The best apocalyptic thriller novels for when you really want to be scared

Station Eleven starts with the world falling apart, then moves forward. Since my novel starts two days after an earthquake, I thought Mandel’s book could teach me about the aftermath. And it did. Mandel’s book is incredible, and also features a strong female lead (like my book). But Mandel’s novel is also a weird book, and weird tends to work when it comes to post-apocalyptic material. The cult leader in my novel has to be at least a little bit influenced by the airport cult leader of Mandel’s imagination.

Margaret Atwood is terrifying even in subtle scenes, and I love how unsettled she makes you in this story. I never felt comfortable while reading The Handmaid’s Tale. I couldn’t put it down, and it stayed in my head afterward. The cult in my novel has a similar utilitarian attitude toward females as the leaders do in Gilead, and I give full credit to Atwood for influencing me as I revised my novel and wrote the religious sermons given by my cult leader. Bonus: Her sequel The Testaments taught me a lot as well.

Any Peter Heller novel will work here—The Dog Stars, The Painter, etc.—but The River is really interesting for a few reasons: Heller pushes his characters into the unknown on a river that serves both as a literal symbol and a propulsive, metaphorical symbol. There’s no way to backtrack on a river, so his two friends can’t go backwards. Then we add in the imminent danger of a forest fire and the creepy people also on the river with them, and the whole entire mix is scary!

This novel terrified me as well as taught me how to pace a scary, post-apocalyptic story. In this book—which I read twice—every tender moment between the boy and his father is juxtaposed against the harshness of the landscape or the imminent threats of violence and/or cannibalism. When I was writing my own thriller I thought of The Road and how it felt to be immersed in McCarthy’s world. I wanted my readers to be similarly caught up, and I wanted every moment of backstory to propel the reader forward. The scene where the father fills up the bathtub in The Road especially stayed with me.

I first read this novel a long time ago, my freshman year in high school. I read it during English class, hiding Misery inside the class copy of The Catcher In the Rye during “class reading time,” because Stephen King was so much more interesting to me than J.D. Salinger. I love how trapped the main character is (the author Paul Sheldon) in Misery, and I knew that I wanted to create that same feeling with my narrator Cielo—her being trapped in a ruined neighborhood with flooding all around. King creates tension in every single scene, propelling the reader forward and that’s something I aspire to do in my trilogy.)