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- Jerusalem's Lot
series3 books1975
similar bycontemporaryour worldeerietensehorror+1 more
Stephen King's 1975 novel 'Salem's Lot follows writer Ben Mears as he returns to his childhood town of Jerusalem's Lot, Maine, only to discover that its residents are being turned into vampires by a newly arrived stranger. It transplants Gothic vampire horror into a small New England community, tracking that community's collapse under a supernatural siege. It is a single, self-contained novel.
- Southern Reach Trilogy
series4 books2014
similar bycontemporaryour worldeeriescience fictionhorror+2 more
The Southern Reach Series is a series of novels by the American author Jeff VanderMeer first published in 2014—Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance, and Absolution. The series takes its name from the secret agency that is central to the plot. In 2013, Paramount Pictures bought the movie rights for the series, and a film adaptation of Annihilation was made with Alex Garland as writer-director. The film was released in 2018. The most recent book in the series, Absolution, was released on 22 October 2024.
- The Andromeda Strain
series2 books1969
similar bysurvivalcontemporaryscience fictiontense+2 more
Michael Crichton's 1969 novel The Andromeda Strain follows a team of scientists racing to contain a lethal extraterrestrial microorganism that crash-lands in Arizona, told in the clinical, document-driven style that helped establish the techno-thriller genre. Daniel H. Wilson's authorized 2019 sequel The Andromeda Evolution revisits the same threat five decades later. Together the two books form a two-part outbreak story separated by a fifty-year gap in publication.
- The Triffids
series3 books1951
similar bysurvivalour worldscience fiction+1 more
John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids (1951) opens with a meteor-shower-like event that leaves most of Britain's population blind, throwing civilization into collapse just as triffids, an aggressive and mobile species of poisonous plant, become free to hunt the helpless survivors. Simon Clark's authorized sequel The Night of the Triffids (2001) picks up a generation later, narrated by the original protagonist's son as he confronts a new triffid-dominated world, and John Whitbourn's The Age of the Triffids extends the shared setting further still. Together the three novels form a loose post-apocalyptic trilogy built on Wyndham's original premise rather than a tightly plotted single story.
- Goosebumps
universe234 books1992
Start hereRevenge of the Living Dummy · The connected HorrorLand story
similar bycontemporaryour worldhorror+3 more
Reader beware — you're in for a scare. That promise has been kept, book after book, since a boy first knocked on the door of the Dead House and found the whole neighborhood grinning too widely. Goosebumps is R. L. Stine's carnival of small-town dread, where the horror is always sized just right for a kid: a haunted ventriloquist dummy, a camera that photographs disasters before they happen, a mask that won't come off, a basement that hums. Each book is its own self-contained nightmare, narrated by an ordinary boy or girl whose ordinary street has quietly turned against them — and every one snaps shut on a twist that pulls the rug out one last time before the lights come up. The shelf is deep. The original run of paperbacks gave way to Series 2000, then the branching, choose-your-doom gamebooks of Give Yourself Goosebumps, the story-collections Tales to Give You Goosebumps, and villain showcases in Most Wanted. HorrorLand strung the standalones into a single running arc set inside a monstrous theme park, and SlappyWorld and House of Shivers keep the lights flickering for new readers, hosted by Slappy, the wooden fiend who considers himself the star of the whole show. The tone is mock-scary and knowing — spooky enough to thrill, silly enough to laugh off before bed, always short and always cliffhung. No reading order binds them; open any cover. Newcomers usually meet the dummy first, in Night of the Living Dummy, or start where it all began, in Welcome to Dead House.
- Into the Out of
Alan Dean Fosterstandalone novel1986
similar bycontemporaryeeriescience fictiontensehorror+2 more
Into the Out Of (1986) is a horror-science fiction novel by American writer Alan Dean Foster.
- H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds
universe65 books1898
Start hereThe War of the Worlds · Start here
similar byscience fiction+2 more
No one would have believed, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely from the timeless worlds of space. And then the cylinders fell. H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds opens in the quiet of the Surrey commons, where a falling star proves to be the first Martian craft — and from the pit rise the towering tripods, the Heat-Ray, the choking Black Smoke and the creeping red weed, wielded by minds that regard mankind much as we regard the creatures we boil for supper. This is invasion rendered as natural disaster: cold, methodical, and vast beyond argument. Wells' 1898 novel is the seed; everything else grows from that Martian soil. The catalogue gathers direct sequels and continuations alongside a wide field of other hands. In War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches the invasion is retold across the whole planet through the eyes of Twain, Verne, Tolstoy, Lowell and Kipling; in the Manly Wade and Wade Wellman crossover, Sherlock Holmes, Watson and Professor Challenger take the field against the machines; and Scott Washburn's Great Martian War stretches the fighting into a decades-long alternate history of steam, artillery and grinding attrition. It is a loose shared world — no single decreed sequence, many voices answering one calamity. What sets this world apart is its refusal of heroics: the invaders fall not to generals but to the smallest things of Earth, humbling and indifferent. Begin, always, with Wells' original novel — it is short, and it is the ground every later book stands upon. From there follow your appetite: Global Dispatches for the panorama, the Holmes campaign for adventure, Washburn for the long war.
- The Wanderer
Fritz Leiberstandalone novel1964
similar bysurvivalcontemporaryour worldscience fictiontense
The Wanderer is a science fiction novel by American writer Fritz Leiber, published as a paperback original by Ballantine Books in 1964. It won the 1965 Hugo Award for Best Novel.
- Cell
Stephen Kingstandalone novel2006
similar bysurvivalcontemporaryour worldscience fictiontensehorror
In Cell, King taps into readers fears of technological warfare and terrorism. Mobile phones deliver the apocalypse to millions of unsuspecting humans by wiping their brains of any humanity, leaving only aggressive and destructive impulses behind. Those without cell phones, like illustrator Clayton Riddell and his small band of "normies," must fight for survival, and their journey to find Clayton's estranged wife and young son rockets the book toward resolution.
- Hellstrom's Hive
Frank Herbertstandalone novel1973
similar bycontemporaryeeriescience fictiontenseunderground & caves+1 more
Hellstrom's Hive is a 1973 science fiction novel by Frank Herbert. It is about a secret group of humans who model their lives upon social insects and the unsettling events that unfold after they are discovered by a deep undercover agency of the U.S. government.
- Pym
series5 books1838
similar bysurvival+5 more
Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), his only complete novel, sends a young stowaway through shipwreck, mutiny, and cannibalism toward an increasingly strange voyage to the South Pole that breaks off on a mysterious, unexplained image. Jules Verne wrote an unauthorized 1897 sequel, An Antarctic Mystery, resolving Poe's cliffhanger in more rationalist terms, while Mat Johnson's 2011 novel Pym uses Poe's original as the springboard for a satirical modern story about race.
- Footfall
Larry Niven & Jerry Pournellestandalone novel1985
similar bysurvivalcontemporaryour worldscience fictiontense
When aliens travel to Earth from Alpha Centauri, differences between alien and human psychology result in an unprovoked invasion, and the resulting resistance results in the aliens' use of a devastating weapon.
- Rats
series4 books1974
completed
similar bysurvivalcontemporarytensehorror+2 more
The Rats, James Herbert's 1974 debut novel, imagines a plague of giant mutant rats overrunning London, told through a rotating cast of victims and survivors in the tradition of British disaster horror. It was followed by two sequels, Lair and Domain, which widen the outbreak first to the countryside and then to a besieged, apocalyptic city, completing a three-book trilogy.
- Richard Forthrast
series2 books2011
similar byour worldscience fiction+2 more
Neal Stephenson's Richard 'Dodge' Forthrast novels open with Reamde, a globe-spanning thriller that starts when ransomware inside an MMORPG economy pulls Richard's extended family into a real-world hostage crisis involving hackers, jihadists and Russian mobsters. The sequel Fall; or, Dodge in Hell shifts registers entirely, following Richard's digitally preserved mind after death into an afterlife simulation built from his scanned brain. The two books share a protagonist and family but differ sharply in genre and scale.
- The Fog
James Herbertstandalone novel1975
similar bysurvivalcontemporaryour worldtensehorror+1 more
The Fog is a horror novel by English writer James Herbert, published in 1975. It is about a deadly fog that drives its victims insane when they come into contact with it.
- Ascension
Nicholas Bingestandalone novel2023
similar bycontemporaryour worldeeriescience fictiontense+1 more
Ascension is a 2023 novel by Nicholas Binge, published in the UK by Harper Voyager, and in the US by Riverhead Books. It is published or forthcoming in twelve languages, and a film adaptation is in development. The novel tells the story of Harold Tunmore, a physicist, who joins a team to climb a mountain that has appeared in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
- Later
Stephen Kingstandalone novel2021
similar bycontemporaryour worldeerietenseghost storieshorror+1 more
A young boy, with the power of seeing and talking with the recently deceased, and his single mother try to avoid personal and financial disasters.
- Web
John Wyndhamstandalone novel1979
similar bysurvivalcontemporaryour worldscience fictiontense+1 more
Web is a science fiction novel by the English writer John Wyndham. The novel was published by the estate of John Wyndham in 1979, ten years after his death.
- Jeremy Logan
series6 books2007
similar bycontemporarytense+4 more
Lincoln Child's Jeremy Logan series follows an investigator through cases where science and the seemingly supernatural collide, opening with Deep Storm, set at a deep-sea drilling platform that may have uncovered the lost city of Atlantis. The series continues across six novels blending techno-thriller and horror elements.
