What to read after “Blood Meridian” by Cormac McCarthy: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.
William Andrews leaves Harvard for a frontier town in Kansas, hoping to see the West for himself. He joins an old buffalo hunter on an expedition into Colorado, where the work becomes a brutal test of endurance and the hunters' ambitions strip the land bare.
After her father is shot dead in 1870s Arkansas, fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross hires Rooster Cogburn, a one-eyed U.S. marshal with a taste for whiskey, to hunt the killer into Indian Territory. A Texas Ranger joins them, and the three ride into a hard country where justice is personal.
After Comanche raiders kill his brother's family and carry off his niece Debbie, Amos Edwards and Martin Pauley, the orphan the Edwards family took in, spend years searching the Texas plains for her. The long hunt hardens Amos's hatred and strains his bond with Martin, who wants to bring the girl home.
A nameless cowpuncher on a Wyoming ranch falls for the new schoolteacher from Vermont while feuding with a ranch hand named Trampas. His code of honour is tested by a cattle thief, a lynching and a duel, in a territory where the law is still being made.
Stolen from a comfortable California home, the dog Buck is sold into the Klondike gold rush and forced to haul sleds through frozen wilderness. Amid cruelty and hardship he discovers a wildness within himself that calls him away from men.
Two former Texas Rangers drive a herd of cattle north to Montana, leading a ragged crew across rivers, drought and hostile country. The long journey tests the old friendship of the two men and the loyalties of everyone who follows them.
In 1870 Texas, an ageing widower who reads newspapers aloud to frontier audiences agrees to carry a ten-year-old girl south to her relatives. She was taken by Kiowa years earlier and has forgotten English, and the long journey is dangerous for them both.
Frontiersman Hugh Glass is mauled by a bear and left for dead by his companions, who take his rifle and supplies. He crawls out of the wilderness and sets out on a long journey to find the men who abandoned him.
An aging Cuban fisherman, Santiago, has gone eighty-four days without catching a fish. When a huge marlin finally takes his line far out to sea, he must hold on through a long, painful contest of endurance and will.
In 1859, a disgraced Irish surgeon signs on as doctor of a whaling ship bound for the Arctic. Among the crew is a brutal harpooner with his own plans, and as the voyage turns from routine to disaster, the two men are set on a collision course.
In 1348, as the Black Death empties France, a disgraced knight finds an orphan girl in a dead village. She says the plague is only part of a larger war between heaven and hell, and persuades him to carry her across a ruined land toward Avignon.
A quiet stranger rides into a Wyoming valley and hires on with homesteaders Joe and Marian Starrett. The boy Bob idolises him, but Shane's skill with a gun pulls him back toward a past he wants to leave when a cattle baron moves against the settlers.
Stevens, a butler at an English country house, sets out on a motoring trip in 1956 and looks back over decades of service. Recalling his employer's political misjudgements and his own missed chances with the housekeeper, he begins to see what a life given to duty has cost him.
Laid up in hospital with a broken leg, Inspector Alan Grant is bored until he is given a portrait of Richard III. Wondering whether the king really murdered the princes in the Tower, he reopens a five-hundred-year-old case from his bed, working only from books.
Released from prison after nineteen years, Jean Valjean finds that his past follows him everywhere. An act of mercy sets him on a new path, but the policeman Javert refuses to believe a convict can change. Across decades and across France, Valjean tries to protect those he loves while the country moves toward revolt.
Kinch Na Shannack owes his guild of thieves more than he can ever pay. To settle the debt he tags along with a scarred knight on a journey to find women taken by goblins, through a world of old wars, hungry gods and creatures that would happily eat a thief.
A young German soldier boards a troop train bound for the Eastern Front. Convinced he will die within days, he watches the passengers and countryside pass by, and begins to wonder whether fate can be resisted.
Mercedes Murcatto, a mercenary general, survives an ambush by the duke she served and loses her brother in the same fall. Assembling a crew of killers and madmen, she begins a patient campaign of revenge in which no method is too cruel and no ally is safe.
Rin, a war orphan from the impoverished south, tests into Sinegard, the empire's elite military academy, and discovers a shamanic power tied to the gods. When war with the Federation erupts she is forced to use it, and the cost turns out to be monstrous.
The Black Company is a band of mercenaries who once served the light and now fight for one side in a war of dark powers. Croaker, the company's physician and annalist, records their grudging days, where the line between good and evil has blurred and surviving matters more than any truth.
In a land torn by earthquakes and ash, orogenes can still the earth but are enslaved for it. Three women, a mother, a daughter and a student, move through a broken world as a new catastrophe begins, and their stories converge on what caused it.
A holy war gathers against the distant Fanim, and the sorcerer Drusas Achamian is sent to find the hidden hand behind it. Into the crusade walks Kellhus, a monk trained to read and master every mind he meets.
By day the world belongs to people; at night, demons rise from the ground. Three children, Arlen, Leesha and Rojer, grow up in the shadow of the wards that keep the corelings out, and each finds a different way to fight back.
Jane Withersteen runs a Utah ranch under pressure from Mormon elders who want her to marry one of them. When the gunslinger Lassiter arrives looking for the men who destroyed his family, his quarrel with the town's leaders becomes hers, and she must decide how far she will go to protect the people she has taken under her wing.
Start with “Butcher's Crossing”, “True Grit”, “The Searchers”: they are the closest to “Blood Meridian” in tropes and mood. Under each book in the list you will see what exactly it has in common.
How are similar books chosen?
We compare tropes (for “Blood Meridian” these are Wild West, Morally Grey Character, Survival), genre, plot, era and tone. It is not “readers also bought”; it is similarity in the content itself.
Are there recent books in this list?
Yes. Among the newer ones are “News of the World”, “The Revenant”, “The North Water”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
