Max Brooks' World War Z is the “Patient Zero” of zombie literature: a contagious classic that went “viral” in a way that few horror novels do. Readers everywhere caught the zombie bug, and when they did, the shelves of nearby bookshelves began to fill with with zombie horror (along with zombie crime, zombie sci-fi, and even zombie romance). Although a number of great zombie novels have come along since World War Z, none have been able to match Brooks’s legendary telling.

One of the things that sets World War Z apart from its competitors is its format. Brooks eschewed a traditional narrative format, choosing instead to present his globe-spanning story in the form of an oral history. Every chapter is an individual survivor’s tale, all of them transcribed and arranged in chronological order by an anonymous United Nations employee. By doing so, Brooks dazzles readers with dozens of perspectives on the horror of the zombie apocalypse, beginning with the first case in a rural Chinese village and ending in the near-complete collapse of global civilization.

World War Z’s survivors are a diverse bunch: soldiers, housewives, scientists, and more are on hand to offer their stories of horror and desperation. Not all of them are “good guys,” either: Zombies don’t care who is good or bad, and the greedy, venal, and violent are among those lucky enough to have escaped their grasping hands and gnashing teeth. Every story needs its villains, and in World War Z, there are plenty. The zombies are horrifying, but there’s no true volition behind what they do: They’re automatons -- eating machines. The human criminals of World War Z have no excuse.

The stories fit together like the pieces of a mosaic: Individually, each survivor's tale is interesting enough, but when all of them are put together they form a great work of art -- in this case, a panoramic perspective on an apocalyptic event.

Fans of World War Z have been clamoring for a movie adaptation since the first day the book hit shelves, and clearly Hollywood saw the same thing readers did: a riveting tale that begged to be resurrected on the silver screen. The buzz about the book only got louder when a bidding war for the movie rights broke out between Appian Way and Plan B Entertainment, production companies owned by Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, respectively, and then the buzz became a deafening roar when Max Brooks revealed that Brad Pitt would star in the film during a panel discussion at San Diego Comic Con 2010.

It remains to be seen whether the film will meet the high expectations of readers, but the brilliance of Max Brooks’s novel will remain undiminished. World War Z is a reading experience that isn't easily forgotten: It infects the imagination like a virus, leaving the reader -- and his or her expectations of what horror fiction can be -- forever changed.

The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters is an entertaining blend of two popular genres -- the police procedural and dystopian fiction. It's a slick and thought-provoking mash-up. How could it not be? After all, what would you do if the world as we know it were set to end in six months?

Six months ahead of the apocalypse is exactly where we set down in Winters' novel. To be more precise, it's six months before a previously unknown asteroid barrels into earth with enough heft to set off an apocalyptic winter. Alas, there are no Hollywood heroics to blast it off course. Instead there's just the ominously creeping dread of inevitability. Some people choose to kill themselves, others go "bucket list" or disappear into drugs. But not Henry Palace, the newest and youngest police detective in Concord, New Hampshire. Detective Palace is a regulation-quoting, straight-arrow cop bumped up to detective to man the suicide and AWOL-drained force. He's also something of a department laughingstock, too, as he insists on investigating what looks like a routine suicide.

In what might be his -- and the world's -- last case, Detective Palace marshals the remaining resources to find out what really happened to the corpse found on a bathroom floor. Was it murder or suicide? And is there a meaningful difference as the world clock runs down? For Henry Palace there is, indeed, a difference. But whether it's justice or the orderliness of puzzle solving is something that may play out in the next two books of this planned trilogy.

Winters' first installment hints at an interesting reveal to come -- namely what's going on behind the wire-ringed military complexes dotting the country. While Detective Palace pursues a killer, a bigger test for him may still lie ahead. Meanwhile, in a side story, Detective Palace's sister has either hooked up with deluded conspiracy theorists or she's onto some secret post-apocalypse survival plans. Detective Palace, though, is largely myopic and focused on the case at hand. His single-mindedness is oddly reassuring -- a tribute to our basic need for justice. But what justice will mean as the apocalypse approaches is sure to test the fundamentals of law and order.

I'm going to be honest here. If something were to go drastically wrong with our world – nuclear blast, zombie apocalypse, massive meteor strike – I hope I am taken out in the first wave. Setting aside the overwhelming heartbreak, mental and physical stresses unlike any I have ever known plus an overwhelming-to-the-point-of-paralyzing worry for my family, especially my children, I know I am just not cut out for a world without air-conditioning, hot water and, much like "Zombieland's" Tallahassee, Hostess Twinkies. And I am fine with that. So why do I spend so much of my downtime in this world? Whether it be Stephen King's The Stand, “The Walking Dead,” or the world of the Virals created by Justin Cronin in The Passage trilogy, I just can't get enough. So, finally, I’ve read the next book in Cronin’s trilogy: The Twelve.

I will admit (that honesty thing here) that I have always been a person who slows down to look at accidents, a what-if person. But I don't think that's it. What draws me in to Cronin’s world is the larger-than-life characters and the worlds they inhabit, which are created by his fabulous writing. And that is what got me hooked on Justin Cronin. He is a fabulous writer, one I had admired even before he entered into the realm of post-apocalyptic fiction. But boy – did he up the ante with The Passage trilogy. When I first read The Passage, book one in the trilogy, I could not stop talking about it. I put it in anyone and everyone's hands; the writing and strong characters drew me in and have lived inside of my heart and mind for three years while I awaited book two.

And then it arrived. I didn't know what to do – treat it like any book, queuing it at the bottom of my pile, dive in but ration it out or tear through? I had no choice, I chose the latter. I couldn't wait and once I started it, I couldn't put it down. Cronin does in this book exactly what I had hoped: He gives us backstories, character insights, he answers questions and creates more. He brings to life Lila Kyle, in my opinion, one of the best characters ever written. He breaks my heart and creates new hope. He kicks it up a notch (several actually) and delivers with The Twelve, a book that is better than The Passage.

When I was young, I could not get enough of the worlds of Laura Ingalls and Mary Lennox so it seems I have always been drawn to stories that were missing the same things: electricity and prepackaged food. But although I have taken a 180-degree turn from the lives on the prairie and in the manor house, the sum of the equation is the same. It's the characters that keep me returning to those worlds, looking for new friends, new survivors, new hopes. Thankfully, Justin Cronin will give me his creation in three parts. I cannot wait to find out how the world ends – or perhaps begins again – for my friends.

One of our greatest contemporary writers, Cormac McCarthy is mostly known for his tales of the American West: No Country for Old Men, All the Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian. All of them are modern classics. Yet McCarthy's greatest achievement does not take place in his American West universe. No, it takes place in the much different universe portrayed in his 2006 novel, The Road, where the world has "exploded" and where "there is no God and [people] are his prophets."

It is post-apocalyptic America. A father and son are trekking to the coast. What they expect to find there, they don't know. What they do know is: Food, water, and shelter are in short supply; other people can't be trusted; and, finally, that they must "keep trying." The two of them walk, eat, and sleep along the road, exposed to the rain and snow and forest fires that devastate the mountains they travel through. Familiar places, such as houses and barns, offer no more comfort, but rather display morbid still-lifes -- hanged corpses, severed heads, people stored in basements as food supply. All the while, the father struggles to find balance between raising his son a child and raising his son a man. One moment he's handing his son his first Coca-Cola and assuring him they (the father and son) are the good guys; the next he's handing him a revolver and telling him to stop crying. Complicating things is the notable, haunting absence of the mother who, we learn, has killed herself (with the same gun the father carries now), leaving just the two of them, father and son, to communicate with, and survive for, each other. Only this isn't so easy in a world where "men can't live" and "gods fare no better." Talk between father and son is a struggle, often filled with repeated phrases and differing ideologies about helping others.

McCarthy's prose is terse and rough. And although ruthlessly unsentimental and full of atrocities, his cadences and repetitions (similar to the Bible) are too beautiful to be read coldly. Rather, The Road reaches a parable-like level of authority and passion, where each detail is bigger than itself and nothing is wasted.

In the end, The Road doesn't answer the question, "What happened to the world?" It has no interest in telling a genesis story. All you get is a clue here and there, a vague word or phrase, as if overheard in a street or restaurant. But the "how" and "why" don't matter. Rather, our hearts rest with the individual struggle of the good guys in a bad world; the reaction to utter disaster; the primal, human fight to live and keep on living.

As Francisco de Goya once said, “The sleep of reason produces monsters.” A brief survey of apocalyptic fiction in recent years would seem to support this. Delving within the literature reveals a haunted house of ghoulish horrors: the shambling flesh-eating hordes of Colson Whitehead’s Zone One and Alden Bell’s The Reapers Are the Angels, and the monstrous chimera of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, to name a few.

What of more prosaic depictions of society’s collapse? Do they carry the same worrying charge? In the case of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, the answer is a resounding (admittedly hilarious) “Yes.”

Perhaps it is unorthodox to consider Super Sad True Love Story in the context of apocalyptic or dystopian (and really, a dystopia is only one gunshot away from an apocalypse) literature, but make no mistake: This an apocalyptic tale, even if it’s a humorous one.

Lenny Abramov is a man out of place in the near-future of Shyteyngart’s America, a society teetering on intellectual and fiscal bankruptcy. Abramov is a book collector. He’s sentimental, deaf to the vagaries of style, and he’s aging: All of these are no-no’s in Shteyngart’s world.

The future America of Super Sad True Love Story is a distorted fun-house mirror reflection of our own. There’s so little difference between the two major political parties that they’ve become one. This coalition government, along with its corporate allies, has created a consumerist fascist state, a situation enabled by a barely literate, youth-obsessed culture too obsessed with jabbering away on a Facebook-like network called GlobalTeens to even notice. As the nation’s Chinese creditors threaten to call in the country’s massive debt, its security apparatus attempts to keep things under control with misspelled propaganda and the deployment of National Guard troops. Not that anyone can pry themselves away from GlobalTeen long enough to care.

Lenny becomes smitten with Eunice Park, a young Korean-American woman who initially finds his affection off-putting and pitiable, but later succumbs to his nebbish charm. She’s a person of her time: suspicious of the books Lenny loves, distracted, and casually cruel. Lenny is drawn to her, but is fundamentally incapable of adapting to her world. He wants something more than she can offer.

Their relationship is improbable from the start, and its inevitable unraveling mirrors the unlikely future of American society as a whole. This is likely as not the beginning of the long American night, and much like Lenny and Eunice’s romance it is both bittersweet and entirely expected.

There may not be any monsters here, no zombies or Frankensteinian predators, but the world of Super Sad True Love Story is no less disturbing. Shteyngart’s acid take on the worst qualities of modern American culture must ring true from anyone who has ever looked upon it and felt a sense of disconnect. This is a love story, but it is indeed “super sad.”