On the Beach, by Nevil Shute

Written in 1957 by Nevil Shute, an aviation engineer who worked on the development of secret weapons for the British in WWII, On the Beach is the story of how a few of the last generation face their fate. A nuclear war, triggered by who knows what, has instantly killed everyone in the northern hemisphere. [...]

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The Stupidest Angel: a Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror, by Christopher Moore

For some, Christmas is a time of joy; for others the holidays are difficult. For me the holidays are a big mix of nostalgia, stress, annoyance, confusion, and sheer wonder at the bizarre extremes of behavior that I see this time of year. That, in a nutshell (with emphasis on the nuts), is why I [...]

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Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood

We meet Snowman on the first page. He awakens in his perch up in a tree near the beach, looks at a watch that no longer works, and feels a jolt of terror run through him as he remembers that “nobody, nowhere knows what time it is.” It becomes obvious in the first few chapters [...]

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The Brief History of the Dead, by Kevin Brockmeier

Kevin Brockmeier’s The Brief History of the Dead is different from most of the other apocalyptic fiction I’ve read in that half the story is about what happens to the dead people after they’ve died. In this novel, when people die, they inhabit the City until the last person on Earth having a memory [...]

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The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

Poetic and devastating. Hopeful and maddening. McCarthy’s The Road is a post-apocalyptic novel that takes place several years after an unspecified event that has spewed a thick layer of dust over everything. The sky is gray, the sun is not seen, only remembered by those old enough. A man and his son walk for miles [...]

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Life As We Knew It, by Susan Beth Pfeffer

With a bang? With a whimper? Or a plague or nuclear bomb? Or asteroid? What happens when the world begins to end, or a cataclysmic event changes our civilization so radically and so quickly that vast numbers of people cannot adapt? This week I’ll explore five books that envision such scenarios.
The first [...]

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