92 Books Like Savage Season

This book pulled me from classical American literature (think Steinbeck, Faulkner, and Hemingway) to hardboiled crime fiction, and I haven’t come up for air since.

I was captured by both the substance and the style—the rich possibilities of an antihero protagonist delivered in a prose as direct and compelling as a bullet to the brain. After this one, I couldn’t stop until I had devoured the entire series!

A friend recommended this book to try to get me out of a reading slump, and man, this book had me crawling out fast. I was impressed with just a darn good story that had me from the start.

Not only did this story contain the elements of suspense and romance that I enjoy, but the intricate lives of the characters had me rooting and emotional, wanting more of them by the end. I would highly recommend this to other readers.

Elmore Leonard was the first crime author I ever read, and his books are what got me hooked on the genre.

Like many of his characters, Jack Foley, despite being a criminal, in this case a bank robber, is just so much fun to spend time with and read about.

The book starts with Foley escaping from prison only to find himself bundled into the trunk of a car with a female US marshal. What follows is a cat-and-mouse, cops and robbers tale, as only Elmore Leonard could have written it.

Fabulous characters, amazing situations, and some of the coolest dialogue in all of fiction. The film was great, but the book is even better.

Read it and you’ll want to read everything else he ever wrote.

Edward Bunker didn’t just talk the talk, he walked the walk, spending over 25 years in prison for various crimes including armed robbery.

That experience of life in and out of prison meant he knew exactly what he was writing about and the authenticity drips from the page.

No Beast So Fierce is a blistering tale about an ex-con trying his damndest to go straight while the pull of the criminal life tugs harder and harder at him.

It captures that life in all its rawness and brutality. Not an easy read, it’s not for the faint-hearted.

Quentin Tarantino was such a fan of the book he gave Edward Bunker the role of Mr. Blue in his movie, Reservoir Dogs.

Trans sci-fi? Yes, please. This delightful collection of short stories—which I have read twice now—consistently wows with its relatable queer and trans body-suffering, body-shifting protagonists. It is not so much a book about queer futures as it is a futurist rendering of the past twenty years, including climate disaster, endless wars, gentrification, digital subcultures, and a bit of high school nostalgia. A trans gay boy enters a portal in the woods; a young menstruating person pulls a screwdriver from their vagina; job opportunities on the moon entice anti-capitalist, ennui-filled teenagers. If Muñoz imagined queerness as a utopian space-time rupture, Jarboe reminds us that our queer dystopia is inescapably here. We wrestle now in our flesh in this fucked-up world. 

As with all the books I have chosen, the River Thames is a central part of this story.

From the affluence of Chelsea, it moves through the varied moods of the river, from crime in Rotherhithe through the Thames Barrier Park (one of my favourite London parks) to the point where it becomes the North Sea. At each twist and turn in the tale, the river matches the events perfectly.

The story is centred round a crime, but what I found fascinating was how a single error of judgement on the part of an innocent academic leaves him homeless, jobless, and in danger, with nowhere to run but a tiny patch of grass by the river. 

This book is so deeply tampered with by society and Western modalities of health that a book like this is necessary for the act of reclaiming our magic. Black Queer Feminist editors Cara Page and Erica Woodland showed me that collective care and radical love are vital ingredients to cultural work. Ancestral medicine and healing were not offered to queer folks, sex workers, people on many margins—and our right to magic has been taboo for too long.

I love this book because it names ancestral medicines and healing practices as necessary tools for community survival—communities that have survived centuries of violence. Community and survivor-led care strategies shaped my vision in the Next World Tarot, and this book articulates that vision as praxis. Centering disability, reproductive, environmental, and transformative justice and harm reduction, revolution becomes human.

Drawing on her first-hand experience of living in a shantytown in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Perlman powerfully upends many existing myths about the urban poor as marginal in this classic work.

This book, which inspired me to look beyond the economic models at how people actually live, shows how shantytown dwellers are integrated into society, but in a way that exploits and oppresses them economically and politically.

They are not socially and culturally marginal, but rather they are stigmatized and excluded from a closed social system that is radically unequal.

They are socially well-organized and cohesive; they aspire to educate their children and improve the quality of their homes; they work hard and take pride in a job well done. They are aware of and involved in those aspects of politics that affect their lives. 

Another classic—albeit of a far different type—Lucy Sante uncovers the underbelly of 19th- and early 20th-century New York, a world filled with pimps, madams, gamblers, con men, and crooked cops. But this book is more than just a collection of stories about colorful characters. It’s also a meditation on the city’s secrets and the allure of danger and darkness. I dealt with some of the same themes in my own book and had no better model to emulate than this groundbreaking work.

I loved reading this book, another recent one on ambulances and paramedics. It uses qualitative sociological methods to explore the inner workings of the pre-hospital health system and its workers. Chris Prener, an experienced EMT, took an immersive, ethnographic approach to studying the sociology of ambulance work in Chapman City. 

Prener shows how urban EMS is moving away from its roots as an emergency response system for critically ill and injured patients and becoming more of a community care system, mostly used by vulnerable and neglected populations. Perhaps the most interesting element of the book is its portrayal of the reluctance of ambulance practitioners to embrace these changes. A very insightful book about the messiness and conflict that often reside amid work occupations and healthcare systems.