Sick Bastards Books in Order

Sick Bastards begins with four people who believe they are a family surviving the end of the world. They wake in a house with no reliable memories of their earlier lives, using a photograph to understand their relationships. Known as Father, Mother, Brother, and Sister, they face a world outside that appears to have become deadly. Matt Shaw's horror series follows their attempts to endure while questioning how much they can know about the situation they have accepted as reality.

The opening volume places the family in isolation, where food and information both become scarce. Father remembers a nuclear explosion, but the others have little independent evidence to build on. Threats beyond the house reinforce the pressure to stay inside. That creates a closed world in which decisions made by a small number of people have enormous consequences for everyone living with them. The question of survival gradually becomes a question about what the household is willing to do and how it explains those choices to itself.

Brother's perspective brings readers close to behavior that becomes increasingly difficult to defend.

Cannibalism, incest, and sexual violence are part of the books' extreme-horror material. Those elements are connected to a group whose familiar identities and moral restraints have become uncertain. The characters use family roles to organize themselves, but the names don't supply a trustworthy history or guarantee care. The confined setting concentrates the pressure. Hunger and fear can become reasons for accepting actions that would have been unthinkable before, while controlling information can give one person authority over how the others understand their danger.

SickER Bstards* continues directly from the discoveries made in the first book. Its premise depends on knowing those events, so discussing the larger explanation in advance would remove an important part of the reading experience. The wider sequence includes further continuations and a prequel, Sick Bstards: Everywhere*, which looks toward the question of how people might behave after a social collapse. Across the books, the apparent emergency becomes a way of examining the distance between a claim of necessity and the desire to harm or dominate someone else.

Start with Sick Bstards* before its direct sequel. Expect adult extreme horror with a deliberately confrontational approach to bodily violence and family boundaries. The central mystery is not simply whether the people in the house will find enough food or escape an attacker. It is whether their understanding of themselves and their world can survive investigation. Their lost memories make every explanation provisional, while the decisions they take under that explanation create damage that cannot be undone by learning more later.