HBO’s propulsive, nail-biting series “The Last of Us” — based on the acclaimed video game by Naughty Dog — offers a bleak and brutal depiction of the apocalypse, as hardscrabble survivors including Joel (Pedro Pascal), Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Dina (Isabela Merced) navigate a fallen world crawling with flesh-eating “infected,” not to mention other healthy humans who range from desperate and mistrustful to aggressively sadistic. The show is violent and at times disturbing — especially in its shocking second season, which recently concluded — but there’s more to it than action spectacle. A deep undercurrent of emotion runs through the series, making this story about zombies compulsively watchable, frequently moving and deeply human.
While the first season of the show faithfully adapted the eponymous video game, HBO has split the story of its sequel, 2020’s The Last of Us Part II, into two installments — meaning that we’re leaving things on a considerable cliffhanger. If your craving for killer fungi, survival stories, revenge tales and postapocalyptic considerations of what we owe to each other isn’t quite satisfied, these 10 novels can scratch that itch.
Severance
by Ling Ma
Not to be confused with another popular 2025 series, this darkly comic novel — published two years before Covid-19 — is an incisive (and prescient) portrait of a society stumbling through a devastating pandemic. The contagion here is Shen Fever, a debilitating fungal disease that turns its victims into (harmless) zombies. Even as it decimates the globe, Candace Chen, a millennial Chinese American woman living in New York City, resolves to see out the end of her contract doing product coordination for a Bible publisher. It’s fairly soul-sucking drudgery but, it turns out, an improvement on life after societal collapse, when Candace finds herself sheltering in an Illinois shopping mall with a band of other survivors from whom she’s hiding a secret.
Read our review.
Manhunt
by Gretchen Felker-Martin
In Felker-Martin’s postapocalyptic thriller, a plague that targets testosterone has turned half the population into a brainless mass of murderers and rapists, leaving the matriarchy to reign supreme. But for Beth and Fran, two trans women keeping their hormones in check with home remedies, it isn’t only the bloodthirsty men they need to worry about: Roving bands of TERFs view them not as fellow sister-survivors but as interlopers who need to be expunged. A smart book about the politics of gender and the perils of transphobia, “Manhunt” could easily have turned didactic — but Felker-Martin, a dyed-in-the-wool horror fan, delights in the genre’s free-flowing carnage, and that glee is tons of fun.
What Moves the Dead
by T. Kingfisher
Ursula Vernon, writing under a pseudonym, reimagines Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” as fungus-themed body horror in this slender, atmospheric novel set in the fictitious European nation of Ruravia. Alex Easton, a retired soldier of indeterminate gender, travels to the remote country home of the Ushers, Alex’s childhood friends who have taken ill with a mysterious sickness that also seems to be afflicting various wildlife on the manor grounds. The style is Gothic and the tone is gloomy but playful, befitting the connection to Poe — but the creepy fungal growths and malformed hares are entirely Vernon’s own.
How High We Go in the Dark
by Sequoia Nagamatsu
Nagamatsu’s postapocalyptic novel begins like so many others: with the discovery of a virus, unearthed from the melting Siberian permafrost. But as the “Arctic plague” devastates the globe, the novel breaks into fragments — each a kind of short-form fable about the aftershocks of modern civilization. Some, like a story about a euthanasia theme park that painlessly executes terminally ill children, have the caustic sting of David Foster Wallace; others, particularly a late episode set on a vessel launched into deep space, pose poignant questions about what it means to be human. It’s an impressive range of interconnected stories — and that’s without mentioning the one about the talking pig.
Read our review.
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
An apocalypse story seemed like a considerable departure for the author of “All the Pretty Horses,” “No Country for Old Men” and other beloved westerns. But while the end-of-the-world setting suggests a pivot to sci-fi, the familiar hallmarks of McCarthy’s fiction — ultra-spare prose, uncompromising realism — make this entirely of a piece with his previous work. A father and son traverse a barren American landscape in the aftermath of an undisclosed cataclysm, encountering the best and worst of humanity. Amid the desolation, McCarthy offers occasional glimpses of hope, and a beautiful depiction of an unbreakable parental bond.
Read our review.
Station Eleven
by Emily St. John Mandel
This hauntingly beautiful novel opens with the emergence of a virulent new flu, which kills its victims so rapidly that an actor is felled in the middle of a performance of “King Lear”; 20 years later, where we lay our scene, most of the world’s population has long since been wiped out. The story is centered around Kirsten, an 8-year-old child actor at the onset of the plague, who now roams the area around the Great Lakes with the Traveling Symphony, a troupe of actors who perform classical music and Shakespeare plays for colonies of fellow survivors. Evocative, page-turning and full of intrigue, Mandel’s 2014 novel is more relevant than ever post-Covid. (There is also an excellent HBO series adaptation.)
Read our review.
Parable of the Sower
by Octavia E. Butler
Butler’s novel, published in 1993, is set in 2024 in a United States devastated by climate change, overrun with corrupt white nationalists and governed by a feckless autocrat who promises to “make America great again.” It is science fiction that blurs disconcertingly into contemporary realism: Scenes of large swaths of California ablaze can be found both in its pages and across this year’s news. It is also an astute, heart-pumping story about the meaning of community, and about a teenage girl with an uncanny gift navigating the privileges and dangers that come with it.
Read more about Butler’s prescient fiction.
California
by Edan Lepucki
Lepucki’s understated take on the apocalypse imagines a civilization fractured by a changing climate in which Americans reside in walled-off communities or live as best they can off the land. We follow a 20-something couple — Cal, a survivalist, and Frida, a former banker — as they traverse the Golden State in search of a stable place to land. By narrowing her focus to ordinary human relationships — which, in this new world, are fraught with many of the same tensions (miscommunication, longing, diverging needs) that prevailed in the old one — Lepucki puts a nuanced new spin on an often sensationalized genre.
Read our review.
World War Z
by Max Brooks
Subtitled “An Oral History of the Zombie War” — and written as a follow-up to “The Zombie Survival Guide,” a fictitious instructional manual for dealing with a plague of the undead — Brooks’s cleverly structured novel is told through a series of interviews with survivors of the apocalypse. The sober, pseudoscientific naturalism of Brooks’s writing has notes of Michael Crichton (particularly his classic techno-thriller “The Andromeda Strain”), offering a vividly plausible simulation of how things might go if humankind had to fight off a brain-eating horde. (Spoiler: Not great!)
Read our review.
The Girl With All the Gifts
by M.R. Carey
Melanie is a guileless 10-year-old girl living in Britain. She is well-mannered, possesses a genius I.Q. … and insatiably craves human flesh. When the book begins, Melanie — one of the “hungry,” as this world calls its undead — is under observation at a military base in London, but when scavengers attack the facility, she and her teacher are forced to go on the run. In telling this story of humanity’s last stand against a devastating fungal infection largely through Melanie’s eyes, Carey adds a tragic dimension to a brutal tale — like Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go” if it involved zombies.
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