7 Western Books That Are Perfect From Beginning to End
At any given moment, Scott Simone has at least three books jockeying for his attention. He’ll never turn down a campus novel with a literary bent, nor will he hesitate to add yet another mystery to his Leaning Tower of Pisa-inspired to-be-read pile — which is built upon the bedrocks of too many short story collections, how-are-these-real true crime books, and classics waiting to be cracked open again. Topics that have him ripping through pages the fastest include closed-circle murders, unhappy professors, life-questioning philosophical deep dives, so long as they feature sharp sentences, a dark sense of humor, and at least a little malice.
He’s spent so much time in book shops over the years he is, to his wife’s chagrin, continuing to build a library that doesn’t quite respect the dimensions of the apartment meant to contain it.
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You've been following these people for a hundred pages, and you're beginning to question their judgment. One can't keep his mouth shut. Another seems to regard every disagreement as a reason to reach for his gun. And somebody has made a promise you know he can't possibly keep. But you just can't stop reading — through breakfast, through lunch, through dinner. You're not just anticipating the next bevy of bullets to fly; you've grown attached to them, swilling all their agony and hope until both are swishing around in your gut. So when they saddle up again, you're up for the next ride. You'd follow these fools just about anywhere.
Because that's the type of grip a great Western has on you. Sure, there's suspense in the shootouts and vengeful outlaws. But the best find just as much drama in an argument around a campfire or a decision somebody will spend the rest of his life regretting. And they do so out of the gate, corralling you in that first, never allowing any slack in the rope as they herd you through the hundreds that follow. There are no dull chapters to mosey your way through, and the only disappointment comes when you've finally run out of pages.
1 'Lonesome Dove' (1985)
Not much happens in Lonesome Dove, Texas, and Augustus McCrae would like to keep it that way. The retired Ranger drinks and chases women. He also irritates his old partner Woodrow Call, for whom idleness is deadliness. But a chance to break from the dullness arrives when another former Ranger returns talking up Montana's grazing land. Call decides to drive a herd nearly 2,000 miles north; Gus calls him a fool but decides to tag along anyway.
So this isn't the one that starts out riding hell-for-leather. Larry McMurtry lets the characters marinate long enough for you to become emotionally invested before the cattle even leave town. You yearn for Newt to gain Call's approval, and you dream alongside Lorena about escaping Lonesome Dove. And Gus and Call's bickering is more than comic relief; it's a peeler, stripping back the layers to the soul of each character. So when the journey finally begins, every river crossing and chance encounter threatens a future you've already begun imagining for somebody. And by the time you reach Montana, those idle days back in Texas have become the ones you'd most like to revisit.
2 'True Grit' (1968)
Each character and every situation in True Grit is enough to carry a novel: 14-year-old Mattie Ross has come to Fort Smith, Arkansas, to collect her murdered father's body. There's also a horse trader who owes her money, and he learns rather quickly that being twice her age won't help him win an argument. And then there's Tom Chaney, the man who killed her father and fled into Indian Territory. And of course there's the one-eyed, whiskey-drinking and gun-slinging U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn, who Mattie hires to bring him back.
But it's Mattie's narration that gives the novel its head. Charles Portis has her recount the adventure decades later, apparently having forgiven nobody for cheating her, underestimating her, or wasting her time. She tells the most outrageous stories with the solemnity of someone giving testimony in court, which makes them all the funnier. But Portis never makes Mattie herself the joke, instead making her determination come across as admirable, maddening, and occasionally disastrous all at once. And by the final pages, her matter-of-fact narration is tinged with a certain unacknowledged sadness. It's the same Mattie you met at the start, but you're different now, knowing what her grit truly cost her.
3 'Blood Meridian' (1985)
The Kid is just 14 when he leaves Tennessee, and the West makes a pretty rotten first impression. He eventually falls in with John Joel Glanton's gang of scalp hunters, who collect bounties for killing Apaches but aren't terribly concerned with whose scalps they bring back. Judge Holden is also all-too-present. He's a lot of things: enormous, entirely hairless, an apparent expert on everything — and, most of all, a monster.
Cormac McCarthy never gives you what old Westerns promised; the pages are scant with the heroic men, wide-open freedom, a fresh start you'd expect. Sure, he gives you a ton of slaughtering as most Westerns do. But McCarthy also gives you prose that's sharp, shooting you in the heart as he describes the trivialities of a desert landscape so magnificently that you almost forget the men riding through it have blood on their hands. And he creates one of the most damnable characters in the Judge, who'll launch into lectures about war and about God and about mankind's right to dominate the world. They're despicable as they are enthralling, as he somehow makes the most appalling arguments sound almost sensible. And that's what makes Blood Meridian so difficult to abandon: You're repulsed by nearly everything happening, but McCarthy makes you desperate to understand it.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Western Icon Are You Most Like? No Name · Doc Holliday · Wyatt Earp · Mattie Ross
Pick your name, your gun, your horse and how you spend a night in town, and we will tell you which legend of the Old West you would have been. Four icons are waiting at the end of this: the stranger who never gives his name, the gambler who would die for a friend, the lawman who never wanted the badge, and the girl nobody has ever talked out of anything.
🚬No Name(Dollars Trilogy)
🃏Doc Holliday(Tombstone)
⭐Wyatt Earp(Tombstone)
🐎Mattie Ross(True Grit)
01
The town is about to learn your name. What do they call you? In a Western, what people call you is already half the character.
02
What are you carrying? Everything out here is character, right down to what is sitting on your hip.
03
What are you riding? A hero and their horse is one of the oldest relationships in cinema.
04
You have got one evening in town. How does it go? The saloon is where these films quietly tell you who somebody really is.
05
A stranger offers you money for a job that sounds like trouble. Somebody always turns up with a full purse and a bad idea.
06
Somebody is waiting for you in the street. What does the town see? Two people, an empty road, and everybody else watching from behind the shutters.
07
What is the one thing you will not do out here? The code is about the only thing west of the river that actually holds.
08
The job is finished. Where does the story leave you? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your icon.
The Dust Has Settled Your Western Icon Is…
Four icons and four completely different ways of walking into trouble. This is the one you would have been out there, why it fits, and what it would have cost you.
The Man With No Name
You have never explained yourself and you have never needed to, because people work out fairly quickly that you are the most capable person in the room without you ever having to mention it.
- Eastwood built the character out of everything he refused to do, stripping away the backstory, the speeches and every bit of reassurance until only the competence was left.
- You keep your own counsel, and while other people occasionally find that unnerving, you have never felt any real need to fix it for them.
- The Dollars films work because he genuinely is in it for himself right up until the moment he is not, and he never explains that part either.
- You would be gone before anybody got a chance to thank you.
Doc Holliday
You are the funniest person in most rooms and the most loyal person in all of them, and you would be genuinely insulted if somebody suggested those two things were in any tension.
- Doc has no real reason to be in this fight beyond the fact that his friend is in it, which is the only reason he has ever needed for anything.
- You lead with wit, and it does a very effective job of hiding how seriously you take the handful of people you actually care about.
- Val Kilmer's performance is the most quoted in the entire genre because the jokes keep getting sharper as the situation gets worse.
- You would spend everything you had on this and still describe it as a good week.
Wyatt Earp
You never wanted this job, and you took it anyway because the alternative was standing there watching somebody less careful do it badly, which is the most Western reason there has ever been.
- Earp is the reluctant authority figure, a man who came to town specifically to be left alone and somehow ended up answerable for all of it.
- You are protective by instinct, so when something goes wrong your first thought is who is exposed rather than who is to blame.
- These films understand that keeping order costs far more than breaking it, and that the person holding the line almost never gets thanked.
- You would do the whole thing again, and you would complain about it the entire time.
Mattie Ross
Nobody has ever successfully talked you out of something you had already decided was right, and a long line of grown adults has found that out the hard way.
- Mattie is the most relentless character in the Western canon and she manages it through argument, paperwork and flat refusal rather than a fast draw.
- You have no patience for being managed, so you negotiate, you check the details and you turn up exactly when you said you would.
- True Grit is the rare Western where the moral centre is the youngest person on screen and every adult around her has to catch up.
- You would get what you came for, and the film is honest about what that takes out of you.
4 'Fools Crow' (1986)
White Man's Dog doesn't have much standing amongst his fellow warriors of the Lone Eaters, a small band of the Pikuni Blackfeet. What he does have are three sorry-looking horses and little faith he'll amount to much. But he's eager to prove himself when an opportunity arises to raid the rival Crow for horses. His standing improves, and eventually he earns a new name: Fools Crow. All makes for a happy enough story, if not for what was happening outside the Blackfeet camps: white settlers and soldiers eyeing their Montana homeland as though the people who've lived there for generations are the intruders.
James Welch does something most traditional Westerns never bothered with: He gives the people usually relegated to the sidelines the whole damn story. And he delves into a lot, from horse raids and family squabbles to romances, jealousies, and spiritual visions, all of which carry equal weight. Welch doesn't stop to explain every custom as though he's giving a history lesson, either. He drops you into the middle of it all and trusts you to catch up. So when the threat of white expansion grows more sinister, you're no longer simply reading about a people on the losing side of history. You've come to know their ambitions, petty grievances, and hopes for the future. And, unfortunately, you already know something they don't.
5 'The Sisters Brothers' (2011)
Eli Sisters has a rather unusual profession for a man who worries so much about his weight, his horse, and finding a woman who likes him back: He kills people for money. So does his brother Charlie, who's a little more enthusiastic about the family business. When they head out for Gold Rush-era California to kill a prospector named Hermann Kermit Warm, Charlie looks forward to the payday; Eli begins imagining a life that involves fewer corpses.
Patrick deWitt uses Eli as the narrator, whose deadpan account of their misadventures makes something as little as discovering a toothbrush seem as momentous as a shootout. He, too, never hints at the contradiction within himself, one minute fretting over a sick animal, then committing an atrocity the next. And that's what makes The Sisters Brothers so frustratingly readable: Eli wants to see himself as a decent fellow, the substantial evidence to the contrary be damned. But as the brothers stumble through one calamity after another, their bickering begins to reveal something sadder. DeWitt turns a blood-soaked comedy into a tender story about two brothers outgrowing one another. Charlie can't imagine giving up their murderous livelihood; Eli can hardly imagine continuing it.
6 'The Thicket' (2013)
Jack Parker is dealing with a string of bad luck: Smallpox killed his parents, and a gang of outlaws murdered his grandfather. And then that same group of outlaws kidnaps his sister. This may help to explain the rag-tag posse he recruits as he tracks her across East Texas. He gathers a company you wouldn't exactly expect a respectable sheriff to surround himself with: a foul-mouthed bounty hunter with dwarfism, Shorty; a Black gravedigger, Eustace; and prostitute Jimmie Sue.
Joe R. Lansdale gives this lot plenty to talk about, and what begins as a string of outrageous anecdotes gradually becomes something more revealing. Shorty, for all his vulgarity, is surprisingly well-read and philosophical. And Jack, raised with his preacher grandfather's ideas about right and wrong, starts discovering how difficult they are to uphold when the people you're chasing deserve a bullet. Lansdale isn't afraid to make the supposed good guys do some pretty awful things, either. So the further they venture into the Thicket, the more complicated Jack's mission becomes. You want him to rescue his sister, sure. But you're also beginning to wonder what sort of man he'll be when he finally gets her back.
7 'News of the World' (2016)
Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd has a rather good arrangement: For a dime, he'll read newspaper dispatches aloud to Texans eager to hear what the rest of the world is up to. He's 71, widowed, and content to spend his days on the road. Then someone offers him $50 to escort a 10-year-old girl 400 miles across Texas. Johanna spent four years with the Kiowa, whom she considers her family. She speaks little English, considers shoes an unnecessary nuisance, and can't understand why anyone expects her to be pleased about meeting people she doesn't remember.
Paulette Jiles doesn't give us the kindly old captain rescuing a helpless child. Johanna can be a tremendous pain in the neck, sure, but she knows a thing or two about surviving in the wilderness — sometimes considerably more than the man entrusted with keeping her alive. And between the gunfights and roadside mishaps, Jiles keeps complicating what initially seemed a decent enough undertaking. Johanna doesn't think she needs saving; she thinks someone has taken her from her family for the second time. Kidd, meanwhile, grows more attached to her with every mile. So just as you're rooting for them to make it through Texas, you begin dreading what awaits them at the other end.
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