Here are 100 books that Outage fans have personally recommended if you like
Outage.
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I’ve always been fascinated by the “what if” of how humanity would survive a worldwide disaster. While many post-apocalyptic tales depict a bleak world where the apocalypse brings out the worst in everyone, my favorite stories—both to read and to write—have always been ones where people hold on to their humanity and band together against the darkness. That’s why I like the ones on this list.
This is the granddaddy of all EMP stories—the one that arguably kicked off the entire genre and the one that got me interested in EMP disaster books. So grounded that it has been cited as a cautionary tale in Congress, the story doesn’t shy away from the grim realities of a world where technology suddenly stops working.
Retired army officer John Matherson suffered his share of hardships, but I liked the way he never lost hope or stopped fighting for his family and community.
A post-apocalyptic thriller of the after effects in the United States after a terrifying terrorist attack using electromagnetic pulse weapons.
New York Times best selling author William R. Forstchen now brings us a story which can be all too terrifyingly real...a story in which one man struggles to save his family and his small North Carolina town after America loses a war, in one second, a war that will send America back to the Dark Ages...A war based upon a weapon, an Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP). A weapon that may already be in the hands of our enemies.
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
I worked as an industrial electrician for over two decades. At one point during a meeting to discuss an upcoming project, a question was posed about the delivery time of a specific piece of equipment. When the answer was given that it would be about a year away, it got me thinking: what if a specialized piece of equipment—critical to the grid and with an equally long lead time—was destroyed, how would the grid survive? More importantly; how would we survive? That single statement was the spark that ignited the fire in me to learn all about the grid, and to write Dark State.
Lights Out is another great non-fiction book about electrical grid vulnerabilities. Koppel also spotlights High Power Transformers as the Achilles Heel of our electrical system
But Koppel also does a deep dive on the survivability—or rather lack thereof, of our society if the grid were to be taken down. He even broke down various social classes of people: rural versus urban, and talked about how each group would survive based upon their skillsets and resources available to them. FYI: Ranchers fare best
He even discussed the amazing organization the Mormon Church has put together with regards to the preparedness of each of their members, as well as how they would leverage their collective strengths together as a group.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Ted Koppel reveals that a major cyberattack on America’s power grid is not only possible but likely, that it would be devastating, and that the United States is shockingly unprepared.
“Fascinating, frightening, and beyond timely.”—Anderson Cooper
Imagine a blackout lasting not days, but weeks or months. Tens of millions of people over several states are affected. For those without access to a generator, there is no running water, no sewage, no refrigeration or light. Food and medical supplies are dwindling. Devices we rely on have gone dark. Banks no longer function, looting is widespread, and…
I worked as an industrial electrician for over two decades. At one point during a meeting to discuss an upcoming project, a question was posed about the delivery time of a specific piece of equipment. When the answer was given that it would be about a year away, it got me thinking: what if a specialized piece of equipment—critical to the grid and with an equally long lead time—was destroyed, how would the grid survive? More importantly; how would we survive? That single statement was the spark that ignited the fire in me to learn all about the grid, and to write Dark State.
Although there are novels with the same title, I chose the non-fiction, The Grid, by Phillip F. Schewe, as another one of the books that influenced the writing of my own book. Even though I was formerly an industrial electrician by trade, I only understood the function of the various components within the grid, and didn’t possess an intimate understanding of how it all tied together. In fact, this was the first book I ever read on the topic and it helped lay the groundwork for my knowledge. And although it is fact-based, it’s not overly technical and is written in such a way that it entertains as well as enlightens.
Most importantly however, was the fact that the book highlighted the vulnerability of a single key component of the grid (High-Power Transformers) and this understanding helped me develop the plot for my book.
The electrical grid goes everywhere-it's the largest and most complex machine ever made. Yet the system is built in such a way that the bigger it gets, the more inevitable its collapse.
Named the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century by the National Academy of Engineering, the electrical grid is the largest industrial investment in the history of humankind. It reaches into your home, snakes its way to your bedroom, and climbs right up into the lamp next to your pillow. At times, it almost seems alive, like some enormous circulatory system that pumps life to big cities and…
When Annie Thornton, midwife and apprentice witch, falls through time to a 15th-century Yorkshire village with her telepathic cat, Rosamund, she befriends Will and Jack, two soldiers returning from the French Wars. Mistress Meg, Annie’s ancestral aunt living in the 15th century, is…
I worked as an industrial electrician for over two decades. At one point during a meeting to discuss an upcoming project, a question was posed about the delivery time of a specific piece of equipment. When the answer was given that it would be about a year away, it got me thinking: what if a specialized piece of equipment—critical to the grid and with an equally long lead time—was destroyed, how would the grid survive? More importantly; how would we survive? That single statement was the spark that ignited the fire in me to learn all about the grid, and to write Dark State.
I first heard of The Disaster Diaries from an interview with author Sam Sheridan. While not a book strictly related to a grid failure, it was still about disaster and surviving the breakdown of societal norms.
What was so amazing about the book—and something that endeared the author to me, was his humility regarding his own lack of preparedness. Here was a man who had been an EMT, a mixed martial arts fighter, a fire-fighter, and a cowboy, and yet he still didn’t feel prepared enough to survive a disaster!
What follows is a unique journey as he learns stunt driving, knife fighting, even how to steal a car, all to help him prepare for “The Big One.”
Sam Sheridan has been an amateur boxer, mixed-martial-arts fighter, professional wilderness firefighter, EMT, sailor, and cowboy, and has worked in construction at the South Pole. If he isn't ready for the apocalypse, we're all in a lot of trouble.
Despite an arsenal of skills that would put most of us to shame, when Sam had his son and settled down, he was beset with nightmares about being unable to protect him. Apocalyptic images filled his head. If a rogue wave hit his beach community, could he get out? If he was forced outside the city, could he survive in the…
I’m a Canadian writer living in southern British Columbia. When I was young, most people thought I was too small and frail to do awesome things. It wasn’t until I got older that I began to understand that my love for wild places and adventures was at the heart of who I was, and I began to see that I was much stronger than I thought. These days, I hike, climb, kayak, cross-country ski, and snowshoe – anything that gets me outside in nature. And I've done some awesome things out there! I want to change the way people see nature, not as something to be conquered, but to be treated with affection and respect.
In my search for a survival novel with a young female protagonist, I came across this gem set on a fictional island in the Pacific Northwest, close to where I live.
Thirteen-year-old Hannah is new to babysitting when disaster in the form of an earthquake strikes. I appreciated the way the protagonist constantly evaluates her situation, finding resilience and strength when there are no adults to turn to.
Hatchet meets The Babysitters Club in this epic and thrilling survival story about pushing oneself to the limit in the face of a crisis. We were all alone, in a shaken and shattered house, in the dark. And I was in charge. Hannah Steele loves living on Pelling, a tiny island near Seattle. She's always felt totally safe there. So when she's asked to babysit after school one day, it's no big deal. Zoe and Oscar are her next-door neighbors, and Hannah just took a babysitting class, which she's pretty sure makes her an expert. She isn't even worried that…
I’m a writer with a passion for nature and the great outdoors. As a child, my family vacations centered around camping in various locations around the U.S. We spent plenty of time hiking, swimming, exploring caves, and sitting around a campfire. My mom and I also frequently camped with our horses, sometimes even sleeping in the back of our horse trailer. Those are some of the best memories of my life. To this day, my family and I still enjoy exploring the great outdoors. Some of our favorite destinations include the Grand Canyon, the beaches of Key West, the Pacific Northwest, the Redwood forests, and Yellowstone National Park.
I found this book by chance and wanted to read it because the premise is similar to one of my projects. The Wild is a murder mystery set at a camp for juvenile delinquents. This story takes place in the Pacific Northwest, which was a big bonus for me as it’s one of my favorite places on Earth.
I liked the author’s unique and snappy writing style and the fast pacing of the book. It kept me turning pages, especially once the first murder occurred. Overall, this book was a lot of fun to read.
A girl is sent against her will to a remote wilderness boot camp where things aren't what they seem in this riveting and twisty paperback thriller.
FROM THIS MOMENT ON, YOU'RE A BEAR CUB. YOU'LL LEARN RESPONSIBILITY AND RESPECT. HOW TO SURVIVE. IT'S EASIER IF YOU JUST ACCEPT IT.
Dawn isn't a bad person--she's just made some bad choices: wrong guy, wrong friends, wrong everything. But she wasn't expecting her parents to pay a boatload of money to ship her off to OUT OF THE WILD, a wilderness boot camp with a bunch of other messed up kids to learn…
Chasing Light is a lyrical meditation on grief, memory, and the fragile beauty of everyday life. At its core, it is a story of resilience, forgiveness, and the transformational power of human connection. It sheds light on the overlooked realities of homelessness and addiction, while emphasizing the importance of compassion…
I’ve always admired epistolary novels—stories told in the form of diaries, letters, or other mass media. They seem so real and so much more believable than plain narratives. When dealing with fantastic subjects, like paranormal phenomena, any technique that can draw the weird back into the real world helps me become more invested as a reader. It’s a quality I’ve also tried to capture as a horror writer. Moreover, the epistolary format pairs well with unreliable narrators, often filtering stories so as to make them more ambiguous and disturbing. From the many epistolary works I’ve read over the years, here are my picks for the most compelling—and creepy.
I know the concept of a sasquatch attack on a remote commune sounds silly on the surface, but Brooks crafts it into a realistic, serious story. As a believer in the possibility of Bigfoot, I was fascinated to see how disastrously an encounter between humans and cryptids could conceivably go.
The naivete of the settlers in the wilderness is even more distressing than the hostility of the animals. Unsettling news reports (of which the characters remain unaware) interspersed with diary entries underscore their desperation and peril. I thought the situation was completely credible. Really, we ought to have more sasquatch horror books.
'TRUE TERROR' Guardian 'NAIL CHOMPING SUSPENSE' Total Film ______________________________________ As the ash and chaos from Mount Rainier's eruption swirled and finally settled, the story of the Greenloop massacre has passed unnoticed, unexamined . . . until now.
But the journals of resident Kate Holland, recovered from the town's bloody wreckage, capture a tale too harrowing - and too earth-shattering in its implications - to be forgotten.
In these pages, Max Brooks brings Kate's extraordinary account to light for the first time, faithfully reproducing her words alongside his own extensive investigations into…
I’m a Canadian writer living in southern British Columbia. When I was young, most people thought I was too small and frail to do awesome things. It wasn’t until I got older that I began to understand that my love for wild places and adventures was at the heart of who I was, and I began to see that I was much stronger than I thought. These days, I hike, climb, kayak, cross-country ski, and snowshoe – anything that gets me outside in nature. And I've done some awesome things out there! I want to change the way people see nature, not as something to be conquered, but to be treated with affection and respect.
I’ve read post-apocalyptic novels for adults, but I know that children have even more reason for anxiety about potential present-day disasters.
96 Miles is a survival novel for readers aged 9-12 that appealed to me because the disaster is a believable, wide-scale power outage. The setting is identifiably now, and it takes place on a lonely road in the desert in Nevada.
The book is a page-turner, but there’s also a sense of hope that kept me reading. The four children pool their resources: food, water, knowledge, and maybe most importantly, emotional support. Their teamwork and a few practical survival skills keep them going when many adults would have given up.
21 days without power. 2 brothers on a desperate trek. 72 hours before time runs out...
The Lockwood brothers are supposed to be able to survive anything. Their dad, a hardcore believer in self-reliance, has stockpiled enough food and water at their isolated Nevada home to last for months. But when they are robbed of all their supplies during a massive blackout while their dad is out of town, John and Stew must walk 96 miles in the stark desert sun to get help. Along the way, they’re forced to question their dad’s insistence on self-reliance and ask just what…
Who can really claim that they know everything about the human heart, the mind, the soul? The infinite mysteries and complexities of what makes someone who we can call “human.” I'm betting no one. Certainly not me. But what's important is the passion to keep exploring, to keep digging through the mind in an effort to understand myself. That effort, along with what I discover, is one of the most tangible things that not only enriches my living life, but also gives me comfort facing the inevitable end. These books were passionate companions, inspiring me, for however long, to further my efforts in self-discovery.
As the back cover so prominently states, “Many people dream of escaping modern life, but most will never act on it.” That sentence is a concise summary of how I felt after coming home from the Iraq War.
So traumatized, so repulsed by humanity and our ugliness, I felt an overwhelming desire to never be a part of society again. And I spent years isolating, viewing the world from a removed window.
Reading this book was like talking with an old friend. It allowed me to mentally share and feel a mutual understanding, and in the end, not feel quite so alone in the sense that I wasn’t the only one who needed to escape.
Could you leave behind all that you know and live in solitude for three decades? This is the extraordinary story of the last true hermit - Christopher Knight.
'This was a breath-taking book to read and many weeks later I am still thinking about the implications for our society and - by extension - for my own life' Sebastian Junger, bestselling author of The Perfect Storm
'A wry meditation on one man's attempt to escape life's distractions and look inwards, to find meaning not by doing, but by being' Martin Sixsmith, bestselling author of Philomena…
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman
by
Alexis Krasilovsky,
Kate from Jules et Jim meets I Love Dick.
A young woman filmmaker’s journey of self-discovery, set against a backdrop of the sexual liberation movement of the 1970s and 1980s. In Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman, we follow Ana Fried as she faces the ultimate…
I had the passion to write Necessary Deeds because: 1) as someone who'd spent 20+ years writing novels, dealing with untrustworthy literary agents, and book-doctoring other writers’ novels in order to pay rent, I'd come to know betrayal (“best friend” writers who stole drafts of mine and called them their own, novelists who backstabbed me after I helped them land agents and book contracts, and so on); 2) like many people who lived through the drug-and-alcohol-laced Eighties, I had a long relationship with someone that ended because they cheated on me. So I never doubted that, as I wrote Necessary Deeds, my heart knew well what motivated its characters.
This book leans a bit more toward the literary fiction category than do most books I read these days, but it’s among my top five because of two elements it develops, and poignantly so: 1) the constant threat of death for not only the narrator but also others he knows, and 2) a love story.
And the love story, much as it got to me emotionally, never once struck me as sappy. Instead, it was very realistic. Very human. Very no-b.s. As a result, altogether, this novel offers terrific storytelling.
THE ROAD - but with hope. Hig, bereaved and traumatised after global disaster, has three things to live for - his dog Jasper, his aggressive but helpful neighbour, and his Cessna aeroplane. He's just about surviving, so long as he only takes his beloved plane for short journeys, and saves his remaining fuel. But, just once, he picks up a message from another pilot, and eventually the temptation to find out who else is still alive becomes irresistible. So he takes his plane over the horizon, knowing that he won't have enough fuel to get back. What follows is scarier…
