9 books like The Infected

The Rising was one of the first zombie books I read after a while and it was interesting. It went beyond what people expected or thought they wanted from zombie novels. It was less Night of the Living Dead and more Day of the Dead with killing, and mutilations, and suspenseful expectations that no one really thought could be met. 

Germ is an intriguing look at how a plague can be weaponized. We follow the bio-terrorist act of a modified form of Ebola that targets people of a specific genetic makeup. Ebola scares the hell out of me because it really exists and pockets of it still spring up around the world. I loved this book for how descriptive it was and how real it felt. This book isn’t so well known, but it deserves more attention. If you liked The Andromeda Strain or if you just want a somewhat gross (ebola is a messy disease!), thriller-type story you’ll enjoy this one.

Call me a sucker for some Stephen King and you’d be right! While I could go on and on all day about different Stephen King novels, Cell in particular was one of my favorites. This novel jumps right into the action, bombarding the reader with the chaos of what is essentially a zombie outbreak caused by a mysterious cell phone pulse. I always love King’s attention to character in his novels and his ability to weave that characterization in with the story while not bringing the plot to a total standstill. Throw in some mystery when the zombies start operating as though they’re part of a hive-mind and this novel kept me turning the pages.

I listened to this whole series while climbing mind-numbing stacks of backlogged legal work as an Assistant Attorney General. My vision was clogged with the vivid scenes of Bourne's books, legal folders, paper clips, and coffee stains. It actually inspired the fourth book of my zombie series.   

Told in the diary format common to many books of the zombie epic subgenre, this journal depicts one man's struggle for survival. The unnamed narrator is a naval officer who was just returning home to Texas from visiting his parents in Arkansas when the zombie apocalypse hits. John, another survivor, and Annabell, John's miniature greyhound, work together with the narrator to survive, hoping to find some last working vestige of the US government. 

There are some cool elements to this zombie epic that I haven't found anywhere else. They shelter in a functional missile silo at one point. The clunk, clunk… show more.

Homicide detective Bryan Clauser is on the verge of a breakdown: as San Francisco is gripped by a series of gruesome murders, his own dreams seem to be mirroring the crimes. As Clauser tries to find the link between his dreams and the deaths, he finds himself caught up in an underground world of horrors that he is uniquely equipped to battle against. Sigler is one of my favorite modern writers, blending science fiction and horror seamlessly. In this novel, he’s given us a story that’s part gore-soaked monster movie and part superhero origin story, with characters that stay with you long after you’ve put the book down.

In the world of Lafferty’s Playing For Keeps, super-powered types fall into one of three categories. The heroes are powerful, but arrogant jerks. The villains have all the charm and charisma, but are still villains. Then there are people like Keepsie Branson, whose “useless” powers don’t let them fall into either category. After all, what good is the power to prevent something from being stolen from your own possession when it comes to fighting crime – or committing it? Lafferty’s style is slick, funny, and very original. This book isn’t like any other superhero story I know.

Not a novel, but Supergods is one of the most intriguing books about the superhero as a concept that I’ve ever read. In Supergods, the always thought-provoking Grant Morrison digs into what superheroes actually are by picking apart archetypes, delving into the history of the medium, and exploring their place as a sort of modern mythology. Having written countless superhero comics, including some of the most surreal such stories ever to exist, Morrison is in a unique position to dissect the genre in a way that leaves you thinking about what superheroes mean and why they matter. It's the kind of book that makes you examine what the building blocks of superheroes are, and as someone who enjoys playing in that sandbox, it makes me look at one of my favorite genres in new and unique ways. 

In the days after World War II, an alien device explodes in the skies above New York, blanketing the planet with an extraterrestrial virus. Most of the victims die horrible deaths. A smaller percentage – the “Jokers” – find their bodies mutated in various unpredictable ways. And a scant few draw an “Ace” – superpowers without the consequences of a Joker mutation. Wild Cards is the first in a series of “mosaic novels,” books of stories featuring the work of several writers contributing their own pieces of a larger tapestry that helps build and flesh out a remarkable world. The Wild Cards series is perhaps the most elaborate and provocative superhero universe that exists in prose fiction. 

As much as I love comic books, it's always bothered me how many people think comics are superheroes and vice-versa. This was one of the first really successful attempts at doing something with… show more.

For those interested in a compelling work of fiction built loosely around Nazism and the occult, Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is the perfect novel.

Whether it’s one of the protagonists, a young Jewish magician, escaping Nazi-occupied Central Europe in the coffin of the “Golem of Prague” or the eponymous cousins finding success with their own comic book series infused by contemporary esoterica, Kavalier & Clay evokes the world in which young, first and second generation Jewish immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe created the Marvel and DC superheroes and super(natural) villains, often allied with the Third Reich, that have defined our popular culture for the past eighty years.