I would not enter a Zone. I would also never want this to happen to Earth. It’s evident that everyone in the story found different ways to deal with what occurred, but everyone must deal with it. Especially if you live near them. If you don’t you are still affected by tech humans shouldn’t posses because they didn’t invent it.
Can’t believe I didn’t mention this one–I just read it last month.
That said, it, like a lot of books mentioned in this thread, don’t really count as “horror novels.” Station Eleven is a lovely, mostly gentle book, with very little horror in it. A great deal of sadness, but very few frights.
Also, if @Wolf333 is suffering from zombie fatigue (which I 100% get), a few of the books are zombie-adjacent. I wouldn’t characterize the dangers in The Strain or The Crossing as classic zombies–they’re much closer to another classic monster–but they live on the border between the two.
I don’t want to gush too much on this book, but I would be remiss in saying that the extended audiobook of this novel is one of the few (almost only) times I’ve enjoyed an audiobook MORE than the written option. It has a voice cast of over 20, including many sci-fi names of note, and as the description above shows, it is almost designed for an audio format! I have both text and audio book versions, and it’s one of the two audiobooks that gets the most time on day-long drives (the other is a similar exception to my preferences, The Martian, which works for similar reasons).
Anyway, back to the OPs request. When it comes to horror, there’s a lot of differing opinions. Yeah, PA Zombie horror is probably the mainstream for the genre. Because some people find that ‘the true horror is other people’ to be just a norm of a crapsack world. Others want a distinct horror that is separate from the survival/apoc moment itself. It takes a really good writer to make a story that combines so many different person vs man/nature/monster elements into a unified story. But there is plenty of drek that does so poorly. Most stories only credibly handle one or two of the elements well - but the posters have done a pretty darn good job of identifying some!
I don’t remember if they’re novels, at least short stories. ‘Lot’ and ‘Lot’s Daughter’, early '50s, Ward Moore. Tale of a suburban family heading for the hills after a nuke attack on LA… He and his daughter are later (it is implied) in an incestuous relationship in ‘Lot’s Daughter’ . …Panic in the Year Zero, a movie starring Ray Milland, is based on ‘Lot’.
I’m enjoying this thread a lot and also busily adding titles to my to-read list!
Also came back to mention a couple of old favorites, although these are definitely more to the science fiction side than horror: The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham.
Oh yeah, John Wyndham! It’s been years since I read The Chrysalids and it might not appeal as much to an adult audience but I loved it as a kid. Ah, the perils of religious tyranny.
The first few books in S.M. Stirlings DIES THE FIRE series are pretty good.
A Canticle for Leibowitz . by Walter Miller Jr.
Huh - I’ve read “Lot” but didn’t realize there was a second story. Will go check that out.
Doesn’t quite meet the definition, but Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman (set in Black-Plague-ravaged 1300’s France) captures a lot of the same setting/mood of a “post-apocalyptic” novel.
I’ve read most of Between Two Fires, and enjoyed it up to a point. Then it seemed kind of drag.
I’ll add that the audiobooks are very well narrated and I found it much easier to follow along with the Russian people/station names by hearing them than by reading them.
That’s not post-apocalyptic, just Russian and glum.
How is it not post-apocalyptic?
No apocalypse occurred.
It’s not the Stand, but Stephen King’s Cell is also post-apocalypse and is a pretty good read.
But I must admit there are a few zombies…
I can recommend a series of books by Paolo Bacigalupi, which are all [I think] set in a single interconnected universe that is not post-apocalyptic in the sense that lots of the books above use, but is the slow spiralling into the catastrophe wrought by climate change, and subsequent collapse of many areas due to sea level rise, shifting politics and increasing concentration of wealth and power.
He’s done a mix of adult and young adult novels. The most recent are The Water Knife, about how an even more desertified SW USA has collapsed into fighting over water resources and The Windup Girl, where Bangkok faces the opposite problem of too much water. PB is big on trying to build plausible and consistent worlds for the characters, which are quite confronting.
David Benioff’s book “City of Thieves” isn’t technically post-apocalyptic, but it sure read like it was. It takes place during the siege of Leningrad, and includes all the atrocities people had to do to survive. It’s also humorous in places. I think about it years after having read it.
Per Wikipedia, it was a major artistic inspiration for the video game “The Last of Us”. And in “The Last of Us, Part II” , one of the characters is reading it.
The Night Parade: A Speculative Memoir Lin, Jami Nakamura. About some kind of air borne disease that instantly makes your mind go blank and then you stare at the sun till your eyes melt or walk into some sort of grisly suicide. Read it many years ago and I was struck by how society just tries to ignore what everyone can see in front of them and thought that was unrealistic. Then COVID happened and this book seemed more real.
The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway. A lighter Sci-Fi novel about a weapon that makes things disappear. So you begin with enemies and work your way to minor inconveniences, then what is left?
Any book needs to connect with its reader and an Apocalyptic universe is not something anyone has experienced so the genre is more interesting to me if it’s just a setting to discuss what we all already understand of our world. That’s how Sci-Fi makes people care about spaceships and blackholes and shit, once you get past ‘the cool’ and audience has to connect.
Though both are not POST Apocalyptic, it’s happening as you read.
That’s not what I remember from The Gone-Away World — there are plenty of flashbacks, but the war had definitely already happened.