Hello, my little cenobites! My inspiration for this post was an internet outage we experienced in my area a few weeks ago. Service went out for over a week, and I know that we now rely on the internet for a lot of things, but I didn’t fully understand just how much until it wasn’t there.
While I had all that internet-free time–which sounds amazing, but was actually incredibly stressful because I need it to do my job–I started thinking about the whole world if the internet goes out. It wouldn’t be pretty. People are not fully prepared for what going back to analog means.
That is why I thought of books about various apocalypses. There are a LOT of them, from mild interruptions to full-on destruction of the world. These outages happen for all kinds of reasons: weather, war, nature, disease, take your pick. Instead of going over the same post-apocalyptic novels used in every list—The Road, The Stand, I Am Legend, On the Beach, etc.—the books below are not quite as well-known to everyone, but are all really excellent and highly unsettling.
Also, as I write this post, a massive winter storm is expected to wreak havoc across 33 of the 50 states, causing tons of damage and power outages, so maybe we’ll find out sooner than we thought. Although if you’re reading this, it means everything worked out eventually. Fingers crossed!
The Reapers are the Angels by Alden Bell
This is probably my favorite zombie novel. It’s about a young woman named Temple who is searching a monster-infested America in hopes of finding her brother, while a killer is hot on her heels. Temple is also looking for redemption, but mostly she just finds zombies.
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Last Ones Left Alive By Sarah Davis-Goff
In this riveting debut, isolation can’t save people from the end of the world forever. Orpen has been raised on a small island off the coast of Ireland, brought up on tales of the world before the deadly flesh-eating skrakes, who now inhabit their country. Alone with her mother and Maeve, Orpen has been told their isolation is the only way to stay safe. But when tragedy strikes, Orpen knows their sole chance at survival is to go to the dangerous mainland.
The Getaway by Lamar Giles
This is an excellent YA thriller about racism and class. Jay is a Black teen who has the good fortune to live in Karloff Country, a gated resort where the privileged vacation while the rest of the world suffers from a lack of necessities. Jay and his family are able to be there because they work at the resort’s amusement park. But things change when the rich start coming to the resort and don’t leave, and suddenly, the less privileged are disappearing.
The Salt Line by Holly Goddard Jones
As if the end of civilization isn’t bad enough, there are also ticks. In a future United States, humanity has been reduced to a small section of the country by deadly ticks. Inside the burned-out zone, humans are safe. But there is big money to be made taking danger enthusiasts outside the zone. For one such tour, things go horribly wrong when it turns out the deadly ticks aren’t the only thing the group has to fear.
Ice by Anna Kavan
This is a 1967 classic of science fiction about environmental collapse and sexual assault, and it’s still horrifyingly chilling today. As the world is slowly covered in ice and society breaks down, an unnamed narrator hunts a girl he used to love, but for what reasons and to what end, we don’t know.
Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice
This award-winning novel is so frightening because it leaves much up to the imagination.
After power goes out for days in a small, isolated northern Anishinaabe community, the people realize they need to start planning for what to do if it never returns. But soon, power struggles emerge, while outsiders appear with frightening stories of the world beyond their town.
You Weren’t Meant to Be Human by Andrew Joseph White
While White’s recent adult horror debut is technically more dystopian-focused than post-apocalyptic, I take every opportunity I can to shout about it. Why? Because it’s one of the most upsetting, grossest books I have read lately, and it’s also amazing! It’s the story of an alien invasion that wipes out a lot of humans in rural West Virginia and leaves behind a hive of a few survivors. Under all the gore and terror is an important story about navigating identity and dysphoria as a neurodivergent person and a trans person.
Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson
And finally, in what feels more and more likely, technology has turned against the humans. The AI that the world has depended upon has decided it doesn’t need people around anymore, and its robots attack, killing most of civilization. A lone group of survivors narrates the novel, telling the story of the deadly strikes while trying to decide if they have any chance of ever fighting back.
Okay, star bits, now take the knowledge you have learned here today and use it for good, not evil. If you want to know more about books, I talk about books pretty much nonstop (when I’m not reading them), and you can hear me say lots of adjectives about them on the Book Riot podcast All the Books! and on Instagram.
English (US) · 