The best novels about things ending badly—really badly

Back in the 1950s, writers like Richard Matheson started moving the horror story away from the traditional, gothic tale often taking place in remote castles to a more modern setting where the horror was found in our cities and suburbs. I remember buying this paperback as a kid, sitting hunched over on a green bus stop bench, waiting for the bundle of newspapers to be dropped off on the sidewalk so I could begin my paper route for that day, reading another chapter about this lonely man barricaded in his home in a world that had been overrun by vampires. He spends his days staking them while they’re helpless, and his nights cowering behind his boarded-up windows as they surround his house, calling for him to give up.  

In 1968 I was a seventeen-year-old kid working in Manhattan. Getting off work each evening, I’d wander around the city. Can you imagine how much fun that would be for a young boy? One night, on 42nd Street, I found a movie theater showing an obscure, black-and-white movie called, Night of the Living Dead. The first thirty minutes, the audience laughed at the film, but as the movie rolled on, and the sense of dread about this group of strangers trapped together in a farmhouse, zombies outside trying to get inside, increased, the theater went silent. The director, George Romero, admitted in interviews his movie was inspired by I Am Legend. Near the end of his life, Romero, with Krauss, wrote this comprehensive history of the zombie apocalypse.

John Russo co-authored the original Night of the Living Dead script with Romero. Later on, he came up with a new slant on the zombie apocalypse, with a little more humor added, in Return of the Living Dead, which diverged from the grimmer Romero series and created its own franchise. His mass-market paperback novelization of that movie came out in 1978. I found a copy of it in a thrift store in downtown Dallas in the late Eighties, shoved on a shelf amid multiple copies of Reader’s Digest, its spine split, its pages marked up by an unknown reader with inked exclamation points and multiple question marks. It’s a great read, and a worthy addition to the canon.  

World War Z is a look back at the zombie apocalypse ten years afterwards, collecting interviews from survivors around the world on mankind’s struggle to overcome this challenge from the undead. I find it fascinating that a low-budget 1968 black and white movie, Night of the Living Dead, which the New York Times film critic called "revolting garbage," was the inspiration for World War Z, which became a bestseller, and instead of the unknown actors featured in NOTLD, headlined one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, Brad Pitt. They may be slow and stumble, but zombies have come a long way.  

There are novels about the end of the world, but then there are also novels about the world still being here, but no longer a world in which we want to live. Such is 1984. Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, where he and his co-workers spend their days rewriting history to conform it to the latest version of reality the totalitarian government everyone lives under decides is the latest ‘correct’ truth. Not only is there no longer freedom of speech, but there is no longer any freedom of thought. The Thought Police make sure of that. Under this absolute suppression of individuality, this total submission to the state, Winston has the unfortunate misfortune to fall in love.