A reading list for the end of the world

Books about the apocalypse

Tired of feeling like the world is on fire? The Twitter is frying your brain.

It’s time to stop doom scrolling and start doom reading. Lucky for you, I put together what I like to call “a reading list for the end of the world.” And no, I’m not talking about The Book of Revelation, you evangelical nut. I mean like novels that are post-apocalyptic.

This became one of my favorite genres in 2020 when it all felt a bit too real and we were wiping our packages with Lysol wipes lest we keel over and die.

Everyone has so many different ideas of how the world could end and some authors skip the apocalypse part all together and just focus on the individual feelings of living through the solitude after some unnamed world altering event. Seeing how people would behave when the structures of society suddenly disappear is an interesting thought exercise and its been explored in a lot of different ways in these novels.

Anyways, enough intro. I really love end of the world books and here are a few of my favorites.

Station Eleven

By Emily St. John Mandel

This one takes place twenty odd years after a world decimating illness and follows a theater troupe who travels the sparsely populated country putting on Shakespeare to try and preserve the arts in what has essentially become a hunter gatherer society. They made a tv show of this for HBO which is as good as the book, but they differ in so many big ways I suggest consuming both.

Severance

By Ling Ma

A very smart take on the zombie genre. Part immigrant story, part rumination on the millennial workplace, and part zombie pandemic story. This book is perfect. Its hard to believe she wrote this before covid was a thing, it feels like she predicted so many aspects of it so well from the need for N95 masks to the airborne illness coming here from China. I can’t recommend this one enough. Its fun and funny and scary all in one.

The Book of M

By Peng Shepherd

This is a really creative one where its a bit of an apocalypse via alzheimers. Slowly one by one people start losing their memories, small things at first and then larger and larger until they forget how to breathe. Both a roadtrip adventure and a mystery solving story in which the characters have to find out why this is happening and how to reverse it. A very spooky vibe to this one.

A Children’s Bible

By Lydia Millet

This one takes place over one night I think if I remember correctly which creates for a pretty exciting pace. It’s a biblical style apocalypse that takes place during a combined family vacation. It is from the children’s point of view I think (I don’t remember exactly) which gives it an interesting perspective.

Leave the World Behind

By Rumaan Alam

A family is AirBnBing a house in the Hamptons when some kind of apocalypse begins to happen. They aren’t clear in this about the exact cause of the end of the world but the real tension in the story comes from the owners of the AirBnB coming back to shelter in it with the renters. They made a Netflix movie of this with Julia Roberts and produced by the Obamas. Weirdly the Netflix movie was kind of bad though.

The Road

By Cormac Mccarthy

Another one with a famously unnamed apocalypse. This might be the peak of “post-apocalypic fiction” in which you don’t see any of the end of the world happening but it just drops you into life after it. Its at its heart a story about a father and his son and the bond between them. It is just them walking along a road trying to survive but its so beautifully written that its one of those books where you will be reading it and it feels like you’re in the sphere in las vegas. The world around you ceases to exist and then your phone will ring or something and you’ll be like “woah! Where am I?!” as you snap out of it.

To Paradise

By Hanya Yanagihara

This is a bit of a controversial one in the sense that no one else seemed to like it except me. Hanya is most famous for writing “A Little Life” in 2015 and this was her follow up to it. Hard to do a follow up when your last thing was such a breakout hit. But Hanya is not a hack. She didn’t just do more of the same, which you gotta respect. This book follows the residents of the same house that borders Washington Square Park in three distinct stories that each take place 100 years apart. The first is in 1893, the second is in 1993, and the final one is 2093. The apocalyptic part is in 2093 in a world that is ravaged my multiple waves of pandemics thus ushering in a Orwellian government who claims to be trying to keep people safe (but at what cost?). I really liked this and think its critical reception had a lot to do with the timing of its release (2022) and that it may have been a bit to “of the moment”.

Cabin at the End of the World

By Paul Tremblay

Is there an apocalypse happening or not? Thats the central question to this horror/thriller book about a young family who is vacationing at a cabin in the woods when zealouts break in and tell them the world is ending and they are the only ones who can prevent it. Fast paced, extremely violent, and suspenseful this feels kind of like a movie. They made a movie of it recently directed by M. Night Shyamalan. I didn’t see the movie yet so I can’t vouch for it, but I do think the source material would be easy to adapt and wouldn’t be surprised if it were great.

I Who Have Never Known Men

By Jacqueline Harpman

Haunting novel that reads like watching a scene through a fog. You never know more than the child narrator and she doesn’t know much about whats going on. Without spoiling much, she is in a cage with two dozen or so other women. They have memory of life before the cage and she does not. The cage is guarded. They are fed. They don’t know how they ended up there or why they are there. To tell anymore would be to ruin it, but its a very quick read and truly unlike the others on this list. Kind of wish there were ten other books set in this world telling it from other perspectives so I could piece together more of what is going on, but also not knowing is what makes it so special.

The Dog Stars

By Peter Heller

This one is so cool. So basically it’s post world-ending pandemic. Like 1% of people or less have survived. This guy who has a small prop plane (that’s a little plane with a propeller for my low IQ readers) and a dog. He lives with this grisly survivalist. The book shows how they survive and the systems they have set up and the friction between their two mindsets. The survivalist doesn’t trust anyone and prefers the solitude, the narrator with the dog yearns for connection with others again. You also get to learn more and more about their back stories as it goes. Its really terrific and doesn’t end up on a lot of lists. I think this is about as good as this genre can be done. Also keep in mind it’s a story with a dog in it, so there will be sad parts. You’re an adult, you know this. Doesn’t count as a spoiler.

If there are any good ones I missed, please leave them in the comments as I love this genre and will be inside reading a lot as it starts to get cold.

Thanks! ✌️

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Note: This is an excerpt from Uncynical #20, a post I wrote over a year ago when I didn’t have any subscribers. So apologies if it looked familiar. I just came across it again and wanted to share it with more people because I liked it. A dip into the archives if you will.