Nine Haunting Postapocalyptic Novels

I started reading postapocalyptic fiction in my teens, somewhere between my phase and my Russian phase, collectively known as the Billy No-Mates Years. It was the mid-90s. was a memory and the Berlin Wall was half a decade down. The IRA was on the verge of declaring a ceasefire. Hope was a marketable commodity and it seemed that progress was irreversible. Things could only get better. As I read my way though the nuclear fables of the ’50s and ’60s, it seemed like I was looking through a window onto a world we’d superseded, and I found it both fascinating and horrifying that people had managed to exist alongside so much anxiety, so much existential