The 10 Best Books Without Movie or TV Adaptations, Ranked

Image via Picador Published Nov 10, 2026, 6:41 AM EST Jeremy has more than 2900 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows. His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings). When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account. He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels written by Stephen King, and plans to spend the next year or two getting through the author's 82,756 short stories and 105,433 novellas. Sign in to your Collider account It’s not a good or bad thing that there are a ton of books that get adapted, because some adaptations are good, and some are bad. Some good books have been made into bad movies/shows, some bad books have been improved through adaptations, some bad books have been similarly underwhelming movies/shows, and then, as a best-case scenario, there are also great books with great adaptations. This all makes those allegedly “unadaptable” books interesting to look at and think about, with the following titles all being especially high-quality, as novels. They're the best books that don’t have movie or TV adaptations… at least not yet. You can’t ever say never, but for now, you have to experience them as books (and no recent books will be included here, because there are just too many books from the last five or 10 years that don’t have adaptations; it’s probably more just a matter of time with some of those). 10 'The Big Nowhere' (1988) Image via The Mysterious Press James Ellroy is not an easy author to adapt, but there was a film version of L.A. Confidential that showed it could be done. Ellroy would not agree with the sentiment that said movie was great, but look, it was a great book, and it was also a great movie. They were great for some shared reasons, and then also great in different ways. The same can be said about The Shining (1977) and The Shining (1980), honestly. If you want evidence he’s definitely not an easy author to adapt, there’s the rather messy The Black Dahlia (2006), but parts of that movie are interesting. That one’s definitely inferior to the book, though. Anyway, The Black Dahlia was the first book in Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet, and L.A. Confidential was the third, with The Big Nowhere being between those two, and just as good quality-wise, albeit harder to adapt (one would assume) because it’s particularly dark, violent, and also complex on a narrative front. 9 'The Wolf's Hour' (1989) Image via Pocket Books The Wolf’s Hour is probably the most obscure book here, but it’d also be the one easiest to do as a movie, just from a writing/adapting perspective. The challenge would be getting enough money to have it look good, since this takes place during World War II, gets quite extravagant at points, and has a werewolf protagonist, so there would be a lot involved on the technical side of things. Possibly the only other challenge would be structure, because The Wolf’s Hour jumps back and forth between being about how the protagonist became a werewolf and also what he does as a spy during World War II, so maybe the flashbacks would be condensed, or that side of things would just be a prologue. After that, it’s all a matter of handling special effects and accurately recreating a time and place that’s been explored thoroughly throughout other movies and TV shows (few of them, however, include werewolves). 8 'Stoner' (1965) Image via Viking Press If you don’t mind feeling sad, Stoner is the sort of book that can be returned to quite easily. It is about one man’s life, and so the idea of reading it at different stages of one’s own life makes sense, because Stoner at 30 would probably feel quite different to Stoner at 50, and so on. Or maybe it’d still be very sad and relatable, just in slightly different ways at different ages. Speaking of ages, Stoner has been around for ages, though it’s been properly acclaimed and celebrated for a little less time, and even then, there’s still a sense of it being a little underrated. Anyone could get something out of reading this, and it’s also quite straightforward, so adapting it wouldn’t be insurmountable, in terms of difficulty, but capturing the spirit of the book might be (and so that could account for nothing coming of a movie adaptation that was first discussed and reported on back in 2015). 7 'Underworld' (1997) Image via Charles Scribner's Sons Owing to its length, Underworld would function best as a miniseries, and even then, with a runtime of say seven to nine hours, there would still be some strain in getting everything in. A movie adaptation, if severely streamlined, would technically be possible, but you'd ultimately have to leave out so many of the tangents and interesting threads in Underworld that make it feel like such an impressive overall novel. It’s a novel about a baseball and U.S. history throughout the back half of the 20th century, basically. But nothing here is basic, because Underworld does cool things with its structure and chronology. Don DeLillo is a generally hard-to-adapt author, because even if Cosmopolis and White Noise were somewhat admirable efforts, both (and especially White Noise) failed to have the same impact as the books of the same name. 6 Most of 'The Dark Tower' (1982–2004) Yes, there’s a disclaimer here, and it’s that in 2017, there was a movie called The Dark Tower. It was not very good, and it also didn’t feel very Dark Tower-ish, but it was an official adaptation, so there’s that. It wasn’t very successful, though, and so there ultimately weren't any sequels that might've continued to kinda/sorta adapt other books in The Dark Tower series, nor any opportunities to make follow-ups that were more faithful. So, as it stands, you could argue that one out of the seven main books in the series has been adapted, but to counter that, it’s probably easier to argue that it’s not even a “real adaptation.” That means you’ve got six or six and a half top-quality and endlessly interesting Stephen King books that haven’t yet made the jump to the medium of either film or television. There have long been rumblings about Mike Flanagan doing a full-on TV series adaptation of all the books, so hopefully that comes to fruition eventually and then also does the entire thing justice. 5 'Blood Meridian' (1985) Image via Random House So, about two and a half years ago, yours truly wrote about Blood Meridian as a book that'll never get a movie adaptation (a few other titles from that ranking have inevitably ended up in this ranking). Blood Meridian was the closest to a “might still happen” in that ranking, but it’s two and a half years later, and Blood Meridian is still something you can only experience through reading (or listening, of course, if you're into audiobooks). Or do you go ahead and make it alienating and somewhat challenging to latch onto, in turn being potentially more faithful to the text? Blood Meridian is by Cormac McCarthy, and his stories are challenging, though a few have successfully made the jump from the page to the screen; see The Road and No Country for Old Men, naturally. As a book, Blood Meridian might be an even more impressive achievement, so there’s that pressure in doing it right, and there’s also the difficulty of how much to show (Blood Meridian is notoriously violent) as well as what might need to be either cut down or expanded for things to make sense on screen. Or do you go ahead and make it alienating and somewhat challenging to latch onto, in turn being potentially more faithful to the text? It’s hard. See you again in another two and a half years when another article gets written here about books without adaptations. 4 'Infinite Jest' (1996) Image via Little, Brown and Company Some other books here might be difficult to summarize if you want to try to break down what they're about, but with Infinite Jest, part of the challenge is assigning a genre, even if you’ve got the option to assign multiple genres. The book’s kind of funny? But it’s not always funny. It’s almost science fiction or a little dystopian? But not in the ways you might expect. And it is a psychological drama of sorts, but without the focus on just one or two characters the way you might find in most psychological drama/thriller stories. There are so many different threads here, and the links between them aren’t always obvious, and then things are made further mind-bending thanks to the narrative playing out in a continually surprising order. The word “Infinite” being in the title feels very fitting, with the whole book feeling like it expands beyond its already considerable length somehow, so the act of streamlining or condensing it and getting it into another medium feels close to insurmountable, honestly. 3 'House of Leaves' (2000) Image via Random House If you tackle House of Leaves after conquering Infinite Jest, you'll probably find it a comparatively easier read, but only comparatively, because on its own, and against most other metrics, this is one of the more head-spinning novels out there. You can break down the different threads here a little easier, though, and if only one thread or story within the broader work were tackled through an adaptation, you could see it being doable. There is The Navidson Record here, after all, which is an apparent documentary that’s viewed and experienced within House of Leaves like a found footage horror movie, but what can be trusted about the film, and whether it’s even “real” within the book’s world, complicates things. And so The Navidson Record becoming a movie would be cool, but House of Leaves is more exciting and interesting because of everything that goes on around that piece of footage, so having a series or movie emotionally deliver what this book does is hard to imagine ever being a possibility. 2 'A Confederacy of Dunces' (1980) Image via Grove Press It’s unique, and so that’s a factor in there being no adaptation of A Confederacy of Dunces, since doing it justice in a form other than how it was originally written would be quite a daunting task. That’s despite it technically having a simple premise, because it’s about a man named Ignatius J. Reilly and his struggles to find employment in New Orleans during the 1960s. That is the premise, and it’s not exactly the story. There isn't much of a real story here in the way you'd get with most books, since A Confederacy of Dunces is more about the characters and conveying a certain time and place, all the while having a unique tone that’s simultaneously funny and downbeat. Also, there is a supposed curse around people’s attempts to adapt A Confederacy of Dunces, so if you want to disappear down that rabbit hole, it is kind of interesting. 1 'Gravity's Rainbow' (1973) Image via Viking Press While it’s not a horror book, Gravity’s Rainbow is one of the most disturbing pieces of fiction out there, at least if you're looking at novels that are fairly well known… “popular” might be a stretch, but for something with this much confusion and disturbing content, Gravity’s Rainbow does have a certain presence. Or call it notoriety. That might be more accurate. It has a bit of everything tonally, though the strongest emotion you're likely to get out of reading it is anxiety, because Gravity’s Rainbow does a good job of making you question so many things about history, human nature, and just existence in general. Like, good luck to anyone who genuinely has a go at adapting it, but one assumes even Paul Thomas Anderson (the only filmmaker to have tackled Thomas Pynchon through adaptations, with Inherent Vice and the loose reworking of Vineland that was One Battle After Another) would want to stay away from touching this particular novel.