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A list of dark, weird, and Southern gothic books that every fan of
HBO's True Detectiveshould read.
MYTHOLOGY
The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers
This cult classic of supernatural horror is the source of the cult references on the
show. The interlinked stories circle around a fictional play, titled The King in Yellow,
which drives its readers insane. There is also a creepy supernatural entity referred
to as the King in Yellow and references to the mysterious city of Carcosa.
Attentive True Detective fans will recognize those names from the show. Ledoux’s
rambling comments about “black stars” and “twin suns” are also taken from the
fictional play. The crooked spiral tattooed on the back of the murdered Dora Lange
is likely an interpretation of the “yellow sign” of the King in Yellow. This is the center
of the weird fiction mythos that haunts the edges of True Detective. (For longer
literary analysis of how The King in Yellow relates to True Detective, check out
these essays on io9 and ThinkProgress.)
Chambers himself borrowed elements from the great American satirist (The Devil’s
Dictionary) and story writer (“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”) Ambrose
Bierce. Specifically, he borrowed the names Carcosa and Hastur from his haunting
“An Inhabitant of Carcosa,” which you can read online. It is really only that one
story that ties into Chambers’ mythology, but Bierce’s fiction is well worth your time.
Lovecraft’s cosmic horror has been kept alive by a whole school of writers. One of
the best, whom Nic Pizzolatto frequently cites in interviews, is Laird Barron.
Barron’s dark and haunting fiction also frequently draws on the tradition of hard-
boiled detectives and noir that are clear influences on True Detective. The Imago
Sequence, his first collection, is a great place to start.
PHILOSOPHY
Thomas Ligotti is the bridge between weird fiction and Rust Cohle’s existential
philosophy. Ligotti writes both Lovecraftian horror and existential pessimistic
philosophy. As I said above, Cohle’s aphorisms are not random ramblings but
references to actual philosophers and thinkers, especially Ligotti. At one point, Cohl
says, “We became too self-aware; nature created an aspect of nature separate
from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law.” Compare that to
Ligotti in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: "We know that nature has
veered into the supernatural by fabricating a creature that cannot and should not
exist by natural law, and yet does." Pizzolatto has talked openly about the influence
of Ligotti on Cohle, and noted that, “Next to The Conspiracy Against the Human
Race, Mickey Spillane seems about as hard-boiled as bubble gum.”
For my tastes, the finest writer of pessimistic philosophy is the great Romanian
thinker E. M. Cioran. His aphorisms could easily come out of the mouth of Cohle,
such as his famous question "Is it possible that existence is our exile and
nothingness our home?" Cioran viewed existence as fundamentally pointless and
urged us to resist the “temptation to exist.” At the same time, Cioran’s writing is
very funny and treats life as humorously absurd. Allegedly Cioran’s mother once
told him she would have aborted him if she’d known he would have such
depressing views, which prompted Cioran to take the attitude that "I'm simply an
accident. Why take it all so seriously?" Here’s True Detective's Nic Pizzolatto on
Cioran: “I’d already been reading E.M. Cioran for years and consider him one of my
all-time favorite and, oddly, most nourishing writers. As an aphorist, Cioran has no
rivals other than perhaps Nietzsche, and many of his philosophies are echoed by
Ligotti.”
You can’t really talk about existential philosophy without talking about Friedrich
Nietzsche. Nietzsche was a major influence on Cioran and one of the most
important philosophers of the 19th century. His philosophical novel Thus Spake
Zarathustra contains a lot of elements that seem to influence True Detective. The
central concept of this work is “eternal recurrence,” the idea that existence occurs
over and over again and we will be forced to make the same decisions and suffer
the same fates for all eternity. Rust Cohle paraphrases this exact idea in the series'
fifth episode.
OTHER READING
A classic work of hard-boiled detective fiction. Chandler totally changed the crime
writing world with his Philip Marlowe. And the film version with Humphrey Bogart is
pretty great too.
Pizzolatto has called Jonnson one of his all-time favorites, and Jesus’ Son is his
masterpiece. This series of interlinked short stories about a heroin user (the title is
a reference to the Velvet Underground song “Heroin”) is written in dreamy,
surrealistic prose that might recall the beautiful landscapes and dreamy Rust Cohle
hallucinations on True Detective.
If you like your Southern gothic tales as dark and thick as molasses, you can’t do
better than the late William Gay. “The Paperhanger” in particular is one of the
greatest and darkest short stories ever written.
Last year’s The Vanishers is a great detective novel with supernatural overtones.
Karen Russell called it “One of the best novels I’ve ever read, delivering all the
immediate pleasures of mystery, horror, and satire while exploring grief in language
that is as shocking for its originality as its precision.”
Speaking of Karen Russell, her novel Swamplandia! is a good choice for readers
interested in contemporary Southern gothic with supernatural aspects. The story
follows the journey of a 12-year-old gator wrestler searching for her lost sister.
While hardly as dark as the bleak world of True Detective, it shares a swampy
setting and Southern gothic sensibility.
Big Machine, LaValle’s fantastic second novel, follows an injured junkie ex-cultist
who gets sucked into a supernatural investigation. Publishers Weekly compared
him to Haruki Murakami, John Kennedy Toole, and Edgar Allan Poe.
Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor
Few writers have the gift for bringing terror out of everyday life like Shirley Jackson.
Like O’Connor, she is a master of the grotesque. The titular story, “The Lottery,”
caused a huge scandal when it was published and over 60 years later is still one of
the most anthologized short stories in American letters.
Brian Evenson is another writer who combines noir, horror, and philosophy. I could
list a lot of his books here, but his great novel Last Days seems most appropriate. It
follows a disfigured detective who investigates a murder in a bizarre religious cult
that views amputation as a means to enlightenment.