Enigmatic Apocalypse: A Dystopian Mystery Reading List

Dystopian mysteries or mysterious dystopian novels are mash-ups of two of my favorite genres – especially if you add a dash of literary. And there are surprisingly few around. In September 2019 I thought it would be a good idea to write a dystopian novel about five clinical drug trial volunteers—strangers to each other—stuck inside a London clinic while a deadly pandemic sweeps the world.

In January, February and March 2020, I wasn’t so sure it had been such a good idea, but by then I was some 30,000 words into the novel, and after a short hiatus I continued writing. When I’d finished the first draft, two years or so later, I realized what I’d written was really a locked room mystery rather than a pandemic novel, although I’m okay with readers slotting it into the latter genre.

For me, reading (and writing) pandemic fiction is a safe way of catastrophizing. What’s the absolute worst that can happen? When I know that, then whatever I’m facing is usually not so bad.

And for me, writing novels with a mystery element is what happens during the drafting process, in fact usually I set out thinking, This time, don’t write a mystery! but then it appears once again. My favorite mysteries are ones which don’t provide all the answers but have the reader do some of the work to fill in the gaps, making me have to consider what happens to the characters after I have closed the last page.

So, here is a list of this seemingly limited genre:  Mysterian? Dystopery? If you can think of a better title or any more novels that fit the criteria, please let me know.

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Rumaan Alam, Leave the World Behind

A novel about race, privilege, and who you would trust when the world might be falling apart. A white couple have rented a remote holiday home in Long Island with their two children, when an older black couple knock on the door one evening to say that they own the house and there is a power outage in New York City. Can they come in?

The Internet is down, the phones and the TVs are down, and as weird things start to happen both inside the house and outside, each family has to decide what to believe and who to trust. It’s incredibly tense and disorientating, just don’t expect answers to everything.

Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

Atwood drip-feeds the reader small amounts of information throughout this dystopian novel, until about two thirds of the way through we learn something that keeps us in suspense until nearly the very end. Snowman finds himself on the shores of a land where most humans have been wiped out by a man-made pandemic. He remembers his friend Crake, as well as Oryx, the sex-trafficked woman he fell in love with, but no one is really who they seem.

It’s complex and convoluted and an interesting allegory for how our world could end up.

Marlen Haushofer, The Wall (trans. Shaun Whiteside)

An unnamed narrator is on holiday visiting her cousin in the Austrian Alps but in the morning her cousin and her cousin’s husband have not returned from their dinner, and the narrator finds herself alone. When she tries to go to the local village she comes across an invisible “wall” keeping her inside with only a dog, some cats and a pregnant cow.

What happened to the world overnight, and the single “frozen” man that she can see through her binoculars? How will she survive? It’s weird and wonderful and was also made into a brilliant film.

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

Mysteries within a mysterious dystopian world. Narrated by Kathy H., it doesn’t take long for the reader to learn that she’s a carer for clones who have been raised as organ donors. She and her two friends, Ruth and Tommy, have been living in a kind of boarding school which is beset by rumors and the three of them go on a quest to have their questions answered.

This is a dystopia that isn’t interested in the science, instead it focuses on relationships and the mysteries that Kathy H., Ruth and Tommy need to unravel.

Ira Levin, The Stepford Wives

Maybe this could be classed as a utopia. The wives in Stepford are docile, mindless and beautiful. When Joanna and her family move to the town she begins to investigate what, or who, has made all the other women like this. One of the few novels in this list that sees the mystery resolved for the reader along with protagonist.

Hanna Jameson, The Last

Twenty people remain at an isolated Swiss hotel as nuclear war wipes out most of the rest of the world, and then the body of a girl is found in one of the water tanks on the roof. Jon, an academic is determined to find the killer. Perhaps the very definition of a Mysterian?

Megan Hunter, The End We Start

Rather like a horror film (although it’s definitely dystopian, not horror) where we’re never shown the monster, this novella is better for all the parts Hunter chooses to leave out. In a post-apocalyptic world, the unnamed narrator becomes a mother for the first time and then becomes a refugee as the baby’s father is lost in the upheaval.

The mystery is simple: in these terrible circumstances, how will she and her baby survive?

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The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller is available via Tin House.