36 Books Like The Black Stranger

This remains one of the most haunting novels I have ever read. I cannot shake the character of Judge Holden, a formidable man both physically and intellectually, who deploys his insidious intellect to justify acts of abject violence seemingly only for the sake of violence itself. I was mesmerized by a world where “all covenants were brittle.” This was no straight-up Western as I had expected. It was something more.

McCarthy pushed the boundaries of the classic Western by challenging the notion that good will ultimately overcome evil and the hero will save the day. There was no hero here, and the day was truly lost to forces beyond the characters’ control, hallmarks of the Southern Gothic tradition. I was hooked on this curious blend of genres!

For me, the Dark Tower series is an easy first pick as it so thoroughly encompasses everything I love about speculative fiction: big ideas, compelling, at times mysterious but ultimately fully realized characters, and a healthy, rich, and potent dose of world-building.

Over the years, I’ve reluctantly come to accept that this book and series are not necessarily for everyone, but they are absolutely for me, and I always find myself feeling a sort of kinship with other readers who love them as much as I do.

If Howard is the father of the weird western, Joe Lansdale is the godfather. The trope of the wronged Native American shaman afflicting a frontier town with an undead plague has surely been used time and time again in the genre, but this is the original and best iteration. Joe’s Texas dialogue pops like a bullwhip cracking on a skeletal mule’s vertebrae and you can smell the iron and gunsmoke in his prose. He establishes his reputation with this book and in my opinion, cements it with the Jonah Hex weird western comics Two-Gun Mojo and Riders of The Worm and Such.

Richard Matheson’s career was as prolific as it was varied. He’s best known for I Am Legend, What Dreams May Come, and The Incredible Shrinking Man, to say nothing of his Twilight Zone episodes, but he also wrote the Spur Award-winning Journal of The Gun Years and its companion novel The Memoirs of Wild Bill Hickock – huge influences on my own found document novel. A number of his western shorts are collected here. Most notable in terms of weird westerns is the cleverly titled "Gunsight," the story of a blind lawman preparing to defend himself from a band of approaching killers a la High Noon.

A doomed king, the last of his kind: a final shepherd of a race fallen into such depravity and barbarity that most no longer see the Picts as human; a man driven to deliver his kin from Roman oppression, to lift his people out of squalor. I was floored by Howard’s iron-hard writing in this all-too-brief sequence of heroic stories. The razor descriptions cut to the core of a man willing to give his all in a doomed quest. I read and re-read the few tales of Bran, but I always find something new and ferocious in the brooding king’s tragedy and bitter triumph. These tales rekindled my love of sword and sorcery, and helped me hone the edge in my own stories. I recommend them to any fantasy fan!

My dad had a comic collection of Conan for as long as I can remember. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I discovered that the comics were loosely adapted from a series of novels by a pulp fiction author. I thought this was interesting because pulp fiction was known for being short and action-packed, whereas we are all familiar with the contemporary, more decompressed storytelling of fantasy novels.

I’d also heard about the connection between Robert E. Howard and HP Lovecraft, and when I picked up Conan of Cimera, I could see it immediately. Horrific fantasy abounds throughout the book!

Written one hundred years ago, the original Conan stories brought alive a world so rich in culture and history that it is still badly imitated by hundreds of authors.

Besides great writing of action and suspense, Howard also presented theories about evolution and civilization and colorful prose with a very strong vocabulary that stimulated my young mind. Far from the brutish Conan to which we’ve become accustomed, the original was given to philosophical discussion that shows Howard had a remarkable intellect.

Howard's style is compelling, dragging you through the story with an inescapable inevitability. His characters possess stark, almost brutal qualities, sure of their place in the world they inhabit, even when facing the unknown. With mighty warriors such as Conan, we know they cannot lose but when it comes to Howard's horror stories, success is not so certain.

This is a short story featuring Conan, and one of, if not, my favourite (it has tough competition from Red Nails and Wolves Beyond the Border). Simple, straight-up, sword and sorcery action. Howard’s Conan was the first real fantasy I fell in love with (before discovering Lord of the Rings). Epic character, but straightforward stories. The opposite of the sprawling epic. One of my books is a collection of sword and sorcery stories, and the first story is heavily influenced by The Tower of the Elephant. The otherworldly aspect, magic, (but not all-encompassing magic), a quest, and ultimately a choice between good and evil. I can’t not recommend a Conan story when talking about fantasy.

This was the first book compiled by Cathy and Arnie Fenner on the art of grandmaster fantasy artist Frank Frazetta. My first thought was to choose the Ballantine collection of his work because of its nostalgic quality (I was fifteen when I bought it), but this much later Underwood collection went way beyond a simple collection of art due to the care and love put into the production by the Fenner’s, who knew frank personally and admired his art. It's a big art book and the images fill the pages. If I have one gripe about art books in general it’s that the images are nearly always too small, not so here, this is a beautiful showcase that I have treasured and re-read hundreds of times.