“Rural noir” is a 21st-century term used to describe a stream of American literature that has been flowing since the 19th century. We’ve had dark, dangerous stories set in the countryside since William Leggett’s 1827 tale The Rifle. Some of the best-known writers associated with the label have suggested doing away with it, but at this point it seems futile to pretend that it doesn’t exist. If your book, like mine, has an all-terrain vehicle chase or a fistfight over a deer rifle in the middle of a swamp, somebody somewhere is going to call it rural noir.

The following is an incomplete list of books and authors I feel have contributed to this trend.

This slender novel begins, “They threw me off the hay truck about noon.” Who are “they”? Where is the narrator coming from, and why was he travelling in the back of a hay truck? Was he actually physically thrown out of it? I like to think so. There is no writer more classically noir than James M Cain, and because he set this tense, murderous love triangle in a small California town, I include it here.



While certainly not every story in this collection can be described as rural noir, O’Connor’s work set the sub-genre’s tone and contributed much of its DNA. I would guess a great many authorial risks were taken as a result of Joy Hopewell’s stolen wooden leg in Good Country People. A Good Man Is Hard to Find is a lodestar, mixing violence and bleak wit for an unbalancing and unforgettable read. The Misfit, the murderous loner who haunts that tale, has many descendants throughout American literary and genre fiction.



Small-town sheriff Nick Corey’s ambling narration belies a deeply troubling moral nihilism – as he contends with a loveless marriage, pimps on his trail and a tiresomely upright rival in the coming elections. It’s Jim Thompson, after all.



Some may think it a stretch to include this literary masterpiece with more genre-bound novels. But Walker’s book gives me a chance to discuss one of the defining characteristics of rural noir. Not violence, though The Color Purple has its share. Not poverty or despair, either, though this portrayal of African American women in the 1930s rural South is full of both. It’s Ceelie’s unique narrative voice, strange and familiar and fractured beyond mere dialect, that brings her and her world so heartbreakingly to life.



In the mystery world, he has no equal. The books in this series set on the Louisiana Bayou have a dilapidated, lyrical charm, and Burke excels at physical atmosphere. But his greatest achievement, in my humble opinion, is emotional atmosphere, and the rich interior life of his lead character.

Despite the many beatings and shootings that take place in this Mississippi-set novel, Joe is animated by a sad and gentle spirit. When I first encountered Larry Brown’s work years ago, I was refreshed by its physicality and vividly blighted hill-country landscapes. Though a contemporary novel, something about it felt older, its characters haunted by Huckleberry and Pap Finn, far from sivilization.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jennifer Lawrence in the film of Winter’s Bone. Photograph: Roadside/Everett /Rex

Sixteen-year-old Ree Dolly’s quest to save her family’s Ozark Mountains home leads her through the wilds of the rural methamphetamine trade and into legend. Generations from now, people will still be reading this novel and marvelling at, among many other things, the Dolly clan’s cave-dwelling religious history. Rural noir can be engrossing for its brutality and narrative pull. Winter’s Bone stands out for its beauty and strangeness.



An acknowledged master of Appalachian fiction, Rash’s work is imbued with history and engaged with the natural world. This novel’s hero, Travis Shelton, comes of age among North Carolina tobacco and marijuana farmers in 1978. Nothing in this novel is out of place, least of all the rusty bear trap that sets the story in motion.



Campell’s work suggests how much room for innovation there still is in the realist short story form. The tales in this volume document the erosion of the American countryside through the people who remain there. American Salvage is a series of intrusions, accidents, and self-destructive acts that, taken together, begin to feel like fate at work.



I have referred elsewhere to this novel as “bighearted”, and I have yet to think of a better word for it. Cash’s work shows how the line between gothic fiction and rural noir can blur, exemplified particularly in the person of Carson Chambliss, a snake-handling preacher disfigured by chemical burns sustained in the production of methamphetamine.