Beyond 12 Monkeys: 6 Books With Scary Sci-Fi Pandemics

Blindness, Jose Saramago
A virus wipes out everyone’s ability to see and the impact it has on society is totally terrifying. The afflicted are isolated and left to fend for themselves, and a total breakdown of the social contract is not long in the offing. It’s hard to know what’s most jarring about this novel: its basic concept, or the fact that the characters don’t have proper names like Jesus, Derek, or Tralfaz. Instead you’ve got “the Doctor’s Wife,” and “the Boy,” and the “Woman with the Dark Glasses.” One of the best books you’ll ever read, though also one of the most disturbing.

The Andromeda Strain, Michael Crichton
You know him for Jurassic Park, Sphere, Congo, and maybe even Timeline, but Michael Crichton’s breakthrough novel was this techno-thriller about space spores that hitch a ride back with a manned probe and cause a massive outbreak on Earth. It’s still potent enough to strike fear into your heart every time you hear a sniffle or a sneeze, even though Crichton wrote it in 1969! Whoa.

The Word Exchange,  Alena Graedon
Published last year, this unsettling novel presents a future where people have begun to lose all desire, and later, their ability to retain the meanings of specific words. Thanks to the introduction of new kind of gizmo—representing the next generation of smart phone-esque devices—the threat of losing language itself becomes real when an aphasic “word flu” strikes the globe. The scariest aspect reading this one is when the word flu begin to infect the prose of the novel itself.

The Flame Alphabet, Ben Marcus
Kind of like the scarier cousin of The Word Exchange, Ben Marcus’s 2011 novel posits a world in which the voices of children turn poisonous, causing all adults to develop sores, lose teeth, and suffer all sorts of other gross afflictions. This progresses to include all voices and all language of any kind, which means somebody has to start developing new ways of communicating in a secret lab. This novel is much smarter than you and you will be totally altered by reading it.

The Stand, Stephen King
The most fearsome thing about this undisputed viral classic is not just its post-apocalyptic plot, or the icy indifference of Captain Trips, the superflu that eliminates over 99 percent of the world’s population. This book is mostly scary because it is so freaking long.

The MaddAddam Trilogy, Margaret Atwood
Since the publication of Oryx and Crake a decade ago, Margaret Atwood has long contended that her disparate, dystopian trilogy should not be lumped in with science fiction because it do not include any technology that has yet to be invented. While we might debate her on that particular definition of the genre, there’s no question that the elements of Oryx and Crake, Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam feel like sci-fi. The global pandemic that establishes the “present” of these novels is depicted in the overlapping storylines of the first and second books. There are also super-intelligent pigs and giant blue people. But it’s not sci-fi, we swear.
What’s the scariest pandemic novel you’ve ever read?