I basically write everything I can’t say in real life. So my characters tend to be witty assholes who see the world for what it is: a raging dumpster fire. The best compliment I ever received came from a reviewer who said my writing style was like a “wholesome Palahniuk or less trippy Vonnegut.” That’s about as good as gets for any author, especially one who adores all things Kurt Vonnegut. I am a fan of books that trace the trajectory of human behavior to its logical end: self-destruction. So my list is made up of books that imagine funny, scary, sad, and absurd apocalyptic endings to human civilization.
As an avid Vonnegut reader and aficionado, I can confidently recommend any of his fourteen novels. You’ve probably heard of his most famous work, Slaughterhouse Five. My personal favorites are Galapagos and Mother Night. But in terms of apocalyptic collapses of human civilization, I’d have to suggest Cat’s Cradle as your next (perhaps, first) Vonnegut read.
Cat’s Cradle was published in 1963 as a satirical commentary on technology and religion, specifically referencing the creation of the atomic bomb and its devastating impacts on the planet and its people. But even more devastating is Vonnegut’s ice-nine, a solid crystal that turns any liquid it touches into more solid ice-nine. When some of this ice-nine accidentally falls into the ocean, all the water on Earth instantly solidifies, causing a mass extinction event and leaving only a few unlucky humans to fight for survival in the barren aftermath.
Everything Vonnegut writes borders on the absurd, so go into this read expecting a wild ride through a satirical universe filled with quirky characters and dark humor. I love this book and its wisecracking author. So Cat’s Cradle goes on top as my number one recommendation for best books in which the whole of human civilization collapses overnight.
One of America's greatest writers gives us his unique perspective on our fears of nuclear annihilation
Experiment.
Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global destruction preys on our deepest fears of witnessing Armageddon and, worse still, surviving it.
Solution.
Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding fathers of the atomic bomb, has left a deadly legacy to the world. For he is the inventor of ice-nine, a lethal chemical capable of freezing the entire planet. The search for its whereabouts leads to Hoenikker's three eccentric children, to a crazed dictator in the Caribbean, to…
Where Cat’s Cradle is a dark comedy, Blindness is just plain dark. A plague of blindness sweeps through an unnamed city in an unnamed country. The afflicted are quarantined in an abandoned asylum where all hell breaks loose. The story is told through the eyes of a woman who is inexplicably immune to the blindness, but who accompanies her husband in quarantine. She witnesses the worst of humanity, seeing everything that the inmates do when they think nobody is watching.
José Saramago won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his body of work, which includes this dystopian novel. Blindness is not for the weak of stomach or faint of heart. I have to admit that I get a little sick every time I think about the terrible ways the people treat each other in this book. It doesn’t help that I have horrific scenes from the movie version of Blindness etched into my skull. Read it first, then watch the movie if you dare.
No food, no water, no government, no obligation, no order.
Discover a chillingly powerful and prescient dystopian vision from one of Europe's greatest writers.
A driver waiting at the traffic lights goes blind. An ophthalmologist tries to diagnose his distinctive white blindness, but is affected before he can read the textbooks. It becomes a contagion, spreading throughout the city. Trying to stem the epidemic, the authorities herd the afflicted into a mental asylum where the wards are terrorised by blind thugs. And when fire destroys the asylum, the inmates burst forth and the last links with a supposedly civilised society…
Station Eleven hits a little close to home for those of us who are living through the COVID pandemic. In this quintessentially American tale, a swine flu pandemic wipes out a significant portion of the global population. The story takes place in the Great Lakes region and follows a traveling theater troupe through a post-apocalyptic world.
I read Station Eleven years before the COVID pandemic struck. At the time, the novel made me contemplate what life might be like for me in a pandemic. Would I be stocked up on enough food and water? Would I wait it out in my apartment? How would I survive?
Now I know what it’s like to live through a deadly pandemic, and it is nothing like the books. Turns out, life in a pandemic involves a lot of Netflix.
'Best novel. The big one . . . stands above all the others' - George R.R. Martin, author of Game of Thrones
Now an HBO Max original TV series
The New York Times Bestseller Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award Longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction National Book Awards Finalist PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist
What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty.
One snowy night in Toronto famous actor Arthur Leander dies on stage whilst performing the role of a lifetime. That same evening a deadly virus touches down in…
I found Dissipatio H.G. through a New York Times book review when the first English translation was released in 2020. The story was originally published in Italian in 1977, four years after the author died from suicide. This obscure but brilliant work of fiction takes place in a fictional mountain metropolis. One day our main character wakes up, and every human being on the entire planet has vanished. Except of course for him. Part philosophical treatise, part post-apocalyptic adventure, Dissipatio H.G. is a rare find for those lovers of eclectic literature.
A fantastic and philosophical vision of the apocalypse by one of the most striking Italian novelists of the twentieth century.
From his solitary buen retiro in the mountains, the last man on earth drives to the capital Chrysopolis to see if anyone else has survived the Vanishing. But there’s no one else, living or dead, in that city of “holy plutocracy,” with its fifty-six banks and as many churches. He’d left the metropolis to escape his fellow humans and their struggles and ambitions, but to find that the entire human race has evaporated in an instant is more than he…
What's the point of having it all when you have no one to share it with?
Brandon Miller has everything—except a commitment from the woman he loves. Angela Cooper has deep scars from a previous marriage. She's not interested in a do-over with Brandon or anyone.
A plague of vampires? Why not? This book is part of a trilogy but stands well on its own. In fact, I haven’t even read the other books in the trilogy. Maybe someday. The Passage was one of the first books I’d ever read that imagined vampirism as a global pandemic. And I ate it up. Of all the books on this list, The Passage is the least philosophical in its treatment of human nature. So if you came here for a purely apocalyptic adventure with lots of action, then this is your book.
Amy Harper Bellafonte is six years old and her mother thinks she's the most important person in the whole world. She is. Anthony Carter doesn't think he could ever be in a worse place than Death Row. He's wrong. FBI agent Brad Wolgast thinks something beyond imagination is coming. It is. THE PASSAGE. Deep in the jungles of eastern Colombia, Professor Jonas Lear has finally found what he's been searching for - and wishes to God he hadn't. In Memphis, Tennessee, a six-year-old girl called Amy is left at the convent of the Sisters of Mercy and wonders why her…
Jim Frost thinks that when you're dead, you're dead. Gone. Finished. Kaput. But on the eve of his seventy-third birthday, his daughter suggests he have his brain downloaded to a microchip for safe-keeping, and Jim is forced to consider what it really means to die, and what it might mean to live forever.
Winner in the 2015 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Awards and semifinalist in the 2015 Kindle Book Awards, Do Not Resuscitate is the firsthand account of Jim Frost, an aging misanthropist who witnessed the rise and fall of the United States as a world power, the digitalization of the planet, the advent of the water wars, and the near collapse of the global economy. Yet he remains impervious to it all. Concerned more with his plasma TV, high-speed Internet, and continual supply of hash, twentysomething Jim takes an under-the-table job off Craigslist delivering mysterious red coolers to strangers in cafés in an effort to pay the bills. But when Jim's enigmatic employer asks him to fly to North Korea for a delivery, Jim starts to wonder what he's gotten himself into.
Disgraced British anthropologist Nigel Rowe hopes his YouTube adventure channel will be just the treat to redeem him, but vengeful treasure hunters have other plans! Seeking a legendary Jesuit mission in Baja, Nigel saves his producer’s life when the man takes a bullet meant for him.
