Books like Love in the Ruins
A cracked dial trembles over these three books, registering the same stubborn fact: beneath our ingenious machines, doctrines, and evasions, the soul keeps making trouble.
If you liked Love in the Ruins, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with Love in the Ruins, and we tell you exactly what.
Miller shares Percy’s gift for turning apocalypse into theological comedy. In the desert after civilization’s collapse, monks preserve scraps of technical knowledge whose meanings they barely understand. Their earnest scholarship is hilarious, yet Miller never treats faith—or human destructiveness—as a joke.
Like Percy, he distrusts both scientific salvation and easy anti-intellectualism. The real problem is fallen humanity wielding its splendid intelligence. Winner of the Hugo Award and now a cornerstone of post-apocalyptic fiction, this is the rare classic whose wit, Catholic imagination, and bleak diagnosis have only sharpened with age.
Hazel Motes returns from military service determined to escape belief, eventually preaching a Church Without Christ. Unfortunately for him, unbelief can become as consuming as faith. O’Connor called Hazel a “Christian malgré lui,” and that violent struggle against grace is precisely what should grip a Percy reader.
Her debut novel has the same Southern mixture of grotesquerie, comic salesmanship, spiritual emergency, and compromised flesh. Every preacher, confidence man, automobile, and roadside attraction seems ludicrously physical yet charged with metaphysical consequence. Few novels are so savage about self-deception—or so unwilling to conclude that a ridiculous person is therefore beyond redemption.
A mysterious pamphlet inducts the credulous Lamar Jimmerson into the Gnomon Society, an American esoteric order devoted to secret wisdom, dubious diagrams, and organizational squabbling. Portis watches its believers manufacture an all-explaining system from vanity, loneliness, and a desperate wish to belong.
That makes the novel a superb companion to Percy’s satire of diagnostic gadgets and totalizing ideologies. Portis writes cleaner, drier comedy: pompous declarations collapse under one perfectly chosen mundane detail, while fools remain oddly lovable. Long cherished by his devoted readership as a comic masterpiece, Masters of Atlantis catches an essential American absurdity—the conviction that salvation must be available through a correspondence course, if only one fills out the forms correctly.