After the Pulse Books in Order

After the Pulse is a newer series from Mark Tufo that trades zombies and aliens for a different kind of collapse: the lights simply go out and never come back on. It’s built around the idea of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that knocks modern life flat in a single instant.

The first book, Reset, opens on an ordinary world that becomes unrecognizable overnight. Power grids fail. Cars and planes stop. Phones, computers, and every piece of tech people rely on go silent. Within hours, cities slide toward chaos as food stops moving, emergency services are overwhelmed, and fear fills the vacuum.

Instead of focusing on one hero, the story follows several very different people. Marty is a recovering addict who stumbles into the remnants of a crumbling military structure and, for the first time, finds purpose in protecting others. Pre‑teen siblings Benny and Becky are suddenly alone, forced to navigate a landscape where being young and trusting is a liability. Al, an older man facing a terminal diagnosis, decides that if his time is limited he’ll spend it on one last journey, teaming up with Sophie, a young woman desperate to find her missing family.

Each thread shows a different slice of the same disaster: rural stretches where neighbors eye each other over empty pantries, highways turned into graveyards of stalled vehicles, small towns deciding whether to help strangers or shut their gates. The EMP means there’s no cavalry coming, no easy line to federal help. Communities either improvise or fracture.

What ties the story together is the question of what survives when technology, convenience, and old identities are stripped away. Characters who might have been background players in a more traditional action novel move to the foreground, forced to make impossible choices about who to save, who to trust, and what kind of people they want to be in a world without safety nets.

Future installments promise to expand on the initial shock, exploring how new power structures form and how far people will go to avoid slipping back into something even worse than the post‑pulse chaos.

If you’ve ever wondered how Tufo’s mix of dark humor and hard choices would play in a tech‑less apocalypse, After the Pulse is where he answers that question.