What did you love about Pulp Fiction?
Get Shorty
Get Shorty gives you mobsters who sound like Tarantino characters, riffing on movies while collecting debts.
No Country for Old Men
No Country for Old Men delivers that same sudden brutality in quiet rooms where everything turns on a coin toss.
The Big Sleep
The Big Sleep has Marlowe moving through chaos with the same unflappable deadpan Jules brings to his work.
6 books like Pulp Fiction
- The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler — Philip Marlowe walks through a Los Angeles full of pornographers, blackmailers, and socialites with …
- The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson — A small-town Texas deputy sheriff narrates his own descent into serial murder with folksy charm and …
- Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard — A Miami loan shark goes to Hollywood to collect a debt and realizes the movie business runs on the s…
- No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy — A hunter finds two million dollars at a drug deal gone wrong and is pursued across Texas by the most…
- Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley — Easy Rawlins, a Black WWII veteran in 1948 Los Angeles, takes a job finding a white woman in the jaz…
- A Savage Night by Jim Thompson — A tubercular hitman botches a job in a small town and everything spirals into surreal, nightmarish v…
Picked for the feeling of Pulp Fiction, not its genre. Each one is explained below. One movie isn’t much to go on: rate four more and the books are picked for you.
Why these books
Pulp Fiction rewired how stories could be told — scrambled timelines, hitmen philosophizing about cheeseburgers, violence and tenderness in the same breath. Its influence is everywhere, but the writers who got there first were the hardboiled and noir novelists whose books Tarantino consumed. These are the books that live in the same neighborhood: crime fiction with literary ambitions and a very dark sense of humor.
The Big Sleep
Philip Marlowe walks through a Los Angeles full of pornographers, blackmailers, and socialites with the same detached cool that Jules and Vincent bring to their errands. Chandler invented the modern crime voice — wry, observant, allergic to sentimentality — and his plots are as deliberately tangled as Tarantino's timelines. The Big Sleep is so convoluted that even Chandler admitted he didn't know who committed one of the murders.
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The Killer Inside Me
A small-town Texas deputy sheriff narrates his own descent into serial murder with folksy charm and zero remorse. Thompson's 1952 novel is the darkest thing in the noir canon — a first-person account of psychopathy so convincing it got the book banned. It shares Pulp Fiction's trick of making terrible people compelling through voice alone, but Thompson goes further because there's no Vincent Vega redemption arc here. Just the abyss.
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Get Shorty
A Miami loan shark goes to Hollywood to collect a debt and realizes the movie business runs on the same scams as organized crime — just with better catering. Leonard is the writer Tarantino has cited most often as an influence, and this novel shows why: the dialogue crackles, the criminals are smarter than they look, and the plot turns on people underestimating each other. It's Pulp Fiction as a comedy of manners.
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No Country for Old Men
A hunter finds two million dollars at a drug deal gone wrong and is pursued across Texas by the most terrifying killer in American fiction. McCarthy's novel shares Pulp Fiction's fascination with violence as a random, amoral force — the difference is that McCarthy offers no comedy to cut the dread. Anton Chigurh is what happens when you take Jules Winnfield's Old Testament wrath and remove the epiphany at the end.
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Devil in a Blue Dress
Easy Rawlins, a Black WWII veteran in 1948 Los Angeles, takes a job finding a white woman in the jazz clubs of Watts and gets pulled into a murder that reaches the city's power structure. Mosley writes noir with the same rhythmic, voice-driven energy as Tarantino, but grounds it in the racial geography of postwar LA. The result is a crime novel that's also a history lesson, told by a narrator as charismatic as any character in Pulp Fiction.
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A Savage Night
A tubercular hitman botches a job in a small town and everything spirals into surreal, nightmarish violence. Thompson's short, hallucinatory novel does what Tarantino does with the Gimp scene — takes genre conventions and pushes them past the breaking point into something genuinely disturbing. The last thirty pages are among the most unhinged in American fiction, and they earn every beat.
Read it with your book club →Is Pulp Fiction based on a book?
Pulp Fiction isn’t based on a book — it’s an original screenplay by Quentin Tarantino.
What should I read if I loved Pulp Fiction?
Start with The Big Sleep, The Killer Inside Me and Get Shorty. 6 books on this page were picked for the feeling of Pulp Fiction, not its genre, with a reason for each.
Which book is most like Pulp Fiction?
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. Philip Marlowe walks through a Los Angeles full of pornographers, blackmailers, and socialites with the same detached cool that Jules and Vincent bring to their errands.
These are for everyone who loved Pulp Fiction. Want books picked for you?
Someone who loved Pulp Fiction and Castle in the Sky reads different books from someone who loved Pulp Fiction and The Empire Strikes Back. One movie isn’t much to go on. Rate four more — Pulp Fiction already counts — and the books are picked for you.
Rate four more moviesOr read it with your book club and talk about it while you’re still reading.