A military border is set up along the river to keep the sickness from spreading west, but this is a border that Gary is determined to cross. Wilson Tucker, The Long Loud Silence (1952)Įverything east of the Mississippi has been destroyed by a nuclear attack the scant survivors have been dosed with a bioweapon that has infected them with the plague (just to be safe, I suppose). Of course, there are plenty more great apocalypse and post-apocalypse novels that didn’t fit on this list, and I haven’t read enough books in translation in this genre, so as ever, please add on your own favorites in the comments.

We could argue all day about what actually constitutes an “apocalypse”-2020 is checking a lot of boxes, as you may have noticed-so for the most part, I’ve gone with my gut. I’ve done my best to limit this list to books in which there is-or has been-some kind of literal apocalypse, excluding dystopias (like The Handmaid’s Tale) or simply bleak visions of the future. Humans have been pondering the end of existence for as long as we’ve been aware of it (probably, I mean, I wasn’t there), and as a result we have a rich collection of apocalypse and post-apocalypse literature to read during our planet’s senescence. After all, someone must survive to tell the tale. The Cabin at the End of the World is a masterpiece of terror and suspense from the fantastically fertile imagination of Paul Tremblay.The end of the world is never really the end of the world-at least not in fiction. Thus begins an unbearably tense, gripping tale of paranoia, sacrifice, apocalypse, and survival that escalates to a shattering conclusion, one in which the fate of a loving family and quite possibly all of humanity are entwined. As Wen sprints inside to warn her parents, Leonard calls out: „Your dads won’t want to let us in, Wen.

Three more strangers then arrive at the cabin carrying unidentifiable, menacing objects. Leonard and Wen talk and play until Leonard abruptly apologizes and tells Wen, „None of what’s going to happen is your fault”. Leonard is the largest man Wen has ever seen but he is young, friendly, and he wins her over almost instantly. One afternoon, as Wen catches grasshoppers in the front yard, a stranger unexpectedly appears in the driveway. Their closest neighbors are more than two miles in either direction along a rutted dirt road. Seven-year-old Wen and her parents, Eric and Andrew, are vacationing at a remote cabin on a quiet New Hampshire lake. The Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts adds an inventive twist to the home invasion horror story in a heart-palpitating novel of psychological suspense that recalls Stephen King’s Misery, Ruth Ware’s In a Dark, Dark Wood, and Jack Ketchum’s cult hit The Girl Next Door.

Cabin at the end of the world book