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Books like Sanctuary

William Faulkner · 1931 · US · literary fiction · horror
★ 3.63 Goodreads · 15,546 ratings

A young woman in Depression-era Mississippi is violated by a bootlegger, and the justice system that responds reveals more about the corruption of power than the crime itself.

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12 books for readers of Sanctuary

A Feast of Snakes

Harry Crews · 1976 · US 99% match ★ 4.02 Goodreads · 5,609 ratings
shares: southern gothic, transgressive, Southern, gothic · dark, cold

In Mystic, Georgia, during the annual rattlesnake roundup, a former high school football star stuck with a liquor-store job and a broken marriage feels the weekend's frenzy pushing him towards violence.

Light in August

William Faulkner · 1932 · US 99% match ★ 3.95 Goodreads · 68,977 ratings
shares: southern gothic, Southern, brutal, gothic · dark, cold

A pregnant woman, a disgraced minister, and an outsider collide in a Mississippi town, and Faulkner uses their intersecting stories to expose the violence of Southern racial and religious codes.

Child of God

Cormac McCarthy · 1973 · US 99% match ★ 3.78 Hardcover · 177 ratings
shares: southern gothic, transgressive, brutal, gothic · dark, cold

A necrophiliac cave-dweller in rural Tennessee commits unspeakable acts, and McCarthy refuses to look away or moralise.

The Violent Bear It Away

Flannery O'Connor · 1960 · US 99% match ★ 4.07 Goodreads · 16,447 ratings
shares: southern gothic, Southern, brutal, gothic · cold, dark

A fourteen-year-old boy raised by a prophetic great-uncle in rural Tennessee is torn between his destiny to baptise a cousin and his atheist uncle's rationalism.

Reflections in a Golden Eye

Carson McCullers · 1941 · US 98% match ★ 3.83 Goodreads · 7,994 ratings
shares: southern gothic, Southern, gothic, southern · cold, dark

On an army post in the South in peacetime, a repressed officer, his careless wife, her lover and a silent young private circle one another in a short novel of watching and obsession.

As I Lay Dying

William Faulkner · 1930 · US 98% match ★ 3.72 Goodreads · 195,799 ratings
shares: southern gothic, Southern, nobel laureate, gothic · dark, cold

A poor Mississippi family transports their dead mother's body across the county for burial, and the journey becomes a darkly comic, hallucinatory odyssey.

Outer Dark

Cormac McCarthy · 1968 · US 98% match ★ 4.00 Hardcover · 74 ratings
shares: southern gothic, brutal, gothic, southern · dark, cold

In the Appalachian South, a brother and sister wander apart through a nightmarish landscape, she looking for the baby he left in the woods, while three murderous drifters move across the land.

A Good Man Is Hard to Find

Flannery O'Connor · 1955 · US 98% match ★ 4.15 Goodreads · 51,836 ratings
shares: southern gothic, Southern, brutal, gothic · dark, cold

Ten stories of violence, grace, and the grotesque in the rural South, where moments of divine revelation arrive alongside shotgun blasts and stolen wooden legs.

The Devil All the Time

Donald Ray Pollock · 2011 · US 97% match ★ 4.14 Goodreads · 44,547 ratings
shares: brutal, crime, gothic, southern · dark, cold

Between the end of World War II and the 1960s, in the hollows of southern Ohio and West Virginia, a grieving veteran's son crosses paths with a pair of roadside killers and a preacher who handles spiders.

Serena

Ron Rash · 2008 · US 97% match ★ 3.55 Goodreads · 37,489 ratings
shares: brutal, gothic, southern, southern gothic · dark, cold

In 1929 a timber baron brings his new wife Serena to the North Carolina mountains, and her ruthlessness, matched with his own, makes them a terror to the loggers and to anyone who stands in their way.

Other Voices, Other Rooms

Truman Capote · 1948 · US 97% match ★ 3.74 Goodreads · 18,399 ratings
shares: southern gothic, Southern, gothic, southern · cold, intimate

Thirteen-year-old Joel Knox is sent to a decaying house in the Deep South to meet the father he has never seen, and is met by a nervous stepmother and a languid cousin who will not say where his father is.

The Ballad of the Sad Café

Carson McCullers · 1951 · US 96% match ★ 3.77 Goodreads · 27,721 ratings
shares: southern gothic, Southern, gothic, southern · cold, intimate

In a dreary Southern mill town the formidable Miss Amelia Evans opens a café after a hunchbacked stranger turns up claiming to be her cousin, until her ex-husband comes home from prison.