88 Books Like Southern Gods

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and the Cthulhu Mythos? I cannot think of a finer genre cross than this. Holmes’s adventures often touched on the macabre, on the supernatural, and here in this anthology he faces the most monstrous and alien of foes: those created by H. P. Lovecraft. Cosmic horror, ancient mysteries, Doyle’s dauntless detective has his investigative work cut out for him. 

Twenty of the finest modern authors contributed to this book and I could not put it down. Neil Gaiman’s "A Study in Emerald" is a particularly horrific and effective tale.

This book features the best of author C.J. Henderson’s supernatural detective stories in one volume. Not only does it contain his creation P.I. Teddy London, he writes tales about many other supernatural detectives. There are stories here of Lin Carter's Anton Zarnak, H.P. Lovecraft's Inspector Legrasse, and more, including Cthulhu Mythos settings created by Brian Lumley and Ramsey Campbell. There are thirteen stories in total, this being an exciting collection detailing the adventures of investigators, both private and otherwise, taking on the horrors of the supernatural and the Cthulhu Mythos. I consider this book a must for all fans of detective fiction and horror.

The first of Lovegrove’s Cthulhu Casebooks series. This was my introduction to the idea of a mash-up between classic and modern stories.

In Shadwell Shadows we see the brilliant Holmes and loyal Watson that everyone is familiar with, but Lovegrove takes the characters and shakes up their worlds.

He takes their documented histories and adds new, darker elements among the old. These are the hidden stories which Watson could never commit to paper for fear of what they would do to humanity.

What if, while pursuing Doctor Moriarity, Holmes and Watson were actually on the trail of something much older and more evil.

C.J. Henderson is recognized as the father of modern-day occult detective fiction. He wrote his protagonists' encounters with the Cthulhu Mythos in beautifully effective prose. Sadly, C.J. passed away in 2014 and his passing is a great loss to the literary world and fans old and new.

This book was written as a tribute to C.J.’s finest occult detectives, twelve authors being chosen to contribute to this hard-boiled, tentacle-smacking anthology. All earnings from this book go to support C.J.’s family. An added bonus for fans of weird hardboiled fiction is the never-before published novella by C.J. Henderson, The Temporal Deception.

I love this collection for it expands on both the Cthulhu Mythos and C.J.’s own creations.

Iconic feminist, philosopher, and activist Angela Y. Davis put African American women at the center of the story of the blues, expanding our understanding of a genre usually presented as the purview of male artists. Discussing the music and careers of 1920s blues superstars Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith and 1930s jazz vocalist Billie Holiday, who was deeply influenced by the blues, Davis approaches the blues as music innovated, popularized, and consumed by African American women. She pays close attention to the impact of gender, race, and class on artists and audiences, and shows how these artists and their fans used blues music as entertainment, self-expression, social commentary, political critique, resistance, and survival.

A precise, thoughtful, and unromantic blues scholar, Barry Lee Pearson was also a friend of, and occasional booking agent for, DC-area acoustic blues legends like John Jackson and Cephas & Wiggins.

Jook Right On, which I was delighted to blurb and use in my own teaching, offers a series of compact autobiographical testimonies—“blues stories”—on a wide range of topics from a wide range of blues people. 

“Wordsmiths by trade,” Pearson writes in his brilliantly incisive introduction, “these storytellers bring to their tales qualities also found in blues musical performance and philosophical perspectives characteristic of the blues tradition such as improvisation, ironic humor, ambivalence, and a life-affirming sense of hope in the face of adversity.”

Constitutionally immune to cliches, Pearson brings you closer to the blues musician’s perspective than any writer I know.  

Who’s your daddy? If you play electric guitar, the answer is “T-Bone Walker.” If your response to that name is “Who?” then it’s time to meet your musical ancestor. Over a period of just two decades, T-Bone, along with the “Three Kings” (BB, Albert, and Freddie), Buddy Guy, Otis Rush, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and others created and developed the fundamental techniques and styles of electric guitar that underpin blues and rock to this day.

Obrecht is one of the best writers on the subject, compiling biographies, historical research, interviews, and conversations into a fascinating and very readable history of the musicians, the music, and the instrument.

It began as a master’s thesis in the early Sixties, when the blues was still (just) alive and evolving, and still celebrated by its traditional black audiences. By the time the book was published in 1966, however, white fans had ‘discovered’ the music, and everything was changing. Pounding, repetitive tunes of the kind written by Willie Dixon at Chess and popularised by English R&B bands, became the canon. The blues, with a new rock audience unaware of its rich variety and deep hinterland, was reduced to a single rather tedious idea. It didn’t have to be like this. It’s not the fault of those white R&B bands, but if they had been less fixated on Chicago and opened themselves up to influences from Detroit, say, and Memphis, we might now be living in a different musical world. Keil provides a glimpse of it.

This is the biography of blues legend and multiple Grammy winner Bobby Rush. He grew up in Arkansas and was not an overnight success. Blues and R&B fans will appreciate the stories he tells about well-known musicians and life on the road.

His is not a hard luck story, although it is about hard work, including how he supported his family when music wasn’t paying the bills. Great to hear from someone who lived to tell the story. I am glad he is finally getting his just rewards.

Wald is a contrarian’s contrarian; this revisionist study--lucid, sensible, self-assured--demolishes not just the soul-selling-at-the-crossroads mythology embraced by fans of Robert Johnson, but a series of romantic misconceptions about blues music in general and Mississippi blues in particular.

He reminds us, for example, that classic blueswomen like Ma Raney and Bessie Smith were the first stars of the blues; that Johnson was, by contrast, virtually unknown on a national level during his own lifetime; and that Johnson, celebrated by his mythologizers as a devil-haunted innovator, was actually a savvy, record-copying consolidator of a broad range of contemporary blues styles.

He was also a “polka hound” and human jukebox, according to Wald, a jack-of-all-trades who played Gene Autry songs and other pop tunes for the pleasure of his audiences, black and white.