Best Apocalyptic Books

Spiderman80884

I'm going through a real 'Apocalyptic' phase at the moment and am looking for some (really) good fictional books relating to the subject.

I've recently read The Road, The Stand, The Passage. Any recommends along those lines would be appreciated.

Ta.

mcgovern

Recent ones that come to mind is The Strain/The Fall/The Night Eternal by Chuck Hogan and Guillermo del Torro. A rather famous one (which is much better than the film) is I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. Also Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (though this doesn't really show you much of the post apocalyptic world).
If you are on Goodreads, you might like this group which mainly deals with apocalyptic books.

Tabnabs

Lord of the Flies would probably be the classic apocalyptic book?

But also check out A Canticle for Leibowitz and World War Z

old gregg

Jim Crace - The Pesthouse

The book came out around the same time as The Road. I liked it largely because I was going through a Crace phase. Reviews were mixed though. Perhaps due in part to comparisons with The Road.

Paddy Samurai

If you liked The Stand ,then you should read Swan Song by McCammon.

Kinski

Early JG Ballard is worth reading, especially The Drought and The Drowned World. I quite enjoyed Douglas Coupland's playful take on the millennial novel, Girlfriend In a Coma (a writer I'm not all that keen on usually.) Very much influenced by McCarthy, Alden Bell's recent zombie novel The Reapers Are the Angels is one I can't recommend enough.

There's a big market for so-called "Rapture" fiction in the US right now, exemplified by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins's Left Behind series. The books sound rubbish, but there's something about writers doing such a trashy take on Christian eschatology that makes me think they could be quite fun. I mean, in the series mentioned, the Antichrist is a Romanian Secretary-General of the UN, who was conceived through a combination of genetic engineering and IVF (those twin evils!), whose sidekick is able to dispatch non-followers with lightening bolts. Doesn't that sound great?!

Shryke

Terminal World by Alastair Reynolds for some post-apocalyptic sci-fi.

dots03

Day by Day Armageddon by J. L. Bourne is also worth checking out...it's a Zombie novel written in a diary format and is a good read.

Paddy Samurai

dots03 wrote: »

Day by Day Armageddon by J. L. Bourne is also worth checking out...it's a Zombie novel written in a diary format and is a good read.

+1 .
Read the first two and thought they were damn good.I read somewhere that part three is out soon.

daithiocondun

I would suggest:

"1984" by George Orwell
"The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood
"In the Country of Last Things" by Paul Auster
"The Road" by Cormac McCarty