76 books like Edge of Collapse

I write about flawed characters as a reflex. I’m more interested in exploring the journey of an alcoholic monster hunter with literal and figurative demons than a white knight. Throughout my life, I’ve seen the effects of substance abuse up close, and while difficult, it helped me find the humanity in flaws. I choose to write about those flaws with a humorous bend, because life is far too long to go through without jokes. As a result, I gravitate towards pithy antiheroes and dark comedy. To feel a character’s pain is human, to laugh in the midst of their darkest moments is divine.

I remember finding an old Edgar Rice Burroughs book on my grandfather’s bookshelf when I was nine years old. I opened the pages and started to read. From that moment, I was hooked on anything that had to do with fictional worlds. Books became my passion, gobbling them up by the hundreds. Also, attending a private Catholic elementary school, I constantly heard the tales of Revelations and the End Times. These two reasons instilled in me a passion for post-apocalyptic books and led me to write in the same genre. I hope you enjoy these books on the list as much as I have!

I remember finding an old Edgar Rice Burroughs book on my grandfather’s bookshelf when I was nine years old. I opened the pages and started to read. From that moment, I was hooked on anything that had to do with fictional worlds. Books became my passion, gobbling them up by the hundreds. Also, attending a private Catholic elementary school, I constantly heard the tales of Revelations and the End Times. These two reasons instilled in me a passion for post-apocalyptic books and led me to write in the same genre. I hope you enjoy these books on the list as much as I have!

I remember finding an old Edgar Rice Burroughs book on my grandfather’s bookshelf when I was nine years old. I opened the pages and started to read. From that moment, I was hooked on anything that had to do with fictional worlds. Books became my passion, gobbling them up by the hundreds. Also, attending a private Catholic elementary school, I constantly heard the tales of Revelations and the End Times. These two reasons instilled in me a passion for post-apocalyptic books and led me to write in the same genre. I hope you enjoy these books on the list as much as I have!

I got interested in the theme of a post-apocalyptic, dystopian world after hearing years of doomsday predictions, most of which never came true or were far from catastrophic. I wondered what some real threats to our way of life are and in 2015, started writing a novel, Defenders of Holt, about what a dystopian future might look like. After that book, I wanted to write about the events that led up to that dystopian world and settled on a coronal mass ejection (CME) as the apocalyptic event in the Teenage Survivalist series. I did many hours of research to back up my stories to make them as realistic as possible. 

I write in the speculative fiction genre where an overwhelming event, seemingly beyond the control of the main characters, underpins what happens to those characters. Exploring scenarios about how society would change as a result of cyber controlled multiple personality overlays, for example, is a great opportunity for considered thought. I believe that a mind without a question is dead. As a writer, I imbue my characters with this philosophy and then set them free to navigate the vast plane of destiny for themselves.

During my fifth year teaching 7th grade, I found myself repeating the same lessons as prior years, participating in the same club events, marching in the same parades, etc. My students would inevitably reach the end of the school year and move on, while I was forever frozen in 7th grade. Herein my fascination with time loops was born. Over a decade later, I’m now happily teaching high school English while moonlighting as a writer of stories featuring temporal anomalies and time travel. I hope to spread my wings into dystopians and fractured fairy tales in the future, but until then…I may or may not have 22 clocks in my house.

I’m a writer who loves to read and wants to write all the fantasy genres, or at least, wants to try. I’ve always been fascinated by monsters and the question, “What if?” Dystopian, Apocalyptic, Post-Apocalyptic, and Fantasy gives us the freedom to explore both these things. It’s amazing how these genres can bend our world and expectation when we explore these two things. What if the world ended but not in the way we expect? What if monsters were real? What if we are the real monsters? These questions are terrifying but so fascinating to consider and blending fantasy with apocalyptic has been a safe way to explore them.

I grew up watching the best horror movies of the 80s. My parents put me to bed watching Nightmare on Elm Street and this harbored my passion for a truly scary bedtime story. Zombies became my focus when I was trying to decide what road to take with my own writing. There’s something familiar about them, since they were once humans, but also terrifying. They don’t need to eat or sleep, they never stop, and they’ll just keep coming no matter how much you fight them off. I spent my twenties devouring every zombie book and movie I could and now I'm privileged to be a part of this classic horror genre.

As a writer of Psychological Horror who specializes in stories about serial killers, the first-person serial killer narrative stands out as a fascinating vehicle to explore the psyche of real human ‘monsters.’ Which is precisely what I did, using books from this list as subject material for my Master’s thesis. The research also informed Blood Related, my debut novel, a first-person serial killer narrative and the most controversial book I’ve written so far. Perhaps, gaining insight from fictional serial killers would be a failed enterprise if life didn’t imitate art, but the fact is that these types of narratives are mostly informed by their real-life counterparts. Be warned – read at your own discretion.