10 Books That Are Spiritually Taylor Sheridan
Diego Pineda has been a devout storyteller his whole life. He has self-published a fantasy novel and a book of short stories, and is actively working on publishing his second novel.
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Taylor Sheridan's career in Hollywood kicked off as an actor in films like White Rush and shows like Walker, Texas Ranger and Star Trek: Enterprise. It wouldn't be until 2015 that he would make his debut as a screenwriter—by writing Denis Villeneuve's Sicario, no less. Since then, Sheridan has penned the script for several incredible films and created many TV shows, the Yellowstone franchise most prominent among them.
Like all the best auteurs in the history of cinema and television, Sheridan has a very distinct style that makes his works instantly recognizable: gritty, hyper-masculine, modern-day Westerns, and violent crime dramas about intense moral conflicts and fascinating antiheroes. People who love the writer's work and are craving more stories like his should be delighted to know that there are many books out there that feel like spiritual Taylor Sheridan projects. From foundational classics like Lonesome Dove to modern hidden gems like Where All the Light Tends to Go, these are novels which all Taylor Sheridan fans are pretty much bound to love.
'Where All the Light Tends to Go' (2015)
Best known for his Southern Gothic and rural noir fiction, David Joy delivered his magnum opus back in 2015 with the publication of Where All the Light Tends to Go. In it, a young man trapped working inside his abusive father's rural Appalachian meth ring must choose between staying to appease his family or fleeing alongside his first love. It's a dark, dark read, but it's also one of those novels that would make for a perfect Taylor Sheridan show.
The book was adapted into the 2023 film Devil's Peak, starring Billy Bob Thornton and Robin Wright, but it was poorly received and bombed at the box office. Sheridan could very likely do a far better job with the desolate rural setting, brutal sense of realism, rough-around-the-edges characters, and themes of generational trauma that characterize both his work and Where All the Light Tends to Go.
'Where the Lost Wander' (2020)
Amy Harmon is a considerably prominent name in modern historical romance fiction, and there are few better places to start reading her sweeping oeuvre than Where the Lost Wander. It's the story of Naomi, a newly widowed artist who meets John, a half-Pawnee guide, and falls in love with him on the dangerous Overland Trail in 1853. What ensues is one of the most emotionally powerful historical fiction novels of the 2020s so far.
More than any other Taylor Sheridan project, Where the Lost Wander strongly echoes the gritty, poetically-constructed Yellowstone prequel series 1883. Harmon's masterpiece, much like Sheridan's work, is a potent deconstruction of the myths of the Wild West, treating the wilderness more as a dangerous and ruthless character in and of itself, rather than a romanticized backdrop. Elevated by Harmon's melancholy yet wonderfully lyrical prose, it's a must-read for Western romance fans.
'Oil!' (1926–1927)
Pulitzer Prize winner Upton Sinclair was one of the most important writers, journalists, and political activists of his time, an author whose work constantly challenged the status quo in all sorts of engrossing ways. Case in point: Oil!, the book that loosely inspired Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, about the son of a wealthy Californian oil tycoon coming of age during the 1920s oil boom, torn between his father's corrupt exploitation and his growing sympathy for the working class.
Seeing as it already inspired one of the only true masterpieces of 2000s cinema, it's difficult to see what Sheridan could add to the source material with another adaptation. Still, one thing is certain: Oil! feels like it was almost designed for Taylor Sheridan fans to enjoy. It may very well be some sort of early-20th-century prototype for shows like Landman or Yellowstone, showing the cutthroat brutality and lawlessness of the industrial frontier in ways that have aged disturbingly well.
'I Am Pilgrim' (2013)
Terry Hayes started out as a journalist in Australia, before making his screenwriting debut with Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior and thus beginning a prolific career in film. In 2013, he wrote his debut novel, I Am Pilgrim. Its story follows Pilgrim, a retired American secret agent who's pulled back into service to track a radicalized doctor plotting a catastrophic bioterrorist attack against the United States.
One of the best fiction books ever written by a screenwriter, I Am Pilgrim is a must-read for people who prefer non-Western Taylor Sheridan projects like Lioness. Written with the same kind of procedural intricacy and realism that makes Sheridan titles like Sicario so special, I Am Pilgrim is a sprawling globe-trotting thriller executed on a scale that Sheridan's fans should find both deeply astonishing and irresistibly entertaining.
'Bull Mountain' (2015)
Out of any novel published over the last 11 years, it's almost universally agreed upon that Brian Panowich's Bull Mountain is the one that most closely resembles what anyone would expect out of a Taylor Sheridan project. When an ATF agent forces a law-abiding sheriff to help dismantle his family's multi-generational crime empire, he's dragged into a brutal war against his own blood. If there's any modern novel that would greatly benefit from Sheridan's vision in case of an adaptation, it's this one.
In many respects, Bull Mountain feels like a kind of violent mashup of Yellowstone and Mayor of Kingstown. A dark dynasty of power, the friction between familial duty and personal morality, and the endless cycles of violence are themes present in Panowich's masterpiece that fans of Sheridan's work should all find deeply compelling. Gritty, hard-boiled, and airtight in its pacing, Bull Mountain should prove incredibly enjoyable for anybody who loves modern American crime thrillers.
Collider Exclusive · Taylor Sheridan Universe Quiz
Which Taylor Sheridan
Show Do You Belong In?
Yellowstone · Landman · Tulsa King · Mayor of Kingstown
Four worlds. All of them brutal, complicated, and built on power, loyalty, and the price of survival. Taylor Sheridan doesn't write heroes — he writes people who do what they have to do and live with the cost. Ten questions will reveal which one of his worlds you were made for.
🤠Yellowstone
🛢️Landman
👑Tulsa King
⚖️Mayor of Kingstown
01
Where does your power come from? In Sheridan's world, everyone has leverage. The question is what kind.
02
Who do you put first, no matter what? Loyalty in Sheridan's universe is always absolute — and always costly.
03
Someone crosses a line. How do you respond? Every Sheridan protagonist has a line. What matters is what happens after it's crossed.
04
Where do you feel most in your element? Sheridan's worlds are as much about place as they are about people.
05
How do you feel about operating in the grey? Nobody in a Sheridan show has clean hands. The question is how they carry the dirt.
06
What are you actually fighting to hold onto? Every Sheridan character is fighting a war. The real question is what they're defending.
07
How do you lead? Authority in Sheridan's world is never given — it's established, maintained, and constantly tested.
08
Someone new arrives and tries to change how things work. Your reaction? Every Sheridan show has an outsider disrupting an established order. Sometimes that outsider is you.
09
What has your position cost you? Nobody gets to where these characters are without paying for it. The bill is always personal.
10
When it's over, what do you want people to say? Sheridan's characters all know the ending is coming. The question is what they leave behind.
Sheridan Has Spoken You Belong In…
The show that claimed the most of your answers is the world you were built for. If two tied, both are shown — you're complicated enough to straddle two Sheridan universes.
🤠 Yellowstone
🛢️ Landman
👑 Tulsa King
⚖️ Mayor of Kingstown
You are a Dutton — or you might as well be. You understand that some things are worth protecting at any cost, and that the modern world's indifference to history, to land, to legacy, is not something you're willing to accept quietly. You lead from the front, you carry your family's weight without complaint, and when someone threatens what's yours, you don't escalate — you finish it. You're not cruel. But you are absolute. In Yellowstone's world, that combination of ferocity and loyalty doesn't make you a villain. It makes you the only thing standing between everything that matters and everyone who wants to take it.
You thrive in the chaos of high-stakes negotiation, where the money is enormous, the margins are thin, and the wrong word in the wrong room can cost everyone everything. You're a fixer — the person called when a situation is already on fire and needs someone with the nerve to walk into it. West Texas oil country rewards exactly what you are: sharp, adaptable, unsentimental, and absolutely clear-eyed about what people want and what they'll do to get it. You're not naive enough to think this world is fair. You're smart enough to be the one deciding who it's fair to.
You are a Dwight Manfredi — someone who has served their time, paid their dues, and arrived somewhere unexpected with nothing but their reputation and their wits. You adapt without losing yourself. You build loyalty through respect rather than fear, though you're not above reminding people that the two aren't mutually exclusive. Tulsa King is for people who are still standing when everyone assumed they'd be finished — who find, in an unfamiliar place, that they're more capable than the world gave them credit for. You don't need a throne. You build one, wherever you happen to land.
You carry the weight of a system that is broken by design, and you do it anyway — because someone has to, and because you're the only one positioned to do it without the whole thing collapsing. Mike McLusky's world is for people who are comfortable operating where there are no good options, only less catastrophic ones. You speak every language: law enforcement, criminal, political, human. That fluency makes you invaluable and it makes you a target. You've made your peace with both. Mayor of Kingstown belongs to people who understand that keeping the peace is not the same as being at peace — and who do the job regardless.
'American Rust' (2009)
Philipp Meyer's American Rust has already received a television adaptation by Showtime, but it was poorly received and canceled after two seasons. The source material, however, is one of the best thriller books that you've likely not read, set in a decaying Pennsylvania steel town where a compromised police chief must decide how far beyond the law he will go when the son of the woman he loves is accused of murder.
It's a book so remarkably similar to Sheridan's work that the writer could undoubtedly add a whole new dimension to it with an adaptation of his own. Where Sheridan's work tends to explore the decline of the rural West and Texas, American Rust manages to capture the exact same sense of soul-crushing decay in post-industrial Pennsylvania. When written with enough grit and nuance, stories about American communities left behind by modern capital can be absolutely fascinating, and American Rust is one such masterpiece.
'The Lonesome Gods' (1983)
Fans of Western books tend to recognize Louis L'Amour as one of the best things ever to have happened to the genre, and seeing as he's the best-selling and most prolific Western literature author in history, it's easy to see why. One of his greatest works is The Lonesome Gods, about an abandoned boy who grows into a rugged adventurer in the harsh California and Arizona deserts, and must confront his vengeful grandfather as he starts building a new life in early Los Angeles.
Like all the best Western stories in history—regardless of their medium—tend to do, The Lonesome Gods treats its setting as a character in and of itself, described with some of the most wonderfully lyrical prose that the genre has ever seen. A must-read for fans of 1883, Lonesome Gods is such a morally, thematically, and tonally complex gem that it deserves to be a mainstay on the bookshelf of any and all fans of the Western genre, certainly including Taylor Sheridan fans.
'All the Pretty Horses' (1992)
Saying that Cormac McCarthy is one of the biggest and most influential names in the history of American literature would almost be an understatement. Among his most important and admirable works is his Border Trilogy, whose first installment is All the Pretty Horses, McCarthy's first-ever bestseller. In it, young John Grady Cole rides into Mexico after his family's Texas ranch is sold, looking to live the life of a traditional cowboy.
The Border trilogy is arguably one of those book series that peaked with their first entry, as perfectly demonstrated by the fact that All the Pretty Horses is among the best Western books of all time. And with Sheridan having explicitly cited McCarthy as an influence in his creation of Yellowstone in the past, there should almost be no need to explain why fans of the writer should check out All the Pretty Horses. The 2000 film adaptation directed by Billy Bob Thornton isn't exactly exceptional, so a new adaptation made through Sheridan's unique eyes wouldn't hurt.
'Lonesome Dove' (1985)
One of the most intense books of all time, Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and has long been regarded by many as the single greatest novel ever written about the American West. In this great character-driven epic, two retired Texas Rangers leave their border town and drive a stolen cattle herd to Montana, looking to establish the first ranch in the territory.
The resulting masterpiece is so incredible that it has likely influenced almost any and all American Westerns made after 1985—Taylor Sheridan's work most certainly included. With a perfect balance between intense violence, personal tragedy, and even healthy doses of warmth and humor, Lonesome Dove almost feels like the blueprint for the whole Yellowstone franchise. The small screen already loves the book, but Sheridan fans would agree that one more adaptation wouldn't hurt.
'Blood Meridian' (1985)
Fans of Cormac McCarthy often point to different books when discussing what the author's magnum opus may be. However, there's one answer that tends to come up more than most, the one that many would even go so far as to apply the elusive label of "The Great American Novel" to: Blood Meridian, about a teenage runaway drifting across the 1850s American Southwest.
One of the darkest books of all time, Blood Meridian may certainly not be all that easy of a read for just every kind of Western fan, but it's oh so worth it—particularly for those who love Taylor Sheridan's work. But where Sheridan writes neo-Westerns that are mostly about loyalty, code, family, and legacy, Blood Meridian is so inherently cynical that it almost feels apocalyptic. Even so, if there's any book that feels like a spiritual extension of Sheridan's work, it's this one.
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