Fans pick 63 books like Night of the Living Rez

I love this book because it is not afraid to look at deep sadness and disappointment in an honest and complex way. This novel is a collection of short stories that all take place in a coastal Main town and are connected by the large presence of Olive.

Olive is intelligent, acerbic, and abrasive. She is anything but easy. I appreciate the compassion Strout gives her imperfect characters as they struggle with their messy lives. I grew to care more for Olive as I traveled her rocky path with her, even as she was often the one to throw down the rocks before her.

This is a quiet book, which I read in a quiet way. It brought me comfort in its illumination of uncomfortable things. 

When I think of Maine, I think of mill towns. When I think of mill towns, I think of Empire Falls. And to consider Russo’s titular town is to consider what happens to a community when its once-lucrative mills are abandoned.

I have witnessed it repeatedly through the years, all around the state of Maine—first our mills go out of business, then the towns that grew around those mills gradually, inexorably decline. Russo captures this struggle, creating characters as real as the millworkers I grew up with.

He also emphasizes a strange thing that happens in these blue-collar communities: even though the people who live there know their town will never be as it once was, most of them still can’t bring themselves to leave. 

In lyrical prose, Rich brings the reader into her real experience as a woman living in the Maine woods during the 1930s.

Rich’s narrative often reads like an adventure story—black bears, raging snowstorms—but some of my favorite scenes center around the endless daily chores necessary to a life in the wilderness. I also love Rich’s stories of the logging camps that surround her and her husband’s homestead.

Her riveting descriptions of the annual river drives, during which logs would be floated from the forest down to the lumber and paper mills, recall a way of life nearly unfathomable for those of us in the modern age. And if all that weren’t enough, Rich’s singular, humorous voice is simply a delight to read. 

Even though Jewett wrote the stories in this book in the late 1800s, there is a timeless feeling to her prose that reverberates today.

I love Jewett’s attention to and reverence for the natural beauty that surrounds the fictional town of Dunnet Landing. Her descriptions of the Maine coastline—a blend of craggy rocks, forest, meadows, and sea—are visceral, sensory, and alluring. Jewett also nicely captures the hardworking, humorous, quietly resilient spirit of the year-round residents of Dunnet Landing, with a particularly keen and kind eye toward her female characters.

Her care for the everyday rituals of life, the small moments that make up an existence, are lovingly rendered and evocative. There’s a reason this is a Maine classic. 

The animal is a wild pack of gray wolves. Also a dog. The human is a capable and complex fifty-year-old divorcee who is determined not to let politics defeat the wilderness in her state of Maine. A vibrant and educational novel. Though I live in Maine part-time, I’m an indoorsy type. Author Neily is an outdoorsy type, and she proves it with her plots, settings, and characters.

I’ve read many of this author’s works and enjoyed them all, but this one really dug in, grabbed on, and held tight.

I loved the fact that it covered generations instead of a short timeframe; it gave me more insight into the people and relationships. Transplanting a Low Country girl used to a simple life to the summer home of an upper-crust New Englander accustomed to only the finer things promises conflict, which we got in spades, starting with a mother-in-law who could barely hide her hostility.

This highly elevates the uncomfortable dynamics in extended families, and the challenges overcome—and those that aren’t—make the story incredibly satisfying.

This is a darkly beautiful novel, set in the period after the American Revolution, a time of great hardship for many Americans. Hannah Trevor has lost her husband and three children, and she cobbles out an independent if marginal life for herself as a midwife in rural Maine. She finds love with a married man, and when he is falsely accused of rape and murder, Hannah sets out to uncover the truth. I was drawn in by Lawrence’s striking prose and by Hannah, who is strong, resourceful, and in many ways, a loner. 

Here If You Need Me is a non-fiction memoir I read years ago on a whim. It still sticks with me. A woman with four children is happily married to a State trooper training to be a minister. When he dies suddenly, she goes on to become a minister herself, working with search and rescue missions in the Maine woods while raising her children. Her intimate knowledge of grief, her vulnerability, and compassion, coupled with a life of service and family, moved me so deeply that I often call upon the memory of this book in my life to metaphorically “get down on the floor with those who weep, and give them tea if they want it.”

Oh, this book is perfect from the first page. It captures motherhood wonderfully and specifically—in this case, mothering two teenage boys—and it just as successfully captures the Maine coast and the complicated, sometimes fragile ecosystem of a marriage.

Jill is a documentary filmmaker who’s temporarily a single parent to her boys while her husband, a fisherman, recovers in a hospital from a boating accident. There’s nothing flashy about the story—it’s a smart, lovely, often funny look at one woman’s life. It’s a deeply contented life, by the way, which means the stakes are very high when the foundation of it starts to look shaky.

Ketchum’s classic survival horror novel about cannibals attacking a cabin of vacationers is pure 80s slasher goodness. It was perhaps the darkest book of its kind for a long time and pulls no punches with the intensity of its chase scenes. Ketchum’s economical writing style makes it a very easy read, one where you will root for the good guys, and be left emotionally drained by the end.