Each genre has clichés. In most cases, these clichés are what make the genre and what attracts an audience. But some clichés have just been overdone. They are what first pops into your head when you hear post-apocalyptic. They are what makes you think that ehhh…maybe you will pick up a different book. You aren’t really ready for another zombie survival western yet.
So for 2024, we’ve compiled a list of post-apocalyptic clichés that are the most tired and overused. There are a ton of other options, so it’s time to expand your reading list!
The Zombie Cliché
There are sooo many books about the end of the world with zombies. Easily one of the most recognizable clichés, this to me is the most overdone post-apocalyptic one out there.
This trope usually consists of a plague that has spread over the world and resulted in the creation of zombies. Most likely this is human lab created, but there are cases where nature made this plague. Then it goes, almost everyone gets bitten, those who are not bitten have to fight 24/7 for survival to protect themselves, groups of people band together, someone keeps a zombie for sentimental reasons, the group winds up in chaos etc.
There is a rogue survivor who is often born with/found/gifted/has the cure and needs to get to a specific destination to save the world. With tons of zombies, fights, mayhem, and betrayal along the way. Oh, and there are usually a lot of guns and machetes as the main weapons in this subgenre.
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Scorched Earth: Someone Dropped A Nuke
The world was fine one day and the next a nuclear wasteland. Society has spent many years trying to recover from this and usually fails. There are only tiny pockets of people, scavengers, or in some cases people who live underground in utilitarian societies to avoid the nuclear fallout. These people are as harsh as the environment around them. The world has been livable for ~ 100 years or so but there is not a lot of rebuilding what once was.
No one has cleaned up the world and they are still fighting to survive. Usually, these books try to take war and make it into a genre. But it’s always just wrong enough to make a dramatic and overdone plotline.
Where is Eden: An Apparent Utopia Hiding A Secret
This is the genre where only a few are in a picture-perfect place to live. And everyone else desperately wants to get there. The road there is incredibly treacherous, and most die on the way.
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The book will mainly detail the journey there, and the interpersonal relationships within a group of people getting there. The group can start out together or be formed on the road. Trust is created and then broken, and violence usually lives on every page of the book.
In a lot of cases, the end destination is not what everyone had built up in their mind. It falls short to some, and one or two will actually like the new ‘home’. This genre can spiral out and then bleed into the genre of a militia or dictatorship-type paradise with strict rules and heartbreaking storylines.
The Military Takes Over
And we are here to the cliché where the military/dictator/leader took over and is running a tight ship. The world ended and everyone wanted someone who could take over and save them. But they were only good at that and were not the leaders the people really wanted or needed.
Those living and born there usually don’t mind this type of ruling but those who come into the compound are not used to their freedoms being taken from them that they had out in the wild pre-apocalyptic world that they had grown up in.
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Searching For Lost Loved Ones
This cliché is where a family or a couple or even best friends have been separated by the events that have created the post-apocalyptic wasteland they are living in. The entire book details the journey to find them again. Full of emotion, loss, love, hope, and desperation this genre is really great. However, one can admit that it has been overdone and needs a rest for a while.
Trends come and go, and the post-apocalyptic genre lives on in literary history. But, maybe, just maybe, it’s time to move away from some of these tropes, and onto a different spin on this fiction.
