Published in 2010, The Passage is the first book of a planned trilogy by Justin Cronin. The novel spent nearly two months on the New York Times bestseller list, and more importantly my wife really liked it and suggested that I should read it. In broad strokes the story is about a secret government experiment that is attempting to create super-soldiers but instead unleashes a virus that ultimately destroys civilization (at least in North America, we are never given any glimpse of the wider world so it is unknown whether or not the infection was contained). The twelve initial test subjects, all death row inmates who were offered the removal of their death sentence in exchange for participating in the experiment, become in effect vampires. One tenth of their victims also become lesser vampires, powerful enough to hunt mankind nearly to extinction and yet under the thrall of whichever of The Twelve is the original...

After four consecutive weeks of writing about movies, I thought it was time to get back to some white-knuckle post-apocalyptic literature. Published in 2007, Plague Year by Jeff Carlson is the first book in a trilogy about a nanotech machine plague that nearly wipes out humanity and forces the few remaining survivors up onto the mountain tops in order to stay above the invisible sea of death. As one group of survivors struggles to stay alive in the High Sierras in California, a team of researches on the International Space Station races to find some kind of cure or vaccine. Meanwhile a civil war is brewing within the US government, now relocated to Leadville, Colorado in the heights of the Rocky Mountains.

As post-apocalyptic thrillers go, this book is a little more outside my normal comfort zone. It is very much a techno-thriller, with much detail given to the mechanics of the Machine Plague. The nano-virus...

I have been reading The Walking Dead comic book series since issue #6. So, not quite there from the very beginning but definitely on board long before it became a huge media sensation. When I heard it was going to become a TV series I was both nervous and optimistic, and after seeing the pilot last year I was very pleased. (Unfortunately, since the pilot the show has never lived up to that same quality. But I am still enjoying it for the most part.). With the ongoing success of the comic, which is on target to hit an amazing issue #100 in 2012, and with the huge success of the television series, Robert Kirkman has decided to begin producing a series of novels that will flesh out the back story of major characters in the comic. The first to be released is The Walking Dead: Rise of the Governor by Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga.

In reviewing the book, I need to look at it from two different...

In the last 14 entries I have written a lot about apocalypse via nuclear warfare, as well a couple by zombie and a few random other causes. This week, I am here to talk about another major sub-genre of apocalyptica: the world-ending meteor strike. Back in the late 90's there was the pair of meteor movies, Armageddon and Deep Impact, but the real giant of the genre is the 1997 novel Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Lucifer's Hammer very rightfully won the Hugo Award in 1978 for Best Novel, and it earned that award by being simultaneously compulsively readable and scientifically accurate. Although a little slow to start, as it introduces its large cast of characters, once meteor actually hits (about 150 pages in) the book becomes a non-stop series of action set pieces and survival tales. Niven and Pournelle are both known for being hard science fiction writers, and there is quite a bit...

In 2009 Charlie Higson (author of the very excellent Young James Bond book series), began a brand new series with The Enemy. Set in London a year after a global pandemic has infected everyone over the age of sixteen, turning them into flesh-eating ghouls, the first book follows a group of surviving children as they travel through the city to try to reach Buckingham Palace which they have been told is a safe  haven. A secondary plotline follows one small child who has been separated from the group as he travels from Arsenal Stadium and through the London Underground trying to catch up with the rest of the group. At 384 pages, this is a very quick and action-packed read.



The first challenge in any Young Adult novel is how to separate the children from the adults. The whole raison d'être for the genre is to empower the youthful protagonists such that they have to make their own decisions, so the parents have to be taken out of the picture with some kind of plot contrivance. With The Enemy, Higson takes that idea to the extreme by not just taking the parents away but by actually turning them into cannibalistic horrors that will literally devour the children.

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A few weeks ago when I was prepping my columns on A Canticle for Leibowitz and Alas, Babylon I kept encountering references for a third book from that era, On the Beach by Nevil Shute. Somehow, despite a lifetime love of post-apocalyptic fiction, I had never previously heard of this classic novel. Originally published in 1957, it was followed by a very successful film adaptation in 1959 starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, and a very young Anthony Perkins. It was adapted again in 2000 for a 3 hour television mini-series on Showtime, and in 2008 as a radio drama broadcast on BBC Radio 4 as a part of their Classic Serial series. After coming across references to it so many times, I knew I had to pick up a copy and read it for myself.

The story takes place primarily in Melbourne, Australia roughly a year after a nuclear war had devastated the northern hemisphere. The nuclear fallout had killed all human and animal life above the equator, but the equatorial pressure zone had kept the...

In the mid-1980’s in America the Cold War was at its peak and there was a huge resurgence in post-apocalyptic fiction. The Road Warrior burned up the box office in 1982, William Johnstone’s Ashes series was selling briskly along with at least a dozen other survivalist series, and Gold Eagle was ready to jump into that market. They already published several popular men’s fiction series like The Executioner and Mack Bolan – now they were looking for something to cater to the booming post-apocalyptic marketplace.

As recounted in the excellent supplementary material in the back of Deathlands: Encounter, author Jack Adrian (a.k.a. Christopher Lowder) presented a series proposal that mixed the concept of a nuclear-blasted post-apocalyptic America with strong science fiction elements in the existence of top-secret government bunkers with matter-transfer units that would allow the lead characters to teleport from place to place. In his proposal, the protagonists would battle against despotic warlords (or “Barons”),...

1959 was a landmark year for post-apocalyptic fiction. Two of the greatest novels of the genre were published that year. Last week I wrote about the first, A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. and this week I am following up with Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank. Where Leibowitz is a novel of ideas and follows the epic scale of mankind’s long crawl out of (and back into) oblivion, Alas, Babylon is is a novel grounded in stark immediate realities. In fact, Alas, Babylon is widely considered to be the first post-apocalyptic survivalist novel. The story focuses entirely on the events leading up to and immediately after a nuclear holocaust, and what it takes for a small community to survive in the aftermath.

1959 was a landmark year for post-apocalyptic fiction. Two of the greatest novels of the genre were published that year, and so for the next two weeks I am going to discuss them. In fact, the book I am writing about today is not only one of the finest examples of post-apocalyptic literature ever produced, I actually consider it to be one of the greatest American novels of any genre. I have read it several times over the years, and I always discover something new each time.

"Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your own home."
- Caveat to Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman

It must have been about the spring of 1991 when I found myself in my favorite book shop at Pike Place Market in Seattle. At the time I was really into signed hardcover copies of genre books, and this particular shop carried some really cool limited edition items. Things like the two volume slipcase edition of The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub, or the really sweet original editions of Clive Barker's Books of Blood. That particular day the thing that caught my eye was a signed British first edition of Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophesies of Agnes Nutter, Witch.