The best zombie books are those that take place in a post-apocalyptic world, where humanity has been wiped out by zombies. The survivors must band together to survive and find ways to fight back against the undead hordes.
Zombie fiction is one of the most popular genres in fiction today. It’s also one of the most controversial. Some people think it’s just too scary for children, while others love reading about how humans can overcome any obstacle.
Here are 25 of the best zombie books you should read:
1. World War Z by Max Brooks
No doubt you’ve seen or heard of the film World War Z that hit theaters a few years back, but the book it’s based on is completely different. Not just different, it’s arguably a much better story too.
World War Z by Max Brooks follows the story of the outbreak of the Solanum virus in China that sweeps over the world bringing back the dead and and near-apocalyptic downfall of the entire planet. Humanity has finally beaten back the undead and the book follows the journey one man takes across the globe, interviewing survivors about their experiences and tracing events back to the earliest days of the outbreak. It’s unconfirmed but very likely that this canonically leads to the creation of The Zombie Survival Guide.
2. The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman
The original comic series was written by Kirkman and artist Tony Moore, with art by Charlie Adlard. This version of the story would go on to spawn two television shows, four video games, and numerous spinoff comics. In short: there’s no shortage of Walking Dead content out there.
But while the TV show and comics may be popular, Kirkman’s first effort at telling the tale of Rick Grimes and his small band of survivors is still considered the best way to experience the apocalypse. With its stark black and white art style and realistic depiction of post-apocalyptic life, The Walking Dead is a timeless classic.
3. Generation Dead by Daniel Waters
Generation Dead is another novel that deals with the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse. While the setting is similar to that of The Walking Dead, Generation Dead focuses on the lives of three teens as they struggle to deal with the new reality.
In Generation Dead, the world has collapsed into chaos after a mysterious flu spreads through the population. As the disease progresses, people begin to turn violent, attacking each other in packs. People start dying off, leaving behind only those who can’t fight anymore.
4. Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion
Warm Bodies is a young adult novel set in a post-zombie apocalypse world. Starring a high school student named Nick (who gets bitten during a party) and classmate Cassie (a cheerleader), the pair soon fall in love and embark on a road trip together. Along the way, however, they discover that not everyone else shares their enthusiasm for living forever.
5. Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament by S.G. Browne
Breathers tells the story of Andy Warner, a human-turned-zombie who wakes up undead after a car accident kills his wife and leaves him with amnesia. When Andy begins to remember things, he realizes that he’s being hunted down by a group of humans who believe that all zombies should be destroyed.
6. Love & The Zombie Apocalypse by Chelsea Luna
Love & The Zombie Apocalypse is a trilogy of zombie apocalypse books that follow the story of Rachel Cole and her sister Morgan who goes off to science camp. The biological terror attack that causes the dead to reanimate and attack the living just so happens to strike the nation. Now, follow Rachel as her and her group of friends fight across the country to rescue Morgan.
7. This is Not a Test by Courtney Summers
This is Not a Test is a young adult zombie book where the main character, Sloane Price, must learn how to survive when society collapses around her in the ensuing zombie infection. She and a group of other damaged teens fight for survival both in the apocalypse and as well their slowly collapsing mental stability.
8. The Rising by Brian Keene
A particle accelerator experiment goes horribly wrong, ripping open a hole to another dimension that lets demons posses the dead. Follow Jim Thurmond, a construction contractor in West Virginia hiding away in a bomb shelter as the apocalypse ensues. In an attempt to find his son in New Jersey, Jim exits the shelter to find that the dead are able to think, drive, use weapons, and set traps for humans…
9. Monster Island by David Wellington
Monster Island follows the story of a former UN peacekeeper who’s daughter is being held by a warlord in Africa. In exchange for his daughter’s freedom, the protagonist Dekalb enters a zombie-infested island to retrieve critical AIDS medication for the warlord.
10. The Reapers are the Angels by Alden Bell
The Reapers Are the Angels takes place in a near future America where a plague has turned most of the population into ravenous cannibals. Those who remain become slaves to brutal gangs called “Reapers”. One day, a 14 year old girl named Juno runs away from home to join the ranks of the Reapers. There she meets the charismatic yet dark leader known only as Reaper Pope.
11. Zombie Fallout by Mark Tufo
Zombie Fallout is a book series (it’s huge, like 18 books) about a governmental rushed-vaccine against H1N1 pushed out to the populace that ends up accidentally causing the dead to become, uh…undead. It’s honestly a straight forward zombie-survival series that dives right into the outbreak without much fanfare. It’s got raving reviews by avid zombie readers and always makes for a clean break for a zombie-fuelled experience. It’s pulp-zombie to the T.
12. Clickers vs Zombies by JF Gonzalez and Brian Keene
After a devastating tsunami, masses of Clickers swarmed onto California’s coast, destroying everything in their path. As the creatures begin attacking other worlds, humanity fights back, not knowing that a second foe is lurking behind them, an alien race of beings called the Siqqusim who have the ability to take possession of and animate the dead. Now, Earth faces two invasions: the mindless, hungry Clicker invaders and the evil, and just as ravenous zombie invaders. Both groups have only the same goal in mind: the complete eradication of humans.
But what happens when they meet?
13. Braineater Jones by Stephen Kozeniewski
Braineater Jones is a Zombie-Noire book that follows Braineater Jones as he wakes up dead and with no memory of how he died. So he and his comical smart-aleck partner, a severed talking head, dive into the undead ghetto to solve his own murder. Jones needs to solve is murder while also fighting his own growing addiction to human flesh.
14. Southern Devils by Brent Abell
During an alternate history of the American Civil War, the Southern rebel army is fighting the Union in Brother versus Brother warfare. But the Confederates had just lost their imposing general Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson along with their hopes of winning the war. Until the South starts to rise again…this time as undead hordes of zombies ready to eat their way north.
15. Patient Zero by Jonathan Maberry
Joe Ledger, a Baltimore investigator, is recruited into the Department of Military Sciences, a specialist arm of the US government that reports exclusively to the President, to foil a terrorist conspiracy against the United States. El Mujahid and his accomplices invent a prion disease that causes victims to die and then re-animate with only rudimentary brain function, allowing them to locate, assault, and infect other individuals with “Seif al Din.” Before El Mujahid can unleash his newer and more potent strain of the disease on Philadelphia, Joe Ledger and the Department of Military Sciences must intervene.
16. Day by Day Armageddon by JL Bourne
Day by Day Armageddon is another World War Z style book that follows the journal of a survivor in the zombie apocalypse. The book is read as if you were a survivor coming across the journal and reading into the life of this person and their experience facing the end of the world.
17. As the World Dies: The First Days by Rhiannon Frater
Katie is getting ready for court the morning the world ends, while housewife Jenni is taking care of her family. They’re running for their life from a zombie horde less than two hours later. Jenni and Katie are thrown together by fate and become a deadly zombie-killing team, mowing down zombies while rescuing Jenni’s stepson, Jason, from an infected campsite. They seek refuge in a small, poorly protected Texas hamlet. Jenni and Katie discover that they are drawn to Travis, the survivor’s leader; and the refugees are forced to slay individuals they know who have returned in zombie form.
18. Zone One by Colson Whitehead
A virus has wiped off civilization, turning affected people into flesh-eating, dangerously infectious zombies. However, the situation has calmed, and the reconstruction effort has begun. Over the course of three days, “Mark Spitz” and his fellow “sweepers”—other apocalypse survivors—patrol parts of New York Metropolis, killing zombies as part of a mission to make the city habitable once more. The story is peppered with flashbacks that explain how Mark Spitz has survived the apocalypse thus far and how he obtained his moniker.
19. Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan
The Sisterhood and the Guardians rule over Mary’s town. The town is encircled by walls, with only woodland beyond. There are only three routes through the fence: gates that open on paths that are also surrounded by fencing, allowing sick people to escape. Nobody knows where the two pathways will go, because the Sisterhood claims the hamlet is the last human settlement on the planet. Mary grew up hearing stories of life before the zombie apocalypse from her great-great-great-grandmother. She is enthralled by the water and feels that if she could just go to it, she will be set free.
20. Feed by Mira Grant aka Seanan McGuire
Feed is place many decades after the Rising, a zombie apocalypse. Kellis-Amberlee is a virus that swiftly infects all mammalian life by combining two man-made viruses (a cancer treatment and a common cold cure). The Kellis-Amberlee virus is usually harmless, but it may “go live” or “amplify,” turning any host animal above 40 pounds (18 kg) into a zombie. Amplification occurs in three ways: the death of the host, interaction with a living specimen (such as being bitten by a zombie), and spontaneous conversion. Those who haven’t had their infection amplified stay awake until the virus has had chance to propagate throughout the body. Following lucidity, there comes a lack of pain sensitivity, memory loss, and eventually conversion.
21. Cell by Stephen King
Clayton Riddell, a struggling Maine artist, had just scored a graphic novel contract in Boston when “The Pulse,” a signal broadcast across the global mobile phone network, transforms all cell phone users into mindless murderers. When the Pulse goes off, Clay is standing in Boston Common, causing havoc to erupt all around him. As the “phoners” attack each other and anybody in sight, civilization falls.
It’s one of Stephen King’s sillier novels, to be fair.
22. Devil’s Wake by Steven Barnes and Tananarive Due
Terry and Kendra are trapped in the northern United States as winter approaches, and they have no option but to trek a thousand miles of no-man’s-land in a dilapidated school bus, fighting voracious hordes, human raiders, and their own anxieties. They discover something no one could have predicted in the middle of the catastrophe… love.
23. City of the Dead by Brian Keene
As the novel begins, Jim discovers Danny alive, but the living dead quickly descend on their position. When Frankie and Martin arrive to the house, they find themselves locked in the attic. The zombies set fire to the home after seeing Danny’s neighbor in his panic room across the street. Everyone but Frankie makes it between the two houses using a ladder; unfortunately, Frankie suffers a two-story fall into a swimming pool below. Meanwhile, Don, Martin, Jim, and Danny reassemble and flee in Don’s Ford Explorer. They discover Frankie fighting zombies in the front yard after leaving the garage, seriously damaged from the fall and shot multiple times. They come to her aid as she is in shock.
24. Husk: A Novel by Corey Redekop
This hilarious tale follows Sheldon Funk, a poor actor who dies in a bus lavatory only to resurrect and fight the coroner during his examination. Sheldon finds he’s now a zombie as he flees into the winter streets of Toronto, as if he didn’t have enough on his plate already.
25. Plague of the Dead by Z.A. Recht
When a great military effort fails to suppress the undead, a worldwide epidemic ensues. The requirements of existence become much more fundamental in one fell stroke. Petty daily problems are no longer an issue. The comforts of modern existence have vanished. Even yet, there is one natural law that remains: It’s either live or die. It’s either kill or be killed. A battle-hardened general assesses the remnants of his command on the other side of the globe: a young doctor, a seasoned photographer, a boisterous Private, and scores of refugees, all under his authority thousands of miles from home.
Zombie & the Post-Apocalypse
Zombies are a popular reason for an apocalyptic setting. There are many reasons why an apocalypse might happen, but the most common is nuclear war. Zombies are probably the most popular after nukes. Zombies are the perfect sci fi element for a dreadful apocalypse that actively plays with the psychology of the lone survivors trying to stay ahead of the undead.
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