The Lost Valley

by Larry McMurtry

McMurtry gives you that same immersive dive into frontier life, but with a scope that sprawls across the entire American West—his two aging rangers feel like they could sit around a campfire with Nate King and swap stories about impossible promises and the cost of honor. The novel moves at its own unhurried pace, letting you live in the landscape rather than just pass through it.

by Michael Franzese

This is survival writing stripped down to its rawest form—a man alone against the wilderness after a grizzly attack, driven by a singular obsession that mirrors Nate's relentless pursuit through the mountains. Punke based it on real frontier accounts, so it has that same gritty authenticity Thompson brings to his mountain man narratives, but with an almost mythic quality to the protagonist's endurance.

by Cormac McCarthy

Fair warning: McCarthy's vision of the frontier is bleaker and more philosophical than Thompson's, but if you want to see what happens when you strip away the heroic veneer from western adventure, this is essential. The prose is almost biblical in its weight, and the encounters between cultures in the untamed landscape carry a moral complexity that will make you reconsider what 'survival' really means in that world.

by David Stephen Mitchell

Here's your surprise pick: Mitchell takes the same DNA of cross-cultural encounter and survival-through-wit that Thompson explores, but sets it in 18th-century Japan on a Dutch trading post. The isolation, the language barriers, the impossible loyalties—they're all there, but filtered through Mitchell's intricate prose and his fascination with how individuals navigate between worlds. It's adventure fiction that thinks like literary fiction.

by Charles Portis

Portis gives you a frontier pursuit narrative with a voice so distinctive it practically jumps off the page—a teenage girl and a weathered marshal tracking killers through Indian Territory. Like Thompson, Portis respects the landscape and the people who know it, but he's also deeply interested in character, in how people speak and think, and in the gap between youthful determination and hard-won wisdom.