HBO’s propulsive, nail-biting series “The Last of Us” — based on the acclaimed video game by Naughty Dog — offers a bleak and brutal depiction of the apocalypse, as hardscrabble survivors including Joel (Pedro Pascal), Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Dina (Isabela Merced) navigate a fallen world crawling with flesh-eating “infected,” not to mention other healthy humans who range from desperate and mistrustful to aggressively sadistic. The show is violent and at times disturbing — especially in its shocking second season, which recently concluded — but there’s more to it than action spectacle. A deep undercurrent of emotion runs through the series, making this story about zombies compulsively watchable, frequently moving and deeply human.

While the first season of the show faithfully adapted the eponymous video game, HBO has split the story of its sequel, 2020’s The Last of Us Part II, into two installments — meaning that we’re leaving things on a considerable cliffhanger. If your craving for killer fungi, survival stories, revenge tales and postapocalyptic considerations of what we owe to each other isn’t quite satisfied, these 10 novels can scratch that itch.

Severance

by Ling Ma

Not to be confused with another popular 2025 series, this darkly comic novel — published two years before Covid-19 — is an incisive (and prescient) portrait of a society stumbling through a devastating pandemic. The contagion here is Shen Fever, a debilitating fungal disease that turns its victims into (harmless) zombies. Even as it decimates the globe, Candace Chen, a millennial Chinese American woman living in New York City, resolves to see out the end of her contract doing product coordination for a Bible publisher. It’s fairly soul-sucking drudgery but, it turns out, an improvement on life after societal collapse, when Candace finds herself sheltering in an Illinois shopping mall with a band of other survivors from whom she’s hiding a secret.

Read our review.

Manhunt

by Gretchen Felker-Martin

In Felker-Martin’s postapocalyptic thriller, a plague that targets testosterone has turned half the population into a brainless mass of murderers and rapists, leaving the matriarchy to reign supreme. But for Beth and Fran, two trans women keeping their hormones in check with home remedies, it isn’t only the bloodthirsty men they need to worry about: Roving bands of TERFs view them not as fellow sister-survivors but as interlopers who need to be expunged. A smart book about the politics of gender and the perils of transphobia, “Manhunt” could easily have turned didactic — but Felker-Martin, a dyed-in-the-wool horror fan, delights in the genre’s free-flowing carnage, and that glee is tons of fun.