The best disaster books where society fails suddenly

What stood out to me about Severance, aside from the witty-without-trying-to-be writing, was the dynamic between the characters.

In the group of nine or so people still healthy after a devasting virus, one man appoints himself as the leader, and the others allow him to do so, following him on a questionable journey. It spurred me to ponder why people award others status.

Why do people follow others so faithfully, even when they don’t deserve respect? Also, the alternating chapters of pre- and post-disaster expose the many things we stress about in our daily lives that just don’t matter. That may sound tragic, but I found it liberating.

Read this book to immerse yourself in the post-apocalyptic world, but also enjoy the vivid detail and great writing.   

It’s a mark of a good book that years after reading it, scenes from it still play out in your mind.

In Station Eleven, after the world grinds to a halt (again, a virus), a girl can’t get hold of her desperately needed medication. I still visualize her wandering off into the woods, never to be seen again.

If society collapsed, we would profoundly miss many things that are more than just basics. It begs the question of whether we can ever be truly disaster resilient.

At one point in the novel, a character protests, “Are we supposed to believe that civilization has just come to an end?” Another responds, “…it was always a little fragile, wouldn’t you say?”

This compelling book, which imagines both society’s collapse and its resurgence years later, is well worth reading.

It fascinates me how in a disaster, from one day to the next, nothing is ever the same again.

In Bird Box, where something is turning people violently suicidal, “…it definitely begins when a person sees something.”

At first there’s a rumor in a faraway country, but later the world abruptly changes. Nobody can be outside without a blindfold, millions are dying, and society collapses.

It would be bad enough to literally never see the world outside of your house, but then Malorie has to take a journey on a river…while blindfolded...with two blindfolded children…amidst creatures she knows almost nothing about.

That’s pure insanity that makes for a riveting, absorbing book, and Malorie’s determination is beyond inspiring. 

You might think this classic was written in the 1930s because of the panic-causing radio drama, but it was actually published in 1898.

How astounding it must have seemed back then, and the tale of Martians causing utter destruction has endured the test of time.

What stood out for me was the difficulty of disseminating information in the late nineteenth century, and the in-depth descriptions of the English landscape, the Martians, and their machines: “…vast spiderlike machines, nearly a hundred feet high, capable of the speed of an express train, and able to shoot out a beam of intense heat.”

Books like this are wildly entertaining, but that’s not all. Our ability to imagine disaster, and envision overcoming it, is a step toward disaster resilience. 

This nonfiction book is jam-packed with astonishing facts and captivating personalities from the time of the Dust Bowl.

The disasters were many and varied during the 1930s on America’s Great Plains. “The weather might display seven different moods in a year, and six of them were life-threatening. Droughts, blizzards, grass fires, hailstorms, flash floods, and tornadoes…”

Not to mention the dust storms: “thick like coarse animal hair…with an edge like steel wool.” At least two monster “black dusters” traveled 2,000 miles (3,220 kilometers), taking topsoil from the midwest all the way to Washington DC.

The impact on society was terrible, but brought about great change in the country’s approach to conservation. This book is excellent for writers. Having read it helped me write more truthfully (I hope) about disasters in my fiction.