Honestly, nothing discombobulates me more than to be asked, "What's a good beach read?" Aside from the fact that I'm not really a beach person ("Why couldn't God just make the grass extend all the way to the edge of the ocean? Why was sand created?"), I also don't find it very relaxing to read standard beach fare. That is not to say I don't like popular fiction—I do. I just happen to like very particular types of popular fiction, and one that I find more entertaining than most is what can loosely be described as "country noir"—sometimes called "hillbilly noir".  What is "country noir?" Well, it usually involves criminal activity, and the setting is usually in the rural South, particularly in Appalachia or in the Ozarks, but anywhere that has a hardscrabble rural population will suffice. If you like good, dark crime fiction, than you also might enjoy reading some of the following examples—even at the beach.

Perhaps the best (and most accomplished) writer in the genre is Daniel Woodrell.  He is best known for his novel Winter's Bone, which was made into a very popular film that made a star out of Jennifer Lawrence. But, I want to focus on a collection of stories he wrote called The Outlaw Album because it demonstrates his greatest gifts as a writer: an unflinching gaze and a writing style that is at once both ornate and flat (believe me, I don't know how he does it). The first sentence of the first story, "The Echo of Neighborly Bones" acts as a magnet that compels you to keep reading: "Once Boshell finally killed his neighbor he couldn't quit killing him."

Tom Franklin's Hell At The Breech is based on a real event in Alabama's history when the Hell-At-The-Breech gang terrorized the local community. Of course, the only person who can stop them is the broken-down, aging sheriff who just wants to be left alone with his whiskey bottle. Imagine the movie Rio Bravo being directed by Sam Peckinpah instead of Howard Hawks, and you'll have a sense of the visceral ferocity that is generated by Franklin's prose.

In The Devil All The Time, Donald Ray Pollock places his young protagonist Arvin Russell in the backwoods of West Virginia to live with his grandma. There he learns to survive amidst a misfit cast of characters: a crooked sheriff and his serial-killing sister, a murderous preacher, a revivalist huckster, and a strychnine-drinking Pentecostal.  Through it all, Arvin learns many life lessons, none more useful than that "...the world was a sorry-ass place to be stuck living in."

Rural Kentucky is the setting for Alex Taylor's debut novel The Marble Orchard. After Beam Sheetmire accidentally kills his half-brother, he tries to run and encounters a disparate collection of characters that it would be best not to encounter. Through all the Gothic plot twists, Taylor relentlessly drives his story forward with his diamond-hard, precise prose. This is a novel about hard, pitiless men trying to live in a hard, pitiless place.