Post Apocalyptic Horror: 21 Horrifying Books That Will Make You Want to Build a Bunker
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Surviving the Unthinkable: 21 Terrifying Post-Apocalyptic Reads That'll Have You Stockpiling Supplies
Buckle up for a journey into the heart of darkness as we explore 21 bone-chilling post-apocalyptic reads that'll have you rethinking your emergency preparedness and maybe even eyeing that dusty old fallout shelter in your backyard.
Have you ever pondered the grim possibility of civilization's collapse?
Did your stress levels just skyrocket at the mere thought?
I get it—I've been avoiding this genre like the plague for what feels like forever because, let's face it, the idea of societal breakdown is anxiety-inducing on a whole other level.
But here's the kicker: living in today's late-capitalistic world, coupled with the responsibilities of adulthood and parenthood (for some), has a funny way of putting things into perspective, at least it did for me. Suddenly, the prospect of civilization crumbling to dust seems like just another item on the daily anxiety menu.
And against all odds, despite my life-long reluctance, I found myself drawn to the post-apocalyptic genre like a moth to a flame.
It all started with a little show called The Last of Us—seriously, can we take a moment to appreciate Pedro and Bella's stellar performances?—and before I knew it, I was knee-deep in a pile of spine-tingling reads that left me questioning my own preparedness for the worst.
Haven’t seen The Last of Us yet? Have a look, I bet you’ll be hooked!
If you're anything like me—an avid lover of horror with a morbid curiosity for the macabre—then you're in for a treat.
Join me as we unravel the threads of civilization's unraveling and delve headfirst into a world where survival is not guaranteed and every day is a fight for existence.
As we navigate the desolate landscapes and face the horrors lurking around every corner, you'll come to understand the true essence of post-apocalyptic fiction.
It's not just about the end of the world—it's about the resilience of the human spirit in the face of overwhelming adversity, the darkness that resides within us all, and the flickering spark of hope that refuses to be extinguished.
So grab your flashlight, check your supplies, and steel yourself for a journey into the unknown.
These 21 tales of terror will chill you to the bone and leave you questioning everything you thought you knew about the end of the world.
Ready or not, the apocalypse awaits.
Let's dive right in.
Summary
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⭐️ 3.9 stars on Goodreads! ⭐️
First the birds disappeared.
Then the insects took over
Then the madness began . . .
They call it Wanderer's Folly--a disease of delusions, of daydreams and nightmares. A plague threatening to wipe out the human race.
After two years of creeping decay, David Arlen woke up one morning thinking that the worst was over. By midnight, he's bleeding and terrified, his wife is dead, and he's on the run in a stolen car with his eight-year-old daughter, who may be the key to a cure.
Ellie is a special girl. Deep. Insightful. And she knows David is lying to her. Lying about her mother. Lying about what they're running from. And lying about what he sees when he takes his eyes off the road . . .
2. The Fireman - Joe Hill
⭐️ 3.9 stars on Goodreads! ⭐️
No one knows exactly when it began or where it originated. A terrifying new plague is spreading like wildfire across the country, striking cities one by one: Boston, Detroit, Seattle. The doctors call it Draco Incendia Trychophyton. To everyone else it’s Dragonscale, a highly contagious, deadly spore that marks its hosts with beautiful black and gold marks across their bodies—before causing them to burst into flames. Millions are infected; blazes erupt everywhere. There is no antidote. No one is safe.
Harper Grayson, a compassionate, dedicated nurse as pragmatic as Mary Poppins, treated hundreds of infected patients before her hospital burned to the ground. Now she’s discovered the telltale gold-flecked marks on her skin. When the outbreak first began, she and her husband, Jakob, had made a pact: they would take matters into their own hands if they became infected. To Jakob’s dismay, Harper wants to live—at least until the fetus she is carrying comes to term. At the hospital, she witnessed infected mothers give birth to healthy babies and believes hers will be fine too. . . if she can live long enough to deliver the child.
Convinced that his do-gooding wife has made him sick, Jakob becomes unhinged, and eventually abandons her as their placid New England community collapses in terror. The chaos gives rise to ruthless Cremation Squads—armed, self-appointed posses roaming the streets and woods to exterminate those who they believe carry the spore. But Harper isn’t as alone as she fears: a mysterious and compelling stranger she briefly met at the hospital, a man in a dirty yellow fire fighter’s jacket, carrying a hooked iron bar, straddles the abyss between insanity and death. Known as The Fireman, he strolls the ruins of New Hampshire, a madman afflicted with Dragonscale who has learned to control the fire within himself, using it as a shield to protect the hunted . . . and as a weapon to avenge the wronged.
In the desperate season to come, as the world burns out of control, Harper must learn the Fireman’s secrets before her life—and that of her unborn child—goes up in smoke.
3. Yesterday's Gone: Season One - Sean Platt
⭐️ 3.8 stars on Goodreads! ⭐️
They thought they were alone. But they were wrong...
On October 15th, humanity went missing, leaving only a handful of scattered survivors behind. The world is now empty of friends, family, and neighbors.
Among them, an eight-year-old child searches for his family, only to find a nightmare he never expected.
A special agent turned enemy of the state survives a fiery plane crash with no way to reach his daughter. But is he who he says, or even thinks he is?
A reporter will do anything to reconnect with his son, even if he has to wander the empty streets of Manhattan to find him, and even if those streets aren't really so empty.
A mother and daughter are desperate to survive with their two remaining neighbors, on the run but with nowhere to go.
A teenage boy who spent his life bullied and who might be the only person in the world that's happy to see it gone.
And a brilliantly brutal serial killer who will do anything he can to stay at the top of the food chain.
Now, these strangers must find the strength to survive in the new world.
But they are not alone.
In the absence of civilization, a new threat emerges. In the stillness, it waits and watches, preying on their weakness. Their only hope is to find more survivors, rise above their fear, and face the oncoming darkness.
But can they unite before they too are lost? And can they all be trusted?
★★★★★ "I started reading this book and COULD. NOT. STOP. I read it at work. I read it in the bathroom. I admit it - I even read it a little while driving - during every stop light and every parking lot imitation I sat through on I-84. I couldn't put it down until I was done." -- Sidney von Katzendame
4. Bunker Dogs - Gage Greenwood
⭐️ 4.3 stars on Goodreads! ⭐️
Don't just fear what you're hiding from, fear what you're hiding with.
Cassie's night of babysitting goes to hell when bombs explode in the distance, planes fly overhead at low altitudes, and alerts on her phone tell her to seek shelter. Luckily, the boy she babysits tells her his father has a bunker in the yard.
When they make their way to this underground shelter, they soon discover they aren't alone. Something is living in the bunker, lurking in the walls, and it's hungry.
What started as a normal night of babysitting quickly descends into a psychological and claustrophobic nightmare.
5. The Road - Cormac McCarthy (Pulitzer Prize Winner!)
⭐️ 4.0 stars on Goodreads! ⭐️
A searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece.
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.
The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.
6. Winter's Myths - Gage Greenwood
⭐️ 4.4 stars on Goodreads! ⭐️
When the world ends, who will tell the story?
After a disease ravages his underground community, Winter escapes with his daughters to the dangerous surface of Earth. Believing the planet is largely abandoned, he struggles to make sense of this strange new world while trying to keep his family alive... But the surface is not all complicated artifacts and relics of a deserted universe. Winter is certain something—or someone—is hunting them.
He weaves wild tales to entertain and teach his daughters, turning celebrities into demigods and Abe Lincoln into an ice giant. As the journey grows darker and more dangerous, his mythologies keep not only his children from confusion and despair, but him as well.
With tensions rising and danger at every corner, will Winter keep his family alive long enough to finish his tales?
7. The Testing (Trilogy Book 1) - Joelle Charbonneau
⭐️ 4.1 stars on Goodreads ⭐️
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Isn't that what they say? But how close is too close when they may be one and the same?
The Seven Stages War left much of the planet a charred wasteland. The future belongs to the next generation's chosen few who must rebuild it. But to enter this elite group, candidates must first pass The Testing—their one chance at a college education and a rewarding career.
Cia Vale is honoured to be chosen as a Testing candidate; eager to prove her worthiness as a University student and future leader of the United Commonwealth. But on the eve of her departure, her father's advice hints at a darker side to her upcoming studies—trust no one.
But surely she can trust Tomas, her handsome childhood friend who offers an alliance? Tomas, who seems to care more about her with the passing of every gruelling (and deadly) day of the Testing.
To survive, Cia must choose: love without truth or life without trust.
PS: If you’re a Hunger Game’s fan, this book is for you!
8. I Am Legend - Richard Matheson
⭐️ 4.1 stars on Goodreads ⭐️
Robert Neville is the last living man on Earth... but he is not alone. Every other man, woman and child on the planet has become a vampire, and they are hungry for Neville's blood.
By day he is the hunter, stalking the undead through the ruins of civilisation. By night, he barricades himself in his home and prays for the dawn.
How long can one man survive like this?
9. Partials - Dan Wells
⭐️ 4.1 stars on Goodreads ⭐️
Humanity is all but extinguished after a war with Partials—engineered organic beings identical to humans—has decimated the population. Reduced to only tens of thousands by a weaponized virus to which only a fraction of humanity is immune, the survivors in North America have huddled together on Long Island. But sixteen-year-old Kira is determined to find a solution. As she tries desperately to save what is left of her race, she discovers that that the survival of both humans and Partials rests in her attempts to answer questions about the war's origin that she never knew to ask.
Playing on our curiosity of and fascination with the complete collapse of civilization, Partials is, at its heart, a story of survival, one that explores the individual narratives and complex relationships of those left behind, both humans and Partials alike—and of the way in which the concept of what is right and wrong in this world is greatly dependent on one's own point of view.
Supports the Common Core State Standards.
10. The Stand - Stephen King
⭐️ 4.4 stars on Goodreads ⭐️
A patient escapes from a biological testing facility, unknowingly carrying a deadly weapon: a mutated strain of super-flu that will wipe out 99 percent of the world’s population within a few weeks.
Those who remain are scared, bewildered, and in need of a leader. Two emerge—Mother Abagail, the benevolent 108-year-old woman who urges them to build a peaceful community in Boulder, Colorado; and Randall Flagg, the nefarious “Dark Man,” who delights in chaos and violence. As the dark man and the peaceful woman gather power, the survivors will have to choose between them—and ultimately decide the fate of all humanity.
11. Monument 14 - Emmy Laybourne
⭐️ 3.9 stars on Goodreads ⭐️
Your mother hollers that you're going to miss the bus. She can see it coming down the street. You don't stop and hug her and tell her you love her. You don't thank her for being a good, kind, patient mother. Of course not-you launch yourself down the stairs and make a run for the corner.
Only, if it's the last time you'll ever see your mother, you sort of start to wish you'd stopped and did those things. Maybe even missed the bus.
But the bus was barreling down our street, so I ran.
Fourteen kids. One superstore. A million things that go wrong.
When Dean raced out the door to catch the school bus, he didn’t realize it would be the last time he’d ever see his mom. After a freak hailstorm sends the bus crashing into a superstore, Dean and a group of students of all ages are left to fend for themselves.
They soon realize the hailstorm and the crash are the least of their worries. After seeing a series of environmental and chemical disasters ravage the outside world, they realize they’re trapped inside the store.
Unable to communicate with the ones they love, the group attempts to cobble together a new existence. As they struggle to survive, Dean and the others must decide which risk is greater: leaving… or staying.
Monument 14 is a post-apocalyptic YA novel that transcends age barriers.
12. Metro 2034 - Dmitry Glukhovsky
⭐️ 3.5 stars on Goodreads ⭐️
The long-awaited sequel to the cult bestseller Metro 2033, the second volume in the Metro trilogy, Metro 2034 continues the story of survival and struggle that unfolds in the mazes of the Moscow subway after WWIII. As the entire civilization was wiped out by atomic bombs and the surface of the planet is polluted with neclear fallout, the only place suitable for men to live are shelters and bunkers, the largest of which is the subway system of Moscow, aka the Metro.
The year is 2034. There's no hope for humans to return to the surface of Earth, to repopulate the forsaken cities, and to become once again the masters of the world they used to be. So they rebuild a strange and grotesque civilization in the tunnels and at the stations of the subway. Stations become city-states that wage trade and war on each other. A fragile equilibrium is established. And then all can be ruined in matter of days. A new horrible threat looms that can eradicate the remains of humanity and end our era. It would take three unlikely heroes to face this menace.
The basis of two bestselling computer games Metro 2033 and Metro Last Light, the Metro books have put Dmitry Glukhovsky in the vanguard of Russian speculative fiction. Metro 2034 tells a previously unknown part of the greater Metro saga that some only know from video games. Whether you're new to this series, are a fan of the first novel, or want to explore the world of Metro in depth, Metro 2034 is a perfect read for you! Featuring blistering action, vivid and tough characters, claustrophobic tension and dark satire the Metro books have become bestsellers across the world.
13. The Loners - Lex Thomas
⭐️ 3.9 stars on Goodreads ⭐️
It was just another ordinary day at McKinley High—until a massive explosion devastated the school. When loner David Thorpe tried to help his English teacher to safety, the teacher convulsed and died right in front of him. And that was just the beginning.
A year later, McKinley has descended into chaos. All the students are infected with a virus that makes them deadly to adults. The school is under military quarantine. The teachers are gone. Violent gangs have formed based on high school social cliques. Without a gang, you’re as good as dead. And David has no gang. It’s just him and his little brother, Will, against the whole school.
14. Ashes, Ashes - Jo Treggiari
⭐️ 3.5 stars on Goodreads ⭐️
Epidemics, floods, droughts - for sixteen-year-old Lucy, the end of the world came and went, taking 99% of the population with it. As the weather continues to rage out of control, and Sweepers clean the streets of plague victims, Lucy survives alone in the wilds of Central Park. But when she's rescued from a pack of hunting dogs by a mysterious boy named Aidan, she reluctantly realizes she can't continue on her own. She joins his band of survivors, yet, a new danger awaits her: the Sweepers are looking for her. There's something special about Lucy, and they will stop at nothing to have her.
15. Feed - Mira Grant
⭐️ 3.9 stars on Goodreads ⭐️
The year was 2014. We had cured cancer. We had beaten the common cold. But in doing so we created something new, something terrible that no one could stop.
The infection spread, virus blocks taking over bodies and minds with one, unstoppable command: FEED. Now, twenty years after the Rising, bloggers Georgia and Shaun Mason are on the trail of the biggest story of their lives—the dark conspiracy behind the infected.
The truth will get out, even if it kills them.
16. 11/22/63 - Stephen King
⭐️ 4.3 stars on Goodreads ⭐️
On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, President Kennedy died, and the world changed. Unless...
In 2011, Jake Epping, an English teacher from Lisbon Falls, Maine, sets out on an insane — and insanely possible — mission to prevent the Kennedy assassination.
Leaving behind a world of computers and mobile phones, he goes back to a time of big American cars and diners, of Lindy Hopping, the sound of Elvis, and the taste of root beer.
In this haunting world, Jake falls in love with Sadie, a beautiful high school librarian. And, as the ominous date of 11/22/63 approaches, he encounters a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald...
17. The 5th Wave - Rick Yancey
⭐️ 4.01 stars on Goodreads ⭐️
After the 1st wave, only darkness remains. After the 2nd, only the lucky escape. And after the 3rd, only the unlucky survive. After the 4th wave, only one rule applies: trust no one.
Now, it's the dawn of the 5th wave, and on a lonely stretch of highway, Cassie runs from Them. The beings who only look human, who roam the countryside killing anyone they see. Who have scattered Earth's last survivors. To stay alone is to stay alive, Cassie believes, until she meets Evan Walker. Beguiling and mysterious, Evan Walker may be Cassie's only hope for rescuing her brother—or even saving herself. But Cassie must choose: between trust and despair, between defiance and surrender, between life and death. To give up or to get up.
18. Dark Universe - Daniel F. Galouye
⭐️ 3.7 stars on Goodreads ⭐️
The survivors live underground, as far from the Original World as possible and protected from the ultimate evil, Radiation.
Then terrible monsters, who bring with them a screaming silence, are seen and people start to disappear.
One young man realises he must question the nature of Darkness itself.
19. The Border - Robert McCammon
⭐️ 3.9 stars on Goodreads ⭐️
World Fantasy award-winning, bestselling author Robert McCammon makes a triumphant return to the epic horror and apocalyptic tone reminiscent of his books Swan Song and Stinger in this gripping new novel, The Border, a saga of an Earth devastated by a war between two marauding alien civilizations.
But it is not just the living ships of the monstrous Gorgons or the motion-blurred shock troops of the armored Cyphers that endanger the holdouts in the human bastion of Panther Ridge. The world itself has turned against the handful of survivors, as one by one they succumb to despair and suicide or, even worse, are transformed by otherworldly pollution into hideous Gray Men, cannibalistic mutants driven by insatiable hunger. Into these desperate circumstances comes an amnesiac teenaged boy who names himself Ethan—a boy who must overcome mistrust and suspicion to master unknowable powers that may prove to be the last hope for humanity's salvation. Those same powers make Ethan a threat to the warring aliens, long used to fearing only each other, and thrust him and his comrades into ever more perilous circumstances.
A major new novel from the unparalleled imagination of Robert McCammon, this dark epic of survival will both thrill readers and make them fall in love with his work all over again.
20. Swan Song - Robert McCammon
⭐️ 4.3 stars on Goodreads ⭐️
An ancient evil roams the desolate landscape of an America ravaged by nuclear war.
He is the Man with the Scarlet Eye, a malevolent force that feeds on the dark desires of the countless followers he has gathered into his service. His only desire is to find a special child named Swan—and destroy her. But those who would protect the girl are determined to fight for what is left of the world, and their souls.
In a wasteland born of rage, populated by monstrous creatures and marauding armies, the last survivors on earth have been drawn into the final battle between good and evil that will decide the fate of humanity....
21. The Postman - David Brin
⭐️ 3.9 stars on Goodreads ⭐️
This is the story of a lie that became the most powerful kind of truth.
A timeless novel as urgently compelling as Warday or Alas, Babylon, David Brin's The Postman is the dramatically moving saga of a man who rekindled the spirit of America through the power of a dream, from a modern master of science fiction.
He was a survivor—a wanderer who traded tales for food and shelter in the dark and savage aftermath of a devastating war. Fate touches him one chill winter's day when he borrows the jacket of a long-dead postal worker to protect himself from the cold. The old, worn uniform still has power as a symbol of hope, and with it he begins to weave his greatest tale, of a nation on the road to recovery.
“The Postman will keep you engrossed until you’ve finished the last page.”—Chicago Tribune
