Books like She Walks These Hills

I first loved Rebecca for its atmosphere, but what stayed with me was something more unsettling: how completely another person’s version of the past can shape the present.

I remember finishing it and thinking about how easily we accept a story when everyone around us seems to believe it. As a writer, I keep returning to that idea.

Du Maurier showed me that an absence can dominate a novel as powerfully as a living character, and that what people refuse to say can matter as much as what they reveal. That has stayed with me in my own writing about memory, silence, and family secrets.

I discovered Summer when I first moved to the Berkshires, and it quickly became my favorite of all Wharton’s novels. From the opening scene in which a playful June breeze whisks the hat off a young man, catching the attention of a local girl, I was captivated by this story of young love played out against a month of languid, sunny days filled with flowers, green grass, and leafy trees. But as summer edges into fall, the love story falters, giving way to a chilling encounter on The Mountain that has shadowed Wharton’s sensuously described landscape all along. 

I love how Dean takes a creepy cow head on a barn, and builds a compelling mystery around it. The cow head permeates the book, watching, judging, accusing, and shedding tears in the aftermath of a storm—seemingly more alive than wooden. Next to the cow head, snow is the dominant image. It’s a place for fun, as the main character and her close friend create snow angels, but it also carries a warning in the form of a message written in white, and as a blizzard, it knocks out the power in town, making getting around dangerous. Set in New England in the dead of winter, this is a book to read on a dark, frigid night with a hot drink and a blazing fire. 

This emotion-rich novel chronicles three generations of a southern Appalachian family as they rise by ambition and hard work from indebted and nearly destitute farmers to wealthy owners of a national canning business. (In real life, Dykeman married into such a family.) As members of this fictional family feud with one another over the values of “tenderness and toughness,” communal trust and “money-greed,” and “the wild and the useful,” the reader gains insight into the prejudices and passions that have shaped the contemporary land and culture of southern Appalachia. Dykeman was the Tennessee State Historian from 1981 to 2002.

Not for the squeamish, this gothic tale of a depraved serial killer in rural Tennessee is probably the closest Cormac McCarthy ever came to writing a horror novel. For all the sordidness, the power of the author’s language shines through. I enjoyed the humor, pathos, and psychological insight woven in throughout

As with other McCarthy novels I’ve read, this book contains beautiful sentences and phrases, as well as searing images, that have lingered in my mind for years.

McCarthy’s second novel is an underappreciated masterpiece, one that combines the author’s distinct style and notoriously difficult subject matter with a genuinely sublime vision of the world. Simultaneously a horror novel, a historical fiction, a Gnostic heresy, a cosmic joke, and act of spiritual seeking, I cannot recommend it enough.  

When I read this book, I knew plenty about Martin Luther King’s ties to the labor movement. What I did not know—and what it took Honey twenty years to piece together—was an understanding of the 1,200 workers whose desperate straits and courageous creative nonviolence called King to Memphis in 1968. Honey uncovers the small triumphs hidden from view if we only look at the large tragedy of King’s assassination. Sanitation workers fought for safer working conditions, adequate wages, and trade union recognition from a city administration that literally treated them like garbage. A labor dispute transformed into a nonviolent community revolt. I remain in awe of the book’s richly textured portraits, among them Reverend Ralph Jackson, a peaceful protester brutalized by police, who forged a "campaign to end police brutality and improve housing, jobs, wages, and education across the city."

A collaborative book written in verse by award-winning Debbie Levy and JoAnn Allen Boyce who was one of twelve African American students who desegregated Clinton High School in eastern Tennessee in 1956. Brown vs. Board of Education ruled to integrate schools in 1954, but integration didn’t happen easily or quickly. We tend to know more about the Little Rock Nine of 1957 because national journalists published what became iconic photos of the tense struggle of courageous Black teenagers breaking through white hostility to attend a white high school. The earlier event in Tennessee was equally fraught (but less photographed). To have Boyce’s memory of events and her ability to articulate her feelings and Levy’s lyrical bent makes this an enlightening read.

This is perhaps my favorite book of all time. Marlowe Higgins is a werewolf who uses his monthly change to hunt and kill the worst of criminals. The setting mostly takes place in 1993 with a few flashbacks including some time the main character spent in Vietnam during the war. There’s a serial killer targeting young women and Marlowe is hunting for him. He needs a scent or a name before the wolf can find them. And some people suspect Marlowe is the serial killer. The real tragedy of this story is the author died a few months before the book was published. The story is well written. There are plenty of funny moments to go along with the scary parts. If you like werewolves and anti-heroes, you’ll love this novel.

The Battle of Shiloh has been the subject of a number of distinguished historians, but only Winston Groom is able to capture the 170 individual fights between regiments with clarity and skill. The sheer numbers are daunting—100,000 soldiers fighting in 12 square miles. But Groom has told the complex Shiloh story effectively without getting bogged down in “minute detail and technical aspects” as he reports in his beginning notes. Groom’s writing is enhanced by ten detailed maps that bring lucency and specificity to the narrative. Shiloh, fought in 1862, had a deeper impact that foretold the future. In Groom’s words: “It was as if at Shiloh they had unleashed some giant, murderous thing that was now going to drench the country in blood, just as Sherman had predicted back in 1860.”