If the uneasy quiet of the Hamptons rental—after the phones die, the news vanishes, and even the animals seem to be omens—pulled you in, you’ll click with DeLillo’s minimalist catastrophe. Like Amanda and Clay, his characters huddle in an apartment while screens go dark and explanations never arrive. The tension comes from the gaps: as in the sonic boom and flamingos in the pool in Leave the World Behind, the threat is felt more than explained, and every strained conversation becomes an aftershock.

You felt the charge when G.H. and Ruth appeared at their own house and the social pecking order flipped under pressure. Severance digs into similar fault lines as Candace—an often-overlooked office worker and the daughter of Chinese immigrants—keeps her job while a fungal plague unspools society. The satire of corporate comforts and performative care recalls the awkward hospitality and implicit assumptions in Leave the World Behind, while the apocalyptic drift heightens every power imbalance.

If you loved the tight, pressure-cooker setup of two families sharing one house while the outside turns unknowable—G.H. and Ruth at the door, the newsless night—Tremblay’s cabin standoff will hook you. Strangers arrive claiming that a global catastrophe is imminent, and like Clay’s aimless drive for answers, proof never comes cleanly. It’s intimate, suffocating, and morally thorny, with the same claustrophobic debate over trust, responsibility, and what to do when certainty never arrives.

If the slow, simmering unease of watching Archie’s sudden illness and Rose’s secret quest for comfort (that TV glow) stayed with you, The Leftovers offers that same patient burn. After a random, unexplained vanishing reshapes everyday life, Perrotta lingers on backyard conversations, fraying marriages, and small-town rituals. It’s not about solving the event—just like the sonic boom and animal portents go unexplained—but about how ordinary people try, fail, and try again to live with the unknowable.

If what gripped you was the way Alam nests catastrophe inside domestic detail—pool maintenance, grocery runs, a child’s body going strange—Walker’s novel will resonate. As the Earth’s rotation subtly shifts, days lengthen and normal life decays by inches. Like the teeth and deer in Leave the World Behind, the signs are eerie but grounded; the focus stays close on people navigating dinner, school, and family loyalties as the world tilts just past comprehension.