Book picks similar to
Monsters by Peter Cawdron


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The Mountain and The City, Part I


Brian Martinez - 2011
    A solitary survivor hides in a mountain above the city, living in a trailer with the door and windows duct-taped shut. Outside, the air is poisoned with a virulent disease that has killed off most humans. Those who lived have become something else. Something that hunts and kills. Survival in this new world comes down to two, simple rules: stay quiet and protect the air. It's an obsessive and regimented life, but one day a visitor comes up the mountain that threatens everything.Part I of a serialized novel. Continued in Part II: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12...

Alexandria


John Kaden - 2012
    The adults are murdered and the children are stolen away in cages while their homes burn around them. They are taken to the Nezran Temple and taught to be like their captors. The rewards, they are told, will be endless. Two childhood sweethearts, Jack and Lia, must make a vital decision...Should they struggle to fit in -- or fight to escape?A chance encounter with a mysterious stranger sets them on an unexpected course. What follows is a wild adventure down the ruins of the old California coast, through wasteland and woodland, as they go searching for the legendary Alexandria.Join them in this dark, apocalyptic saga that sets the rusted gears of history turning again.

The Trees


Ali Shaw - 2016
    Leaves calmed and trunks stood serene. Where, not a minute before, there had been a suburb, there was now only woodland standing amid ruins…There is no warning. No chance to prepare.They arrive in the night: thundering up through the ground, transforming streets and towns into shadowy forest. Buildings are destroyed. Broken bodies, still wrapped in tattered bed linen, hang among the twitching leaves.Adrien Thomas has never been much of a hero. But when he realises that no help is coming, he ventures out into this unrecognisable world. Michelle, his wife, is across the sea in Ireland and he has no way of knowing whether the trees have come for her too. Then Adrien meets green-fingered Hannah and her teenage son Seb. Together, they set out to find Hannah’s forester brother, to reunite Adrien with his wife – and to discover just how deep the forest goes.Their journey will take them to a place of terrible beauty and violence, to the dark heart of nature and the darkness inside themselves.

One Second After


William R. Forstchen - 2009
    Forstchen now brings us a story which can be all too terrifyingly real ... a story in which one man struggles to save his family and his small North Carolina town after America loses a war, in one second, a war that will send America back to the Dark Ages ... A war based upon a weapon, an Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP). A weapon that may already be in the hands of our enemies.Months before publication, One Second After has already been cited on the floor of Congress as a book all Americans should read, a book already being discussed in the corridors of the Pentagon as a truly realistic look at a weapon and its awesome power to destroy the entire United States, literally within one second. It is a weapon that the Wall Street Journal warns could shatter America. In the tradition of On the Beach, Fail Safe, and Testament, this book, set in a typical American town, is a dire warning of what might be our future ... and our end.

Never Too Far


Thomas Christopher - 2012
    They risk their lives on a terrifying journey to sell stolen fuel on the black market.

The Purge of Babylon


Sam Sisavath - 2013
    That was all it took. Creatures that once lived in the shadows, hidden from humankind, have risen, spreading like a plague across the globe over the course of a single night. Their numbers growing exponentially through infection, these seemingly unkillable creatures have swallowed up whole cities and collapsed unprepared governments. Survivors call it The Purge. Against all odds, a disparate group of survivors has emerged from that blood-soaked night that devastated the planet and reduced humanity to an endangered species. Among the survivors are two ex-Army Rangers, a businesswoman, and a third-year medical student. But surviving The Purge was one thing – staying alive is another matter entirely. Hope exists in the countryside, in the form of a self-sustaining underground facility designed to withstand any calamity. But in order to reach its safety, the survivors must travel hundreds of treacherous miles, with the night – and the creatures that dwell within it – always at their backs. The rules are simple: stay out of the dark, load up on silver bullets, and whatever you do, stay alive. The road to salvation has begun …

Critical Dawn


Darren Wearmouth - 2014
    Archaeologists Pippa Quinn and Charlie Jackson find advanced technology in undisturbed 16th Century graves. A portent, the discovery precedes thousands of giant sinkholes opening up across the globe as extreme weather threatens the population. Charlie suspects the two are related. A centuries old plan unfolds. Pippa, Charlie, and the rest of humanity will have to fight for survival, sacrificing the life they’ve known to protect Earth from an ancient and previously dormant enemy. Even that might not be enough as this new enemy exacts a plan that will change the course of humankind forever. Critical Dawn is an apocalyptic ride to the very edge of human existence. Factions will battle for control of the Earth—if they can avoid the threat of extinction.

Sleepless


Charlie Huston - 2010
    Gripping, unnerving, exhilarating, and haunting, Sleepless is well worth staying up for.What former philosophy student Parker Hass wanted was a better world. A world both just and safe for his wife and infant daughter. So he joined the LAPD and tried to make it that way. But the world changed. Struck by waves of chaos carried in on a tide of insomnia. A plague of sleeplessness.Park can sleep, but he is wide awake. And as much as he wishes he was dreaming, his eyes are open. He has no choice but to see it all. That's his job. Working undercover as a drug dealer in a Los Angeles ruled in equal parts by martial law and insurgency, he's tasked with cutting off illegal trade in Dreamer, the only drug that can give the infected what they most crave: sleep.After a year of lost leads and false trails, Park stumbles into the perilous shadows cast by the pharmaceuticals giant behind Dreamer. Somewhere in those shadows, at the nexus of disease and drugs and money, a secret is hiding. Drawn into the inner circle of a tech guru with a warped agenda and a special use for the sleepless themselves, Park thinks he knows what that secret might be. To know for certain, he will have to go deeper into the restless world. His wife has become sleepless, and their daughter may soon share the same fate. For them, he will risk what they need most from him: his belief that justice must be served. Unknown to him, his choice ties all of their futures to the singularly deadly nature of an aging mercenary who stalks Park.The deeper Park stumbles through the dark, the more he is convinced that it is obscuring the real world. Bring enough light and the shadows will retreat. Bring enough light and everyone will see themselves again. Bring enough light and he will find his way to the safe corner, the harbor he's promised his family. Whatever the cost to himself.It is July 2010.The future is coming.Open your eyes.

Summer


V.L. Dreyer - 2013
    Within a year, it had decimated our world. Our species is on the verge of extinction. Only a few of us have survived; those of us lucky enough to be born with a natural immunity to the plague. We scavenge amongst the ruins of our old civilizations, picking out a living from the devastation.Ten years ago, I watched my family die one by one. Now, I am alone. The year is 2024; it has been a decade since the virus reduced humanity to a scattering of survivors strewn out across the world.The rules that governed our society are gone.Without laws to protect the innocent, I have seen the worst of humanity throughout the years. Now, I have found a new family who are determined to show me the best. But a fresh mutation of the virus has started turning the harmless, pathetic infected into monstrous predatory creatures bent on our destruction; even the wildlife is turning against us.We are forced to leave our home and flee for our lives. It is only through unity that we stand any chance of survival. Enemies wait around every turn. For the sake of our children and our children’s children, we must find some way to survive and flourish again. If we fail, then the human species will cease to exist.My name is Sandy McDermott, and I am a survivor. This is my story.

dEaDINBURGH: Vantage


Mark Wilson - 2014
    In a desperate attempt to quarantine the infected, the city leaders seal the residents of Mary King's Close in their underground homes.2015: Mary King's Close is reopened, unleashing a mutated plague upon the city residents. The UK government seals the entire city. Declaring it a dead zone they seal the survivors inside alongside the infected. dEaDINBURGH is declared a no man's land, its residents left for dead and to the dead. 2050: Joseph MacLeod, born onto the cobbles of the Royal Mile and stolen from the clutches of the infected is determined to escape the quarantined city. Under the guidance of former marine Padre Jock, he leaves the confines of the city centre and hones his archery and free-running skills.Alys Shephard, born into an all-women farming community believes a cure lies in the south of the quarantined zone. The finest combatant in the dead city, Alys burns with anger. The anger of an abandoned child.Something much worse than the infected waits for them in the south, in the form of a religious cult led by a madman named Somna who collects gruesome trophies and worships the dead body of a former celebrity. Added to this the enigmatic Bracha, a supreme survivalist and sadistic former Royal with his own agenda, stalks the teenagers.A self-contained story, dEaDINBURGH is a character-driven Young Adult/Horror/Dystopian novel exploring the human capacity for good, evil and for survival.

The Alpha Plague


Michael Robertson - 2015
    getting to his six-year-old son before the virus does. The Alpha Plague is a post-apocalyptic survival thriller.

Alas, Babylon


Pat Frank - 1959
    When the unthinkable nightmare of nuclear holocaust ravaged the United States, it was instant death for tens of millions of people; for survivors, it was a nightmare of hunger, sickness, and brutality. Overnight, a thousand years of civilization were stripped away.But for one small Florida town, miraculously spared against all the odds, the struggle was only just beginning, as the isolated survivors—men and women of all ages and races—found the courage to come together and confront the harrowing darkness.This classic apocalyptic novel by Pat Frank, first published in 1959 at the height of the Cold War, includes an introduction by award-winning science fiction writer and scientist David Brin.

Fortress Britain


Glynn James - 2012
    Now Fortress Britain is the last bastion of the living - with 50 million beleaguered survivors facing down a world of 7 billion animated corpses.And when civilization fell, one international team of supremely elite special operators was being assembled for a nearly impossible mission, deployed out of the SAS barracks at Hereford. Supremely trained and armed, always the most skilled, resolved, and unstoppable amongst us, now the commandos of Alpha team are humanity's last best hope for survival. Searching through the detritus of fallen Europe, scavenging pharmaceutical labs for clues to a vaccine that might bring humanity back from the brink, now they are tasked with one last desperate operation.They must cross the Atlantic aboard the world's only remaining supercarrier, insert by air into the very middle of a dead continent, and then fight their way on foot through a city of 3 million ravening dead guys. But these Zulus will not be like any zombies they have ever fought before...

The Tide


Anthony J. Melchiorri - 2015
    He’s taken them to all corners of the earth to protect the United States from biological and chemical warfare. When his CIA handler, Meredith Webb, gives him a mission to investigate a disturbing lead on a laboratory based out of an abandoned oil rig, they discover the most terrifying threat to mankind they’ve ever faced—a genetically engineered biological weapon called the Oni Agent. Back in the United States, Meredith discovers a frightening connection between the CIA and the Oni Agent. But her investigations are short-lived when the Agent spreads and brings mankind to its knees. Cities burn as it turns humans into warped creatures hell-bent on destruction. Dominic and Meredith vow to do everything they can to combat the Agent and find a cure. But will their efforts be enough to turn the tide—or is humanity’s fate already sealed?

Outpost


Adam Baker - 2011
    They didn't expect the world to end. Kasker Rampart: a derelict refinery platform moored in the Arctic Ocean. A skeleton crew of fifteen fight boredom and despair as they wait for a relief ship to take them home. But the world beyond their frozen wasteland has gone to hell. Cities lie ravaged by a global pandemic. One by one TV channels die, replaced by silent wavebands. The Rampart crew are marooned. They must survive the long Arctic winter, then make their way home alone. They battle starvation and hypothermia, unaware that the deadly contagion that has devastated the world is heading their way...