I don’t know what it is about books with a plague running rampant, but I’m always so fascinated!
I’ve already read books like The Stand by Stephen King and WWZ by Max Brooks.
Bonus for books that give the details as it progresses are even better! I want to be horrified
by N7gamergirl
22 Comments
{{Under a Graveyard Sky by John Ringo}}.
First in a 4 book series
La Peste by Albert Camus (The Plague, translated in English)
The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
The Andromeda Strain.
Zoo by James Patterson
Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton
Toxin, Outbreak, and Pandemic by Robin Cook
Hospital by Arthur Haley is about a hospital in the 50s trying to identify the source of a pathogen. It’s not “plague” exactly, but it’s a wild read – the doctors smoke in the hallways, patient records are on recipe cards, the “infection precautions” are horrifying from a modern lens
Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman – It’s set in medieval France during the Black Death but it does have many fantastical elements in it.
Here are some:
* Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
* The Rifters series by Peter Watts. Do note that the plague-apocalypse starts *during* the series, this doesn’t start out as a plague story. But the use of real science is very good, and these books are available as free ebooks on the author’s website.
* World War Z by Max Brooks. Not as realistic, but it is about people’s experiences during a zombie plague.
* And Then I Woke Up by Malcolm Devlin. Uses a zombie plague as a metaphor for real world social divisions. May not be quite what you are looking for, but it’s very short.
* Feed by Mira Grant.
* The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. I have *not* read this, but was recommended it a while back when I posted in this subreddit, and it may fit your request as well.
The White Plague by Frank Herbert
*The Mask of the Red Death: A Fantasy* by Edgar Allan Poe.
*The Decameron* by Giovanni Boccaccio.
Into the Forest by Jean Hegland. It’s not a plague book, but a lesser known, older book (1996) about two sisters trying to survive in a world after the collapse of technology and the subsequent decay of society. I picked it up on vacation at a LFL and I loved it, still have it years later, and I keep very few books.
The Girl With All the Gifts by Mike Carey
Wanderers by Chuck Wendig. Great future-present plague read with a fun scifi element.
I did not enjoy the sequel at ALL, but that may have been because the first book was just impossible to top… and the sequel was written during COVID and was a bit too weird and bleak. But it isn’t necessary to read it, you get lots of closure from the first alone.
Year of Wonders, by Geraldine Brooks
This is also one of my favourite genres as an epidemiologist haha. Blindness is spectacular
Birdbox… it is different from the movie.
He followed up with Malorie which was alright.
There was another movie made from the perspective of the infected–interesting.
{How High We Go in the Dark}! unique (?) situation where the plague doesn’t affect everyone, so you get to see parts of society falling apart while new structures get integrated. that is, there’s a plague service industry.
You might like The Wanderers by Chuck Wendig. I read it about two weeks before Covid hit, and it rocked my world.
The Power – Naomi Alderman for an entirely different take
You might enjoy:
Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandell
The Passage by Justin Cronin
The Kristen Lavransdatter series.
Well, not horrifying in the sense of being horror, but *A Journal of the Plague Year* by Daniel DeFoe was published in 1722. He basically made up a journal that purported to be from the last big plague in London, which was in 1665, and passed it off as an eyewitness account. It’s not quite history and it’s not quite a novel, but it is very interesting. I was reading it right around the time Covid started to hit hard. Strange days.
the troop by nick cutter