100 Books Like The Frontier Club

There isn’t an author more frightening than Cormac McCarthy.

No Country for Old Men is an existential novel about the pure evil that exists in a barren landscape. The antagonist Anton Cigurth is the darkest character imaginable in a world where there is no justice or remorse.

The sheriff pursuing Cigurth is forced to accept the reality that in the modern world, there is no way to control pure evil.

This book breaks every rule I was ever taught about popular Westerns. Sure, it has a handsome cowboy and a damsel in distress, but he doesn’t get the bad guy, and she doesn’t want or need him to rescue her.

I was all the more amazed that it was written more than 100 years ago yet takes on modern topics like marital breakdown, alcoholism, and divorce.

Its story of a Western marriage gone bad really resonated with me because I grew up in similar circumstances, and Bower’s characterization hit very close to home.  

I love reading books by authors from the margins like Nat Love, who started life enslaved and later adopted a persona as a black cowboy outlaw.

His autobiography surprised me by combining elements of slave narratives, popular Westerns, and travel narratives. The result is a kind of crazy quilt of different personalities that Nat takes on as he moves from slave to cowboy to railroad porter.

I come from a working-class background, so I admire how authors like Nat have to be resourceful and reinvent themselves to survive and tell their own stories in a world where they have little power. 

Zitkala Sa describes her book as “a curiously colored seashell, which is only for those ears that are bent with compassion to hear it.” Images like this stopped me in my tracks. It perfectly captured my experience reading this powerful memoir of Zitkala Sa’s experience as a child on the Yankton Dakota reservation, a student at the Carlisle School for Indians, and later life as an activist.

It isn’t always an easy read, but like holding a colorful seashell to my ear, reading Zitkala Sa’s memoir feels like reaching across a vast distance of time and space to connect with someone whose experience differed from mine. Books like this have become so important to me in these times of division. 

I have always held a deep appreciation for Mary’s novels, but this particular one struck a chord with me on a deeper level. The narrative is rich with adventure and suspense, making it an exhilarating read. Trace emerges as one of my favorite protagonists; I admire his ability to navigate the complex themes of responsibility and love in his role as a protector, even though he’s overwhelmed with the task he’s taken on. I also liked the heroine.

Though she was initially portrayed as a damsel in distress, she showed remarkable strength, which I found particularly engaging. The story has unique characters and a community that emphasizes shared values. I also appreciated the subtle humor that is interwoven throughout the story.

When I cracked the spine on Patrick deWitt’s book, I knew I was in for a treat. Contract killers, endless bloodshed, and belly laughs? How could you go wrong? The novel is technically a Western, but represents a revisionist and darkly comedic pivot in the genre, following two brothers, Eli and Charlie Sisters, from Oregon to San Francisco during the Gold Rush on their quest to murder a man called Hermann Kermit Warm, accused of stealing from their client.

One brother, Eli, questions his purpose in this world, while Charlie cannot satiate his blood lust, all with deadpan humor, which left me thinking hard about the nature of violence and man’s capacity for change, and a little worried about my own dark sense of humor.

Ellen Meloy just might be my favorite Utah writer. She’s smart and witty. She’s laugh-out-loud funny. She’s self-deprecatory and never preachy. She gets her natural history right. And her writing is gorgeous. She died far too young, at 58, in 2004, and I miss her. As she wanders outward across Bears Ears National Monument from her home in Bluff, Ellen’s musings apply equally to the slickrock spine of the Waterpocket Fold in Capitol Reef. So I was determined to include her in my own book. I chose an excerpt from The Anthropology of Turquoise—a terrific piece on sensual canyon country wildflowers, “slickrotica.” In her book, Ellen follows turquoise to the ends of the earth, but she always brings us back to her home territory in the canyons. 

“Margaret Parker and Hattie LaCour never intended to turn outlaw,” but sometimes life just hands you a rough deal. Especially if you are a woman in the Wild West. This novel is an interesting journey of strong women choosing to take fate into their own hands. They don’t want to end up on their backs to make money, and decide they rather take the money they feel the world owes them. Heresy is a classical Wild West tale with a bit of a female twist. A good read for any lover of this genre.

This historical fiction novel features nineteen-year-old Jim Keath, born white, but rescued and adopted by the Crow when he was badly wounded by a bear. He lives as a trapper now, avoiding both sides of his life, but when his younger siblings write to him, asking for his help in staking a land claim, he can't run from his past anymore. The story deals beautifully and honestly with human nature, the harsh realities of survival in Oregon Territory, and the importance of family. And the stark western landscape plays a large part in the story.

The hard-drinking, cigar-smoking, cross-dressing heroine of the American West continues to keep a python grip on the imagination. “I’m a howling coyote from Bitter Creek, the further up you go the worse it gets and I’m from the headwaters,” she used to rap. Calamity fascinates because she is a self-made myth and Linda Jucovy’s biography is an informed and insightful exploration of that myth.