Books like Wise Blood
A young man in the rural American South is consumed by a grotesque religious vision, and the novel's dark comedy conceals a genuine theological horror.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Wise Blood
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
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 Violent Bear It Away
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.
A Feast of Snakes
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.
Child of God
A necrophiliac cave-dweller in rural Tennessee commits unspeakable acts, and McCarthy refuses to look away or moralise.
Reflections in a Golden Eye
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.
The Ballad of the Sad Café
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.
Light in August
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.
As I Lay Dying
A poor Mississippi family transports their dead mother's body across the county for burial, and the journey becomes a darkly comic, hallucinatory odyssey.
Homesick for Another World
Stories of deeply unlovable Americans examining their own decay with uncomfortable clarity.
Miss Lonelyhearts
A male newspaper columnist who answers desperate letters as Miss Lonelyhearts in Depression-era New York takes his readers' suffering to heart, while his cynical editor mocks his growing religious crisis.
The Devil All the Time
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.
Other Voices, Other Rooms
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.