What did you love about The Power of the Dog?
East of Eden
East of Eden follows a man who poisons his family while everyone thinks he's taking care of them.
We Need to Talk About Kevin
We Need to Talk About Kevin is about realizing the danger was always there, hiding in plain sight.
Brokeback Mountain
Brokeback Mountain gives you two men in the West whose connection can't survive the world around them.
5 books like The Power of the Dog
- Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx — Proulx's short story is the obvious companion — two men in the American West whose love is incompati…
- East of Eden by John Steinbeck — Steinbeck's epic about two families in California's Salinas Valley shares Campion's interest in how …
- Stoner by John Williams — Williams' quiet masterpiece about a Missouri farm boy who becomes a literature professor shares The …
- My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante — Ferrante's novel about two girls growing up in a violent Naples neighborhood shares Campion's intere…
- We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver — Shriver's epistolary novel about a mother trying to understand her son's violence shares The Power o…
Picked for the feeling of The Power of the Dog, 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
Campion's slow-burn Western is about the violence of masculinity turned inward — a rancher whose cruelty masks a secret, and the quiet war waged by the people he despises. Nothing in this film is what it appears to be on first viewing, and the ending reframes everything that came before. These books share that same patient, devastating architecture of revelation.
Brokeback Mountain
Proulx's short story is the obvious companion — two men in the American West whose love is incompatible with the world they inhabit. But where Brokeback is a tragedy of exposure, Power of the Dog is a tragedy of concealment. Reading them together maps the full terrain of queer masculinity in landscapes built to punish it.
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East of Eden
Steinbeck's epic about two families in California's Salinas Valley shares Campion's interest in how cruelty gets transmitted through families and how quietly someone can destroy the people around them while appearing to provide for them. Phil Burbank and Cathy Ames are different kinds of monsters, but both use their intelligence to control through fear.
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Stoner
Williams' quiet masterpiece about a Missouri farm boy who becomes a literature professor shares The Power of the Dog's precision about how people suffocate under expectations they never agreed to. Like the film, it moves slowly, accumulates detail, and delivers its devastation through what's withheld rather than what's expressed.
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My Brilliant Friend
Ferrante's novel about two girls growing up in a violent Naples neighborhood shares Campion's interest in how intelligence can be a weapon — used to escape, to dominate, or to destroy. The friendship between Elena and Lila has the same charged, competitive intimacy as the relationship between Phil and Peter.
Read it with your book club →
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Shriver's epistolary novel about a mother trying to understand her son's violence shares The Power of the Dog's central question: can you see the danger in someone you live with, or does proximity make you blind? Both are stories where the ending was visible all along to everyone except the people closest to the threat.
Read it with your book club →Is The Power of the Dog based on a book?
The Power of the Dog is based on Thomas Savage’s novel The Power of the Dog.
What should I read if I loved The Power of the Dog?
Start with Brokeback Mountain, East of Eden and Stoner. 5 books on this page were picked for the feeling of The Power of the Dog, not its genre, with a reason for each.
Which book is most like The Power of the Dog?
Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx. Proulx's short story is the obvious companion — two men in the American West whose love is incompatible with the world they inhabit.
These are for everyone who loved The Power of the Dog. Want books picked for you?
Someone who loved The Power of the Dog and Toy Story 3 reads different books from someone who loved The Power of the Dog and The Big Bang Theory. One movie isn’t much to go on. Rate four more — The Power of the Dog 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.