Post apocolyptic reads

[BlingLoving]

I love a good post apocolyptic/sci fi read but find it's quite hard to find them so I'm looking for inspiration please from all of you. To give you an idea of what I like I recently read and enjoyed the Hunger Games trilogy. Going further back, I love almost everything John Wyndham ever wrote, but The Day of the Triffids and The Chrysalids are my favourite.

My Kindle is charged and I am ready to download...!

I love the post/apocalyptic genre, and Day of the Triffids still gives me the willies. Wool is definitely on my must-read list. Also pretty new and doing well: White Horse by Alex Adams.

The Road is fantastic but almost unbearably disturbing.

Just finished 'Dark Inside' by Jeyn Roberts (people all turn evil and start killing each other) which was a very quick read but not bad. YA and first of a series or trilogy I think, second is out in August.

Also 'The Other Life' by Susanne Winnacker- mutated rabies virus mutates people into hideous creatures. YA, heavy on the teen romance, also first of a series.

I just finished The Road. I really liked it. I watched the film last night too which stayed true to the book.
I'm really into Dystopian and Post apocalyptic books at the moment, so loving this thread.

Ooooh, hello like-minded people

I watched The Road the other week and bawled like a baby at the end. Full on proper sobbing. I might have to give the book a go too by the look of it.

I've just got into the newer zombie apocalypse type books, but am a long time fan of Stephen King so The Stand is one of my favourites.

I've just finished reading a trilogy on my kindle by T W Brown called Zomblog. Rather gory, but I enjoyed them.

I will also second the recommendation for Swan Song. I remember reading that 20 ish years ago and enjoying it very much.

I shall watch with interest for any more goodies to get my teeth into.

I can't believe that no-one has mentioned 'Dinner at Deviant's Palace' by Tim Powers! May be out of print or not bekindled, though.

Some great ideas here! :o

Have to say I thought 'The Rapture' was a bag of shite!!! (Is it the one with the wheeelchair-bound psychologist? If not apologies, I've mixed it up but f**k me then ending was BOLLOCKS!)

Currently pregnant and tried to watch The Road film as I love the book so much. Made it half an hour, sobbing every 5 minutes or so. I'm blaming hormones but actually being pregnant has changed the whole story and made it unbearably intense and poignant. Didn't make it as far as the awful 'human cattle' scene - bad enough in the book!

The Joe McKinney zombie books are great.I agree with someone else who recommended Frater.Also Roux.

I loved the Moody books.Also excellent zombie reads are by J L Bourne and Z A Recht.

I picked up The Year of the Flood the other day - will be my first foray into Attwood.

The Rapture starts off OK but crashes and burns.

Agree re 'The Rapture.' At her best I quite like Liz Jensen (love 'The Ninth Life Of Louis Drax'but the ending of 'The Rapture' was ridiculous.

Zombie Brittanica by Thomas Emson,is rather lovely,I have to say.

crescent I love post-apoc fiction because I find people tiresome and the idea of quiet and clear streets appeals immensely. When I read post-apoc I can I get that feeling for a little while.

Its also fun to imagine what the world would be like, how it would develop and what would be missing from our current world. It reminds me of all the drawbacks of the world collapsing (healthcare, no law and order etc) which makes it easier to deal with the world as it is.

Plus it might happen- not zombies perhaps, but an epidemic would spread fast with our current methods of transport. I have read a lot of books about diseases and how they mutate and post-apoc helps me deal with my fears. I wouldn't want to survive in a world overrun by hostile creatures though.

I'm reading 'Monster Nation' by David Wellington at the moment, its not bad, but I am glad I didn't buy it and borrowed it from the library instead. I also borrowed the most recent Walking Dead graphic novel, 'Flesheaters' by Joe McKinney and 'The Official Zombie Handbook (UK)' waiting so I am going to have a zombiethon.

R2ReePoo I found Monster Nation a bit so-so.I think I abandoned it before the end as it got a bit fantastical. I don't like graphic novels,but Flesheaters and The Official Zombie Handbook (uk) are both well worth a read!

crescentmoon I like them as they transport me somewhere exciting and tbh I love a bit of descriptive blood and guts and gore.I do sometimes wonder whether it's a bit odd to like that sort of thing but I was weaned on horror....

I'm only thirty or so pages into Monster Nation and I keep putting it down and not picking it up for a while which isn't a good sign. Its seems a bit bitty, I'm finding it hard to remember all the different plot threads as they change so frequently. PLus zombie sheep? WTAF.. Its not very action packed in the way of other novels where the survivors struggle to survive. I suspect I'll finish it but not read the next one.

I love the Walking Dead books, but getting fed up of having to wait for the next one continually. They are gritty and shocking and gruesome but its quite hard to tell the different characters apart sometimes-all in black and white line drawings.

Pleased to hear the other two are worth the effort.

I see you recommended Zombie Britannica, I loved that one but it was far too short, needed to be twice the length!

My all time favourite zombie novels have to be ones by Madeleine Roux and Jonathon Mayberry (and World War Z of course). The beginning of Rhiannon Frater's first book was the best and most shocking beginning to a zombie book so far, that haunted me for weeks. Her female characters are quite well drawn too but I wasn't entirely convinced by the men and the relationships that are formed - the gore was excellent though.

*Maberry

R2,I have the next two Frater books on order so I'm looking forward to them.I see what you mean with it,but if you take that on board,I agree it's worth it.

I loved the Allison Hewitt book,by Roux,and now have the Sadie Walker one on order.

I haven't tried Maberry yet - been on my read list for a while.

I have to say I have Monster Island on order too - I'm curious!

My all time favourites are J L Bourne's books and Z A Recht.....

Re Frater: I enjoyed the books but I think they could have benefitted from a really good edit, I found loads of spelling/grammar errors and lots of uses of speech that were slightly disjointed/odd. And after the awesome start I guess I was disappointed. They are better than 95% of the current zombie writing though, loved the fact that she focused on women (the opposite of Bourne and Recht) and their experience, whereas it tends to be the other way round in general - usually lots of talk about guns. There is definitely a gap in the market there. The Bourne and Recht books were technically excellent and I really enjoyed the story - read the whole series etc, but I just didn't click with them and the characters.

Maberry on the other hand is awesome. Well-written, exciting, taut and I really felt that deep, pit of the stomach uneasiness that is missing from a lot of zombie books (I'm not feeling it in Monster Nation). The characterisation is excellent too, they feel well fleshed out. I did all the cooking with the books in my hand, read far too late at night etc.

Ooh, this is great stuff!
Please check out The Wind-Up Girl by Paolo Bacigaloupi - it is fantastic.
Here's a review that also mentions my other obsession favourite, China Mieville review

Just read John Christopher "The Death of Grass" it is often compared to the Day of the Triffids as it was written about the same time. It was very good and does make your think about what could happen.

John Christopher also wrote for teenagers with the trilogies
The Tripods - which is like a sequel to War of The Worlds
The Prince in Waiting series - also a post apocolyptic series

crescent 'On the beach' had the same effect on me.

I'm not sure that I would actually want to be a survivor, especially in a zombie scenario with them as an added threat. Once you get over the initial catastrophe its not an appealing prospect.

It would be terrifying to leave a technologically advanced world where you have a great deal of 'help' and a great deal of distance from production of everything.

As a woman you would probably be expected to have as many children as possible as there needs to be a certain population level to enable people to survive (someone worked this out once, wish I could find it), support the vulnerable etc. And there would be no contraception of course and there would be a greater threat of rape/violence. Once the tinned food ran out you would basically be plunged back into subsistence farming, learning from scratch how to make everything we have forgotten how to. A nail= learning how to mine, process and melt metal, how to shape it etc. I have no idea how to manage crop rotation or deliver a baby sheep. How do you weave cloth? How would you travel long distances without cars or planes? And it would be hard work, with little assistance, ploughs drawn by horses if not by humans.. Plus it would be a world with a low life expectancy, with high rates of mortality in children and women of a childbearing age. Throughout history there has been nothing worse than being a peasant and it would be returning to that again.

R2PeePoo - yes, that ^^ exactly.

Sometimes I spend an unhappy half hour working out what happenings in my life would have killed me/had me killed if I had been born at different times, usually inspired by something I've read in a book.

When I read The Red Tent with my book club I was quite surprised to find out I would have been left outside to die immediately after my birth just for having different coloured eyes.

I also had a birth mark that would have had me burned as a witch at one point in history. The surgeon who was removing it was very cheerful about it as he told me it would have been seen as the devil's mark on a witch and ensured me a very violent death. Several books since then have confirmed my fate, unless I joined the nunnery as in Ken Follett's Worlds Without End.

I suffered from a minor form of pre-adolesent epilepsy that manifested itself as dizzy spells rather than fits, and the doctor who diagnosed that was again quite cheerful when he told me I would have had a hole drilled in my skull to release the demons.

And then there have been various illnesses, accidents and minor (for today's standards) health issues that would probably have killed me off a long time ago had I been born in different times. Being very short sighted is one of them. Pregnancy and childbirth would certainly have killed me at another time in history.

What I would do in a post-apocolptic world I don't know but the thought of being as disaster prone as I am in a world filled with zombies and without any modern conveniences is more scary than whatever it is that caused the end of the world and the rise of the zombies themselves.

I might as well resign myself to covering myself in ketchup and throwing myself to the zombies because I doubt I'd last the year in the world you have described.