Books reading recommendations Eight Deeply Weird Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy Novels Imagining the weird, dark magic and monsters that arise after the end of the world. By Sam Reader | Published on February 2, 2026 Viscera cover art by Gabriel Shaffer Comment 0 Share New Share Viscera cover art by Gabriel Shaffer The end of the world is a perfect place for weird fantasy. Whether it’s Samuel R. Delany’s mind-bending and reality-warping Dhalgren, Jack Vance’s classic sword-and-sorcery series that begins with The Dying Earth, or Stephen King’s cockeyed take on the Book of Revelation in The Stand, setting a fantasy novel after the end is an excellent way to get even weirder with an already weird genre. After all, the end of the old world means a ton of undefined space in the new. Bigger and stranger magic fits right alongside this, too—after all, who’s to say the world didn’t end with an explosion of power and magic unleashed among the chaos? With this in mind, here’s a (by no means exhaustive) list of fantasy set in the ruins of an old world, and in the strange new reality that has taken its place… Viscera by Gabrielle Squailia Squailia’s aggressively queer, aggressively trans, aggressively weird dark fantasy deserves far more attention than it gets. After an unknown calamity, the body parts and organs of the gods litter the landscape as an unkillable doctor, two wayward disembowelers from a psychedelic bug cult, and a homicidal rag doll team up to kill a mad scientist named The Puppeteer who’s trying to take over the world via alchemy. That summary doesn’t do the book any kind of justice, as Squailia’s wild rampage across the apocalyptic landscape where synapse-trees act as communication and a trans sorceress and her undead bear tie the heroes up in a god’s (literal) nerves, but Viscera is not the kind of book you can easily describe. You come for the strange premise; you stay for the grotesquely funny commentary on all things bodily and hang on for dear life as best you can. The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson What’s a post-apocalyptic fantasy without a lot of weird horror? Hodgson’s classic work of epic fantasy sets itself far in the future where the remains of humanity live inside giant ziggurats protected by energy shields and the surrounding landscape is filled with cosmic horrors that have proliferated since the death of the sun. The narrative is a flowery (written in a kind of strange, archaic English) quest fantasy where a bold knight must rescue a damsel in distress, but Hodgson takes it far further, populating his landscape with mountain-size psychics, eldritch houses and cities that kill the unwary, and plenty of human-size horrors that have been emboldened by the fading light and the eventual end of the human race. It may be a strange place to set a romantic quest fantasy, but the juxtaposition between cosmic horror and dashing heroics certainly makes Hodgson’s tale a unique one. The Waste Lands by Stephen King The Dark Tower series might be a sprawling intertextual work weaving in and out of reality, but in its best moments, it’s King doing a dark pulp fantasy with a ragtag crew of desperate heroes led by Roland Deschain—Conan the Barbarian reimagined as Clint Eastwood. The clearest this vision gets is with The Waste Lands, a book that leans into the idea that “the world moved on” alluded to in the more fantasy-inflected Gunslinger and Wizard and Glass. Despite its unambiguous fantasy trappings, the most iconic of the seven books blends ’80s B-movies and post-nuclear crumbling cities filled with wizards, demons, literary allusions, and a very hungry sapient house. The knightly weapons may be revolvers, and the mad king might be a deranged transit AI, but magic and monsters are the same whether it’s the imagined past or the post-nuclear future. Dark Sleeper by Jeffrey E. Barlough We’ll try to keep the number of pre- to mid-industrial apocalypses on this list relatively low, but Barlough’s Western Light series is just so weird it’s hard not to recommend it to people. Following a medieval-era ice age and the Year Without a Summer, the planet is a large ball of ice except for the western United States, a place where reality has gone strange and all contact with the outside world is swallowed up. In this new age, Dickensian villains ride mammoth-drawn carriages, the spirits of the dead loom out of the mists, and animals are capable of speech. Dark Sleeper is perhaps the most fantasy-inclined of Barlough’s books, setting up this strange new world and dealing with a series of unusual supernatural events set in motion by ancient evils. It’s a lot to process, but the reward is some of the strangest Victorian era-set fantasy you’ll ever read. Wonderblood by Julia Whicker In a future ravaged by catastrophe, magic based on a twisted understanding of science has become the new religion, and people worship the astronauts who made it into space before the calamity befell Earth. Into this world is born Aurora, the daughter of a traveling medic who followed “the old ways” before everyone carried around shrunken heads and were terrified of the mutated cows in Kansas. Taken as a war trophy by the insane Mr. Capulatio, Aurora is thrust into violent political machinations as Capulatio makes his way towards Cape Canaveral with designs on ruling the world. Whicker’s world comes alive with strange customs and curious rituals drawing on the vanished past, but the real star is how gorgeous and grotesque she makes everything, finding poetry in prairie sunsets and massive head wounds alike as her tale of war, religion, and prophecy unfurls over the destroyed United States. Finch by Jeff VanderMeer The third book of VanderMeer’s excellent Ambergris trilogy sees the fungal apocalypse finally come home to roost over the wondrous city. The freshwater squid’s river is choked with mushrooms, Ambergris is ruled over by the mushroom creatures known as the Gray Caps, and human collaborators are “rewarded” by getting colonized with more and more fungal improvements. Finch, a police detective in this horrifying new situation, is tasked with solving a bizarre double homicide even as he tries to stay one step ahead of the city’s new dictatorial masters. VanderMeer’s work of bureaucratic body horror starts with his once-familiar urban landscape engulfed in fungal totalitarianism, but blends in interdimensional rifts, postwar noir, and a plot that grows more surreal by the second to create something dark, dystopian, and unnervingly prescient. Angel House by David Leo Rice You can’t get much weirder or more apocalyptic than a cycle of death and rebirth ending in a flood. Professor Squimbop pilots his titular house-ark across an empty landscape; each time he weighs anchor, a town springs up around the ark. For the next several months, he will deliver lectures, cause existential crises, and generally act as a semi-willing satanic figure for the town, harvesting the semi-real inhabitants to power Angel House and sustain himself. As he goes about his work, the inhabitants engage in bizarre rituals, try to recapture their youth and nostalgia, and escape the town. The flood will come to wash everything away again, but with the slimmest chance of escape and hope, some of the townspeople have dreams worth keeping their heads above water for. Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir Far in the future, the known universe is divided into houses of necromancers who serve the Emperor. Gideon, a belligerent swordfighter and foundling under the Ninth House, is in the midst of her eighty-sixth escape attempt when the Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus presses her into service as a swordswoman. The Ninth’s chief necromancer requires a cavalier to defend her as the Emperor calls the highest-ranking members of each House to his temple to be challenged and ascend to the rank of Lictor in a deadly ceremony. As Harrow’s assigned cavalier has abandoned his duty and escaped to another House’s planet, Gideon is shoved into the service at the last minute as a replacement, bound to protect the woman she utterly hates. Muir’s unusual view of a post-necromancy solar system is certainly a bold one—characters banter back and forth in mutated internet memes amid Giger-esque architecture and groaning cybernetics—but it’s certainly an unforgettable one.[end-mark] The post Eight Deeply Weird Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy Novels appeared first on Reactor.