel to its fascinating characters, and nothing is more important in the South than the telling of a good story. As a writer, I'm in love with language. I love Southern turns of phrase and applaud those writers who capture Southern nuance. It is well worth writing about Southern sensibilities.
Ron Rash is a national, literary treasure. The author of multiple award-winning novels, this book is an assembly of 34 short stories, most set in Appalachia, and depicting the social nuances and landscape of the American rural South. I recommend this because it will provide a great introduction to the incomparable author known as The Appalachian Shakespeare. As a writer, Ron Rash epitomizes the idea of landscape as destiny, and his well-drawn characters come to life from his flawless use of regional language.
From the acclaimed, New York Times bestselling award-winning author of Serena and The Cove, thirty of his finest short stories, collected in one volume.
No one captures the complexities of Appalachia—a rugged, brutal landscape of exquisite beauty—as evocatively and indelibly as author and poet Ron Rash. Winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, two O Henry prizes, and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, Rash brilliantly illuminates the tensions between the traditional and the modern, the old and new south, tenderness and violence, man and nature. Though the focus is regional, the themes of Rash’s work are universal,…
I have been a fan of the horror genre since I was a kid. Even though sometimes I was so scared, I had to sleep with the light on or not sleep at all. Something about the darkness and the unknown has always seemed so alluring. I can't even count the number of horror movies I've watched or books I've read. That feel of the hair standing up on your arms or the back of your neck is a thrill like no other.
Tales of a witch's curse in Appalachia draw a grieving father to sacrifice everything for his son. How far will a parent go to save their child and then how much farther will they have to go to save themselves? A Southern voodoo twist on Pet Cemetery that’s twice as frightening and just as engaging.
SOMETHING EVIL ROSE FROM WITHIN, AN ANCIENT BEING, ONE OLDER THAN TIME ITSELF...
Deep in the mountains of Appalachia, a legend is told about something evil that lurks within the dense woods of Gunrack Hollow. A witch is said to live there, one whose appetite for innocent souls dates back hundreds of years.
Sam Fletcher had heard the story his whole life, but he never really believed it. After all, as his father always said, it's just an old folktale...only a story.
But two years ago, something happened that made him believe. Something that ties back to an ancient evil…
I don’t consider myself specifically a horror reader (or writer for that matter!) any more than I consider myself a fantasy, mystery, or science fiction reader. As a writer (under my real name John Mantooth as well as my pseudonym, Hank Early), much of my work has been classified as horror, though I take pride in my novels appealing to people who aren’t typically well-versed in the genre. So, it got me thinking… what are some novels that may or may not be classified as horror that will appeal to a wide range of readers? I call these books horror-adjacent, and no matter what you typically read, I think you’ll enjoy them.
Another one I read many years ago that still has its claws in me today. A sprawling epic made up of many Appalachian voices. There’s magic and grief and family secrets. It’s a Southern Gothic that will grip you from the first page and has influenced me as a writer in a myriad of ways. This might be an example of a novel that wasn’t classified as horror, but very well could have been. Will appeal to all kinds of readers.
A dark and riveting story of the legacies—of magic and madness, faith and secrets, passion and loss—that haunt one family across the generations.
Myra Lamb is a wild girl with mysterious, haint blue eyes who grows up on remote Bloodroot Mountain. Her grandmother, Byrdie, protects her fiercely and passes down “the touch” that bewitches people and animals alike. But when John Odom tries to tame Myra, it sparks a shocking disaster, ripping lives apart.
"A fascinating look at a rural world full of love and life, and dreams and disappointment." --The Boston Globe
I moved from Ohio to southern Appalachia in 1978 to take a temporary job teaching philosophy at the University of Tennessee. I hadn’t planned to stay, but I fell in love with the mountains. Recently I retired after a fruitful 44-year career here. Concern for this land and for my children and grandchildren led me to environmental activism and shifted my teaching and writing from mathematical logic to environmental and intergenerational ethics. Eventually I wrote or edited four books on environmental matters (two specifically on the southern Appalachian environment) in addition to three on logic and (most recently) a tome on the tricky topic of incomparable values.
This emotion-rich novel chronicles three generations of a southern Appalachian family as they rise by ambition and hard work from indebted and nearly destitute farmers to wealthy owners of a national canning business. (In real life, Dykeman married into such a family.) As members of this fictional family feud with one another over the values of “tenderness and toughness,” communal trust and “money-greed,” and “the wild and the useful,” the reader gains insight into the prejudices and passions that have shaped the contemporary land and culture of southern Appalachia. Dykeman was the Tennessee State Historian from 1981 to 2002.
Interested in
Appalachia,
the Korean War,
and
West Virginia?
10,000+ authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them.
Browse their picks for the best books about
Appalachia,
the Korean War,
and
West Virginia.
