I read little to no fiction until about 1991, when I began to venture into that genre on long flights and during trips away from home. I now read a small, but reasonably steady, stream of novels and short stories annually.
I gravitate toward novels and short stories with powerful language, haunting characters (southern or western), intense themes, occasional philosophical monologue or dialogue, and layered moral themes. In short, I want writing that descriptively highlights the human condition and makes me think poignantly about the nature of reality. Such writing is often expressed in scenes and imagery that is stark, brutal, and even terrifying. If one enjoys "chick lit" (which, I am advised, is the genre comprised of books mainly written by women for women), one will likely not appreciate the authors I recommend in this post.
Notably, however, my lead recommendation is the female icon of Southern Gothic literature, Flannery O'Connor. Most of her writing takes place in the South and often includes morally flawed characters (is
there any other kind?). O'Connor, who died at age thirty-nine, wrote only two novels, but she published many deeply insightful and captivating short stories laced with a sardonic sense of humor. Steeped in a sacramental view of the world, O'Connor wrote from the perspective of Thomistic realism and layered her stories with deep meaning. She also drew criticism, often from those who failed to understand her work, for the brutality of some of her characters and the dark and disturbing elements in much of her writing. For my part, no writer of fiction, living or dead, makes me think more deeply than the noble soul Flannery O'Connor. A good place to start is with The Complete Stories. If you are captivated by that collection, you will likely enjoy reading a selection of her letters titled, The Habit of Being, for a good glimpse of the life and thought behind her writings. Then, you may want to follow by reading everything she has written.
My second recommendation is also a Southern writer--"philosophical novelist"--Walker Percy. Trained as a medical doctor, he became a novelist and literary critic of rare breadth and depth. He is known for focusing his writing on modern man's quest for faith and love in a chaotic world. His first and best known work, The Moviegoer, is an existential novel that won a National Book Award for fiction. It is a brilliant, 
slightly difficult to read, work about the tedium and boredom of life that is considered by many to be the best example of American existentialism. It is not, however, my favorite Percy novel. Although a bit challenging at the start, my favorite Percy novel is Love in the Ruins, a very creative post-60s book about America in a virtual state of civil war and anarchy. The hard drinking, lapsed Catholic, protagonist, Dr. Tom More, has invented the Ontological Lapsometer, a machine that can diagnose the condition of a person's soul. It is a humorous look at the psycho-babble of the age and pokes fun at about every conceivable group. Dr. Tom More, by the way, is the namesake of the 16th-century martyr Sir Thomas More, who said, "the times are never so bad that a good man can't live in them." A fascinating and fun parody of the self-help age is Percy's Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. Don't be taken in by the title. It is definitely not a self-help book. It is a provocative look at human behavior and it is intended to help one think. I'll mention one more. In The Thanatos Syndrome, Percy's final work, he prophetically strikes at the utopian social engineers so evident in the early 21st-century. There are two typical reactions to Walker Percy--one finds his work either creatively provocative or singularly uninspiring. For the former, there may be no better author than Percy for jump starting reflection on things that matter.
Cormac McCarthyis a Rhode Island born, Southern bred, author who has written a number of novels in the Southern Gothic and Western genres. McCarthy lived for years in Tennessee, moved to El Paso, Texas, and now lives near Santa Fe, New Mexico. Those who are unfamiliar with his writings may nonetheless be familiar with a recent Oscar-winning movie adapted from his book No Country for Old Men. A master of
language, description, and detail, McCarthy has been called the modern William Faulkner. I recommend his The Border Trilogy, which is an unabridged collection of three haunting novels of uncommon descriptive beauty. Perhaps the best known of McCarthy's works is Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West, which was recently listed by the New York Times Magazine among the greatest novels of the previous quarter-century, and hailed by Harold Bloom as the greatest work of any contemporary American author. A sort of 19th-century western variation of Dante's descent into hell, Blood Meridian is a graphically violent novel written in powerful prose and intended to provoke the reader to moral reflection. This is not a John Wayne western story, but then, John Wayne westerns were never known to provoke thought. If you like beautifully descriptive writing, stunning prose, and philosophical musings--and, you can stand intensity and brutality in a story, you will likely appreciate Cormac McCarthy.
