Nine novels that tap into the myths of “Americana”

Susan Bernhard is a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship recipient and a graduate of the GrubStreet Novel Incubator program. She was born and raised in the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana, is a graduate of the University of Maryland, and lives with her husband and two children near Boston.

Winter Loon is her debut novel.

At Lithub she took "a look at contemporary fiction that taps into Americana mythology and storytelling, that is unafraid to turn the body over and examine the underbelly for wounds and scars," and tagged nine novels. One title on the list:

Wiley Cash, A Land More Kind Than Home

Cash’s debut novel reads like a ballad—a story about love and religion gone wrong, about moral codes put to test in an Appalachian town. In the tradition of southern gothic noir, Cash writes in the distinct voices of three richly-drawn narrators—a young boy whose brother dies at the hands of a false prophet in a Pentecostal church, an old midwife who knows the town’s buried secrets, and the Sheriff who investigates the child’s death while carrying grief for his own dead son.

Read about the other titles on the list.

A Land More Kind Than Home is among Tom Bouman's ten top rural noir novels.

My Book, The Movie: A Land More Kind Than Home.

--Marshal Zeringue