Fiction about Scary Diseases
Explore chilling tales with our list of fiction books about scary diseases. Dive into gripping stories of pandemics, plagues, and terrifying illnesses that will keep you on the edge of your seat.
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The Last Man
by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
The Last Man is Mary Shelley's apocalyptic fantasy of the end of human civilisation. Set in the late twenty-first century, the novel unfolds a sombre and pessimistic vision of mankind confronting inevitable destruction. Interwoven with her futuristic theme, Mary Shelley incorporates idealised portraits of Shelley and Byron, yet rejects Romanticism and its faith in art and nature.
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The Stand
by Stephen King
Horrific disaster as a plague virus sweeps the U.S., leaving only a handful of survivors.
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Doomsday Book
by Connie Willis
Connie Willis draws upon her understanding of the universalities of human nature to explore the ageless issues of evil, suffering, and the indomitable will of the human spirit. “A tour de force.”—The New York Times Book Review For Kivrin, preparing to travel back in time to study one of the deadliest eras in humanity’s history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received. But a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. In a time of superstition and fear, Kivrin—barely of age herself—finds she has become an unlikely angel of hope during one of history’s darkest hours.
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Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang
by Kate Wilhelm
The story of an isolated post-holocaust community of clones who are determined to preserve civilization, Where Late the Sweet Bids Sang" is widely regarded as Wilhelm's finest work.
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The Cobra Event
by Richard Preston
“One of those books you literally can’t put down . . . makes The Hot Zone virus—far away in a rainforest—look like no big deal.”—Detroit Free Press Five days ago, a homeless man on a subway platform died in agony as startled commuters looked on. Yesterday, a teenager started having violent, uncontrollable spasms in art class. Within minutes, she too was dead. Dr. Alice Austen is a medical pathologist at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. What she knows is that the two deaths are connected. What she fears is that they are only the beginning. . . . “Manages to grab you with the authenticity of its scientific detective work and haunt you with its sheer plausibility.”—Entertainment Weekly
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Executive Orders
by Tom Clancy
Don't Miss the Original Series Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Starring John Krasinski! The President is dead. Now, the weight of the world falls on Jack Ryan’s shoulders in this extraordinary #1 New York Times bestseller from Tom Clancy. At the climax of Debt of Honor, the most devastating terrorist act in the history of the world left the President, the Joint Chiefs, the Supreme Court, and nearly all of Congress dead. Only Jack Ryan, confirmed Vice President mere minutes before, survived to take the reins of a shaken and leaderless country. Now he must rebuild a government, comfort a grieving nation, and become a true leader. Meanwhile, he is surrounded by enemies—both inside the White House and around the world—all of them plotting to destroy an untested President. And bring an already wounded country to its knees....
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Earth Abides
by George R. Stewart
A disease of unparalleled destructive force has sprung up almost simultaneously in every corner of the globe, all but destroying the human race. One survivor, strangely immune to the effects of the epidemic, ventures forward to experience a world without man. What he ultimately discovers will prove far more astonishing than anything he'd either dreaded or hoped for.
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Some Will Not Die
by Algis Budrys
The plague struck, and ninety percent of Earth's population died. Those who survived tried to maintain some sort of civilization...which meant more killing, as it turned out. But bit by bit, generation by generation, people began to succeed. With occasional setbacks.
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Year Zero
by Jeff Long
Archaeologist Nathan Lee Swift is coaxed by his mentor to steal an ancient vial of blood from Golgotha in Jerusalem. When the relic is opened, a 2,000-year-old plague is unleashed. As the pestilence threatens to wipe out humanity, Nathan Lee must race with a desperate strategy to find a cure: the use of human lab rats cloned from blood from the year zero.
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Oryx and Crake
by Margaret Atwood
A novel of the future explores a world that has been devastated by ecological and scientific disasters.