Five works involving weird, unsettling isolation

Liz Harmer's debut novel is The Amateurs. She is working on a second novel, and a story collection, which was a finalist for the 2014 Flannery O'Connor Short Fiction Award.

At Tor.com she tagged five works involving weird, unsettling isolation, including:

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

Finally, I will leave us with a novel that has it all: marauders, survivors trying to figure out how to procure water and food (acorns are involved), and the hope of space travel. In some ways it is the opposite of [Shirley Jackson's] The Sundial, in which a group of purely detestable characters try to wait out the end of the world. With its empathic, visionary leader, and its Gospel-derived title, Parable of the Sower adds to this mytho-speculative genre by providing a dose of spiritual hope. People are terrible, but also capable of innovating and adapting, and this capacity to change may lead us both into and out of calamity.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue