When the world they know crumbles to dust, how do the characters we’re reading about react? Do they live haunted by the ghosts of everything they’ve lost or form new connections that help them make the most of the rotten lemons life’s handing out to everyone? I can’t speak for everyone, but I usually float towards post-apocalyptic dystopian books that do the latter.
Whether you’re a Last of Us fan waiting in terrified anticipation for Season 3 or a dystopia junkie on the hunt for your latest fix, here are ten post-apocalyptic books that will keep that Last of Us itch scratched until April.
10. The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau
One of the many reasons Ellie is such a captivating character is her unique status as a child born after the world ended. Some of her best scenes in both The Last of Us games revolve around her seeing giraffes, museums, and other things kids born in a functional society take for granted for the first time. If you’ve ever wondered what the post-apocalypse looks like through the eyes of a child who knows nothing else, check out The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau.
Like all their fellow “Emberites,” Doon Harrow and Lin Mayfell believe humanity has always lived underground in the city of Ember. So when they discover a box containing proof of a world outside and instructions on how to get there, they realize the things they learned from the ruling class may be lies told to keep anyone from leaving.
9. What Moves the Dead by K. Kingfisher
The Last of Us’ terrifying mutation of the Cordyceps fungus left a generation of gamers with a crippling case of mycophobia. Hell, it even got biologists to take a second look at Cordyceps and its world-ending potential. What Moves the Dead by K. Kingfisher won’t help ease that fear; if anything, it’ll make you wonder if the mushrooms in your background have something to say.
What Moves the Dead is a drastic re-imagining of the classic Edgar Allen Poe short story The Fall of the House of Usher, and it’s every bit as existentially unsettling as its source material. Each word Vernon puts on her pages helps raise the tension to its breaking point, and by the time you learn what’s causing things to bump on the Usher estate, it’ll all spill out in a scream that’ll linger long after your mouth closes.
8. Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
One of The Last of Us’ core themes is that nature will always win. Annihilation by VanderMeer takes this thematic concept to its logical extreme while taking us on a fantastic post-apocalyptic odyssey.
Annihilation follows a team of soldiers and scientists as they venture into “Area X,” an isolated track of land dominated by strange flora and fauna. As they venture deeper and deeper into uncharted territory, Area X unveils one terrifying revelation after another, leaving the team and the reader to question where the line that separates humanity and nature got up and walked off to.
7. Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
In The Last of Us, most of humanity has traded massive population centers ripe for fungal transmission for more isolated, intimate communities with radically different approaches to living in the post-apocalypse. Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler explores how communities form and grow after civilization ends, and it has only become more relevant in recent years.
The world Butler presents in Parable of the Sower is disgustingly close to the one we live in today, with climate change-fueled natural disasters terraforming the land and radical politicians occupying the highest seats of the United States government. It’s grim stuff, but Butler rounds out the bleakness of her setting by showing how people can come together and create safe places, even in times of crisis.
6. Wool by Hugh Howey
Cities are not pleasant places to live in The Last of Us. If they aren’t ruins crawling with Infected or bandits, they’re walled-in police states ruled by the increasingly fascistic shadow of the once-proud military. If you need more proof that walling ourselves off from a collapsing world may not be the best idea, Wool by Hugh Howey may be the book for you.
In the world of Wool, the remnants of humanity live in a self-sustained city known as the Silo. The powers that be force anyone who expresses even the faintest desire to see the world beyond Silo’s walls on a suicidal mission to clean the city’s external sensors. Framed as a series of interconnected short stories, Wool challenges its reader to answer a brutal question: Would you rather live as a cog in a tyrannical machine or risk everything to fight for something better?
5. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
The Last of Us never delves into the supernatural, but its story has its fair share of ghosts. The memory of his daughter Sarah haunts Joel throughout the game and the show, acting as the tallest emotional buffer between him and Ellie. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood also pits its protagonist against the vestiges of his past, adding another item to the long list of reasons surviving in the post-apocalypse is hard.
Snowman, a man with only the loosest grip on his past, wanders the ruin of a post-pandemic world, stitching the tattered remnants of his life together bit by bit. Oryx and Crake is, at its core, a story about a person clinging to the memory of a life that they might have been better off forgetting, and a reminder that humanity should probably stop playing God before we all become playthings ourselves.
4. The Girl With All The Gifts by M.R. Carey
As one of the few humans immune to the Cordyceps fungus, Elie represents one of humanity’s last hopes for a cure. Of course, those who’ve played or seen The Last of Us know the Firefly resistance will do terrible things to create said cure. The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey tackles the “ends justify the means” approach to fighting a worldwide pandemic that The Last of Us fans may find familiar.
When a laboratory researching a cure for a parasitic fungus ravaging the world falls, a scientist, two soldiers, and a schoolteacher embark on a perilous journey for survival with the laboratory’s subjects: an infected but immune girl named Melanie. Questions about humanity, empathy, and rationality abound in this thrilling exploration of a world on the brink of no return.
3. The Passage by Josh Malerman
The heart of The Last of Us is the blooming father-daughter relationship between Joel and Ellie. There’s something magnetic about an older, grizzled soul finding new meaning through teaching a young charge how to survive in a dangerous world. The Passage by Justine Cronin understands this well, and its take on the found father-daughter trope will delight The Last of Us fans.
When a deadly virus whittles down humanity, the FBI charges a bitter agent to bring Amy Belafonte, a young girl immune to the virus, to a secret lab to help create a cure. Things start familiar enough initially, but a near-century-long time-skip turns the story on its head.
2. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
In post-apocalyptic dystopias, the fight to survive is already challenging enough, but it takes on an extra dimension when you factor in the human desire to maintain morality in a world that does not care how you feel about what you must do to stay alive. This idea is crucial to The Last of Us story and is just as essential to that of The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
The author takes us on a journey through a twisted, post-apocalyptic version of the United States. At every turn, the main characters—a father and his young son—make terrible choices to keep one step ahead of marauders, starvation, and disease. There aren’t any good guys here, just people trying to live long enough to see tomorrow’s sunrise.
1. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
If you boil The Last of Us down to its essential elements, you’ll end up with a list that looks like this: post-apocalypse, fungus, undead, survival, and love. Only one book takes these pieces and uses them as well as The Last of Us does: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.
Station Eleven follows a troupe of theater performers touring through the Great Lakes as a deadly pandemic tears through the region. This one’s got everything a Last of Us fan could want: a fungus that turns humans into twisted reflections of themselves, a world slowly returning to nature, and a focus on the redemptive power of human connection.
