78 books like Ex-Heroes

I will never survive a zombie apocalypse. I'm pretty sure my last words will be, "OMG, Zombies! I'm going to take a selfie! Arrgghh." But for those with good sense and practical intelligence, plans for defeating the undead will need to be developed and set in motion. That's where The Zombie Survival Guide comes in. Max Brooks' offering is a fascinating "how-to guide" for living in a world overrun with the living dead. This book has it all, from weapons and combat techniques to offensive and defensive strategies. The information in this book is invaluable for those prepping for the inevitable plaque of the undead. 

This is an absolute classic of the genre. Brooks draws in various ‘accounts’ of a recent zombie outbreak and structures them as if the broad details are common knowledge to his in-universe audience.

This approach means the real-world reader is always discovering new details and nuggets of information in a way that really whets the appetite while increasing the sense of horror at the way events unfolded in a world that isn’t quite our own.

Legends are made of powerful stuff, and nothing has greater power than a total flip in perspective. I still recall the gut-punch end to this book, though it’s been decades since I read it. 

Robert Neville is a vampire hunter by day and a tormented man by night. As seemingly the only living human in post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, Robert faces depression, isolation, alcoholism, and his undead neighbor, Ben Cortman, who appears outside Robert’s front door each night chanting, "Come out, Neville."

But when Robert is finally captured, and the truth of his situation is revealed, he gets a good look at the world through the eyes of the undead and is forced to ask himself, who am I? What have I become? 

You’d probably be forgiven if when you think of poetry you think of love, natural beauty, or at worst, melancholic sadness. But with just 17 syllables, the author manages to bring all the grit, gore, and mayhem of the zombie apocalypse into pleasant verse. Haiku is a popular, easily approachable form of poetry (i.e. not pretentious), which makes this book a fun, light read despite its blood-spattered pages.

This is another interactive, choose-your-path zombie book that I discovered after I’d published Infected. It’s off-the-wall zany. You play as a stuffed bunny who wields a chainsaw in the apocalypse. If most zombie stories are caused by viral pandemics these days, then Zombocalypse Now must be the resultant lucid fever dream. If you like nonsequiturs, this is the zombie book for you. 

It might seem strange that this outrageous and thoroughly enjoyable comedy wound up on my list of workplace comedies.

In the original version of Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet was stuck in a Regency-era comedy of manners. Her only choice of life “careers” was “wife.”

Grahame-Smith has taken Austin’s words and turned this classic upside down by giving her a very important job—Zombie Killer.

It’s a hilarious take on the power of women, and, strangely enough, adding a Zombie apocalypse has made some of the characters’ motivations much more understandable.

Elizabeth’s workplace is her small village in England, and, always on call, she has lots of work to do.

I loved this book, and I think Austin would have, too. It’s my kind of humor.

Dreadnought is a fantastic story about a young trans girl who inherits the powers of the most powerful superhero in the world.

Like Captain Marvel, it bestows upon her the looks of her idealized form. Unfortunately, this goes over like a ton of bricks with her family that she hadn't revealed herself to. The coming-of-age drama doesn't take a back seat to the superheroics, though, and I absolutely love the characters created by the author. 

Forging Hephaestus is a fantastic book about a tenuous treaty between superheroes and villains in a four-color world.

Hephaestus AKA Tori Rivas is a new supervillain and is learning the ropes from the most powerful one of them all, Fornax. Fornax is a lot nicer guy than you'd expect from the most terrifying of all villains, which shows this world is a lot more complicated than it seems.

I love the complexity, deep characterization, and thickness of this book. It’s over six hundred pages and full of fantastic details about a complicated but believable superhero world. By the end, I wanted to read a dozen more giant-sized volumes.

I was floored by this fantastic thriller. Most “invisible man” stories cast the invisible character as the villain, but Memoirs flips the script, and the result is magnificent. The protagonist, Nick, is the victim of a scientific accident, and must go on the run from the corrupt government agents who want to capture him. The result demonstrates that Nick missed his true calling—he should have been a secret agent himself. Saint’s protagonist is clever and resourceful as he navigates through every attempt to trap him. And the best part of this different take on the genre: It leaves you asking yourself, “What would I do?” I’ve read it three times, and I spend the intervening years wondering how I would have survived in Nick's shoes. An absolute must-read.

Werewolf stories are pretty straightforward, usually only varying as to whether or not the human can control their wolf-half. Not so with Howling Mad. David weaves a unique tale, not of a man cursed so that the full moon turns him into a wolf, but of a wolf cursed so that the full moon turns him into a man. As a comic book writer and novelist, David is known for his wit—and Howling Mad has plenty of that—but the highlight is David’s adroit examination of this trope reversal, from how the new man-wolf deals with suddenly having opposable thumbs to the effects of “civilized” society on the beast’s basic nature. I was so struck by the clever premise that it influenced some of my own supernatural tales.