The End of the World Running Club: The ultimate race against time post-apocalyptic thriller

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It’s almost winter, and on the reservation of a small Anishinaabe community in northern Ontario, the power has gone out. Not just the power either, but the phones and the internet, resulting in full isolation. And it’s cold. Then the outsiders begin to appear. Fear and chaos reign, as Evan Whitesky, father of two, looks to the past, to tradition, to try to rebuild his community’s future. Chilling in more ways than one. A horror novel and an apocalypse novel in one—as if surviving nuclear holocaust wasn’t enough, now there’s a demonic entity known as The Man with the Scarlet Eye, aka Doyle, running around. Typical. Is it actually a post-apocalypse through which our one-shoed protagonist drifts? Or are we dealing with a different reality entirely? Either way, it has the feeling of a land gone to seed, with bombed-out, disconnected cities, enormous red suns, inexplicable, endless fires. And either way, it is one of the weird greats, a widely influential and difficult—even impenetrable—cult classic. It doesn’t take a meteor or a nuclear missile to destroy civilization; all you need is a surprise epidemic of blindness, and men and women will destroy it themselves. Despite the compelling, experimental prose, parts of this feel like a horror novel, but unlike most of the books on this list, it ends on a note of hope, which makes it a particularly good one to read right now. All right, technically this is a manga series, but I have it as a box set, and I’m counting it. I love Miyazaki’s post-apocalyptic world—most of the world is covered in toxic forest, known as the Sea of Corruption, which is itself overrun by giant, mutant insects, and which is encroaching—and his heroine, a curious princess turned battle captain with a deep respect for the natural world, corrosive as it may be.

In this surreal novel, two characters at the end of a world destroyed switch genders, roles, and relationships to one another as their lives are repeatedly rebooted by a mysterious—and corrupted—atmospheric computer program, which is looking (maybe) for a savior.Of course Cloud Atlas is not entirely a novel about the end of the world, and in fact of its six storylines only one could be considered post-apocalyptic (one other is squarely dystopian). But considering the novel’s insistence on the interconnectedness of time and space (and people) and the centrality of the post-apocalypse it does evoke (located at the pinnacle of the novel’s unique structure), I think it’s only fair to count it here. It is 1963, and a nuclear war has devastated most of the planet. In Melbourne, relatively untouched, a handful of survivors wait for the winds to bring the radiation to their shore, occupying themselves more or less usefully, if such a thing can be said to have any meaning at the end of the world, as others investigate what may be a message from a survivor in Seattle. A moving, if not particularly scientifically sound, classic.

One of the best and biggest contemporary vampire novels is also one of the best and biggest apocalypse novels. It all starts in a lab, in which a virus meant to create super soldiers actually creates a plague of monsters—93 years later, the humans left huddle in colonies, hiding from the hunters outside the walls. But can the world actually be saved after all? You don’t find out that Planet of the Apes is a post-apocalyptic novel, and not just a science fiction novel about another world, until the end of the book. (Sorry for not warning you about this spoiler, but look, you had almost 60 years.) What was the cause? Oh, laziness, really… This classic, highly influential for its use of invented dialect, is set in England, some two thousand years after the end of civilization as we know it—when what society is left is uncomfortably reliant on “Punch & Pooty” shows. A layered, Joycean masterpiece that is as much about the power of story and myth as it is about the end of the world and everything after.In this classic of nuclear holocaust fiction, when much of the United States is destroyed by the Soviet Union, one small Florida town survives, adapting to their new lives in a radioactive wasteland. This is a wonderfully imaginative mix of psychology, quantum mechanics and the meaning of human consciousness. It is based on the “ quantum mind” idea developed by the physicist Roger Penrose in the late 80s. The theory is not taken very seriously now by scientists, but is great sci-fi thriller fodder. It’s two hundred years after “the Blast,” and in Moscow the snow is always falling. Benedikt is just glad not to have any major mutations, and a job, which is to transcribe the “speeches” of the wasteland’s leader, which are actually plagiarized from old books, not a single one of which Benedikt has ever read. Until, that is, he meets the Oldeners, whose secret libraries will change everything for him.