Landman on Paramount+: Books to Read If You Love the Show
May 20, 2026
Landman on Paramount+ is adapted from Boomtown, a podcast by Christian Wallace — not a novel. Billy Bob Thornton plays Tommy Norris, a fixer for a West Texas oil company navigating cartel violence, corporate corruption, roughneck culture, and an industry operating at the edge of everything. It’s masculine, morally complicated, and soaked in the specific texture of the Permian Basin.
There’s no single source novel to recommend. But if the show opened something up for you — a appetite for West Texas, the oil patch, the violent economics of extraction, or just the particular atmosphere of men making bad decisions in vast landscapes — these are the books.
If You Want the West Texas World
No Country for Old Men (2005) — Cormac McCarthy If you haven’t read it, stop here. The novel that Landman owes the most to — not in plot, but in atmosphere, moral philosophy, and geography. The same West Texas landscape, the same violence emerging from economic desperation, the same sense that Sheriff Bell’s world (and Tommy Norris’s world) is being overwhelmed by forces that don’t have names yet. McCarthy’s prose style is unlike anything else in American fiction.
Blood Meridian (1985) — Cormac McCarthy Harder and more demanding than No Country, set in 1850s Texas and Mexico. An account of a scalping gang operating along the border that reads as both historical fiction and theological argument. If the landscape and moral darkness of Landman appeal to you, this is where American literature takes those themes to their furthest point.
Lonesome Dove (1985) — Larry McMurtry The Texas novel. A cattle drive from the Rio Grande to Montana — 900 pages that feel both too long and not long enough. McMurtry’s Texas is the foundational one, and Lonesome Dove establishes the exact tension between freedom and futility that Landman inherits. Won the Pulitzer Prize. Genuinely one of the great American novels.
If You Want the Oil Industry Specifically
Oil! (1927) — Upton Sinclair The original American oil novel. A California oil boom, a wildcatter father, and a son who becomes a socialist. Sinclair’s muck-raking instincts make it more ideologically direct than Landman, but the basic portrait of an industry that creates and destroys with equal enthusiasm is entirely recognisable.
The Big Rich (2009) — Bryan Burrough Non-fiction. The definitive account of how Texas oil money created the modern American right — the Hunt family, the Cullen family, the wildcatters who struck it rich in the early twentieth century and built a political culture around the conviction that their success was self-made. Landman’s corporate characters make much more sense after reading this.
There Will Be Blood — the Paul Thomas Anderson film is itself based on Oil!, but the more useful companion text is Daniel Plainview: An American Story, various critical essays on how Anderson transformed Sinclair’s socialist novel into a portrait of American capitalism as religion. The Daniel Day-Lewis performance and Tommy Norris are different expressions of the same archetype.
If You Want the Cartel and Border World
Don Winslow’s Cartel Trilogy Three novels — The Power of the Dog (2005), The Cartel (2015), The Border (2019) — covering the Mexican drug trade from the 1970s to the present. Winslow spent years researching the actual DEA operations and cartel structures he depicts. The violence in Landman operates at the edges of cartel territory; Winslow goes directly into the centre of it.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1927) — B. Traven Three Americans searching for gold in Mexico. The novel that established the template for stories about extraction, greed, and what the landscape does to men who come for what’s underneath it. Short, elemental, and still completely alive.
Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy — All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), Cities of the Plain (1998) Three novels following young men crossing between Texas and Mexico in the mid-twentieth century. Less violent than No Country or Blood Meridian, more elegiac — McCarthy’s most accessible work, and the one that most directly captures the specific texture of the border landscape Landman occupies.
If You Want the Roughneck Culture
Killers of the Flower Moon (2017) — David Grann Non-fiction. The Osage Nation in Oklahoma in the 1920s — the richest people per capita in the world after oil was discovered under their land — and the systematic murders carried out to steal their wealth. The original American story of what the oil industry does to the people standing on top of it. Adapted into a Scorsese film in 2023.
Friday Night Lights (1990) — H.G. Bissinger A season following the Permian Panthers — a high school football team in Odessa, Texas, the heart of the oil patch. The non-fiction that defined how the rest of America came to understand West Texas: the poverty, the violence, the communal investment in masculine performance, and the economic precarity underneath the swagger. Landman is set in the same town.
If You Want Something That Moves Like the Show
The Cutting Season (2012) — Attica Locke A plantation-turned-event-venue in Louisiana, a murdered woman found on the grounds, and a manager trying to hold the place together while the past presses in. Locke’s Louisiana is as atmospherically specific as Landman’s Texas, and she’s as interested in the economics underneath the surface story.
Bluebird, Bluebird (2017) — Attica Locke A Black Texas Ranger investigating murders in a small East Texas town — a novel where race, economics, and landscape are as inseparable as they are in Landman. Locke grew up in Texas and writes it from the inside. Part of the Highway 59 series.
The thread connecting all of these is extraction — of oil, of gold, of labour, of land — and what it does to the people doing the extracting. Landman is at its best when it’s about that: not just the cartel violence or the corporate manoeuvring, but the basic question of who pays the cost when an industry builds itself on taking things out of the ground.