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The Best of the Backlist: The Apocalyptic Novel
The Best if the Backlist
A look at worthy authors you may not know, focusing on our entire collection of in-stock backlist titles. The backlist is a great way to meet some new authors and get a sense of their work.
The Apocalyptic Novel
There’s nothing more fantastic and frightening than a good apocalyptic novel. Not your cup of tea? You might be surprised, as there’s a little something for everyone in the genre, and you can choose to be scared out of your wits or merely amused. You can pick your setting, time period, and focus (survival? the ins and outs of day-to-day living?) You could even read them in a sequence of sort to track the dangers real and imagined that threaten us all. Taken together, they are a sociological and literary study of the survival mind-set and the well-heard phrase that “hope springs eternal” regardless of whether there’s a chance in hell.
Mr Touch, by Malcolm J. Bosse, is a lesser-known novel in this genre. Ask Deal to get you this one—it is simple for him to do that—and it’s worth it. Some virus hits the US and not many people are left, but a real motley group of ethnic and pretty decent New Yorkers rename themselves to erase the past and move West so that they can breath better. Despite their individual ethical challenges, they do right as best they can, even though they are led by a Wall Street Gordon-Gecko type who calls himself Mr Touch. There are many different stories and scenarios that go on during the novel; some large, some minor, and all interesting as the landscape of America is examined when the band of “Skulls” led by Mr. Touch moves West. Although it reminds me a lot of the granddaddy of all apocalyptic novels, The Stand (see below), it’s still got some very original elements.
The Pesthouse (Paperback)
$13.95
ISBN-13: 9780307278951Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Vintage, 05/01/2008
The Pesthouse and World Made by Hand share the characteristic of showing life far after an apocalypse. The apocalyptic event in Jim Crace’s Pesthouse is long over, and what is left of America is truly littered with an industrial mess. Strangely, people are going EAST to get away from what seems to be a new form of pestilence. Two lucky people (one of whom is alive from being quarantined at a prudent time) find each other, fall in love (or what passes for it), get separated (by pirates enslaving good workers or religious zealots), and trek their way across the landscape. It may not be original but it feels original because of Crace’s dialogue and the way he describes what’s left in the landscape and in the hearts and minds of his characters.
Alas, Babylon (Paperback)
$12.95
ISBN-13: 9780060741877Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 07/01/2005
Alas, Babylon, by Pat Frank, is an early (1950s) apocalyptic novel that has several elements of the genre, all in good form and balance. A career Army guy gets wind that the cold war is about to become real hot, and just before cities are destroyed and the government falls into chaos, he sends his family to rural Florida to live with his brother. The family and brother manage to find like-minded types who see the danger in the radioactive fallout, and a small band thus gets together to protect themselves, build a life, and ultimately start considering how to rebuild a society. In the mean time they deal with the usual rapscallions who populate every apocalyptic novel—bad guys running amok, terrorizing the good folk and threatening the fragile order. This book is classic enough to be required reading for some HS classes and to have its own Cliff Notes. The novel is tightly written, and the dialogue is superb.
On the Beach (Hardcover)
$21.95
ISBN-13: 9780899683652Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Buccaneer Books, 07/01/1999
On the Beach, by Nevil Shute, is one that Deal will have to get for you. It’s set in Australia against the backdrop of the slow and steady (and inexorable) march of radiation across the continent, and the novel is really about the changes in the most minor aspects of people’s world view. Should you bother to go to work? Do your job? Hope for marriage and children? If life seems normal to you here and now, then shouldn’t it be completely normal somewhere else? If the world is going to end (and it is, but slowly over a year) then why bother? And in this one, some do. For awhile anyhow. They plant flowers, maintain the car, and put make up on to go out. The small parts of their day-to-day lives (e.g., what sort of bitters to put in the tonic) become consuming to the cast as well as the reader. You know that this one isn’t going to end well, but it never feels particularly depressing either—perhaps because Shute’s characters are so much like the rest of us: focused on getting through the day and figuring it out.
World Made by Hand (Paperback)
$14.00
ISBN-13: 9780802144010Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Grove Press, 01/01/2009
James Kunstler’s World Made by Hand is a novelization of his prophecies about the coming post-peak oil age in America, and it starts off a little tamer than many others There’s a slightly softer, gentler America populated with horses and old-fashioned work like poppy-growing to make medicine. But there is still plenty of danger. The Chinese have invaded, the government is in Minnesota, the West Coast got blown up and the flu took out most of the rest of us, but those aren’t the real threats. The real threats are your neighbors, in this case drugged-out bikers who want a cut of everything and the typical American pest—the town mobster/politician who controls everything and nearly everyone. Those not trying to scrape what’s left of America into a saleable tin can learn there are some joys in the slow-down of society, although as you are reading the novel you can’t really tell how long it’s been since the big boom and how long it might be until the next one.
The Stand (Mass Market Paperback)
$8.99
ISBN-13: 9780451169532Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Signet, 05/01/1991
Stephen King’s The Stand: The rapscallions this time are human …but also supernatural. This book is thought to be the grand-daddy of the apocalyptic novels, partially because it is epic and also because the themes and seeds for this one appear in several other King novels (including the Dark Tower series and The Talisman/Black House). But the real reason this one is the odds-on favorite is that it is really, really good. There are several story lines featuring different folks, all taking place simultaneously at various places across the country, and the first half of the book allows you to meet them while providing a detailed and by turns gruesome and humorous account of how 99.9% of America dies off in a week after a superflu. (The flu was created by the government, natch). The back story of the characters—where they come from, who they are—is interesting and essential to what happens in the second half of the book. At the end of the first half of the book, you’ve really come to like these characters so much. Or maybe you don’t; but you certainly know them. Except for one person (?) whose story drives the second half of the book, which is focused around what happens when all these people (the good and the bad) manage to cross the country and find each other and join up for the ultimate battle of good and evil. It wasn’t enough that there was a plague, now the fight is for the souls of humankind. That’s when the fun begins. If you read this one, get the uncut version and meet the characters who populate what’s left of America…and, please, don’t open the vials with the little bugs in them.
The Road (Paperback)
$14.95
ISBN-13: 9780307387899Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Vintage, 03/01/2007
The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, is the one you read if you really feel like being good and scared. While the novel paints a truly desolate landscape of hopelessness and despair, of nothing left and no hope, it’s not so much about the horrific realities of life (on the Road, literally scraping for food, for clothing, for shelter) but what happens to people when there’s no absolutely nothing left. This one is McCarthy’s pessimistic view of the nature of humans, showing how most of us will become nothing but animals bent on personal survival, and the psychological costs incurred from losing the basic tools to keep civilization in check. There are glimmers of hope for humans (not their survival, maybe, but their ability to be rational in an irrational world), and the trick is determining what may—if anything—ultimately separate the animal humans from the humane humans.
Swan Song (Mass Market Paperback)
$7.99
ISBN-13: 9780671741037Availability: Special Order - Subject to Availability
Published: Pocket, 06/01/1987
Swan Song, by Robert McCammon, is a large tome (nearly 1000 pages) and in this one it’s the Russians who create a nuclear war (which the US happily plays in) leaving…not much. What’s left in the US is a group of people armed, on point, and ready to fight. Unfortunately, the guns and tanks of the former military machine are pointed at fellow US citizens. One scare in this one centers around what happens if the survivalists go nuts; the worse scare is what is happening inside the heads of the survivalists. On the other hand there’s a little girl who, in the midst of the nuclear winter, manages to grow something wherever she lies down. Swan (hence: Swan Song) is the kernel of hope, protected as she seeks an oracle, destined to travel across the US to find it. (There is something about walking, walking, walking that is nearly de rigueur in these novels). The little girl seeks an other-wordly figure who may have the key to defeating the worst of what’s left of humanity while at the same time allowing the world to heal and support people again.
