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* ''Literature/{{Dracula}}'' is assembled from several of these logs (including a captain's log)(, with a few newspaper articles thrown in.
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* ''Literature/{{Dracula}}'' is assembled from several of these logs (including a captain's log)(, log), with a few newspaper articles thrown in.
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--->'''Log:''' We cannot get out. We cannot get out. They have taken the Bridge and second hall. Frbr and Luni and Nbli fell there [...] went 5 days ago [...] The pool is up to the wall at Westgate. The Watcher in the Water took Oin. We cannot get out. The end comes, and then drums, drums in the deep. They are coming.
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--->'''Log:''' We cannot get out. We cannot get out. They have taken the Bridge and second hall. Frbr Frár and Luni Lóni and Nbli Náli fell there [...] went 5 days ago [...] The pool is up to the wall at Westgate. The Watcher in the Water took Oin. We cannot get out. The end comes, and then drums, drums in the deep. They are coming.
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* Creator/HPLovecraft: Many stories consist of apocalyptic logs, usually ending with the narrator in an asylum or clearly about to be eaten by something.
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* Creator/HPLovecraft: Many stories consist of apocalyptic logs, usually ending with the narrator in an asylum or clearly about to be eaten by something.die.
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** "Literature/TheHound1924": The story is presented as the final writings of a man who is being stalked by a supernatural entity. He is readying himself to commit suicide before the creature gets to him, leaving a recapitulation to whomever may find his writings as to how it came to this.
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** "Literature/TheHound1924": The story is presented as the final writings scribblings of a man who is being stalked by a supernatural entity. He is readying As he mentally readies himself to commit suicide before the creature gets to him, leaving he jots down a recapitulation to whomever may find his writings as to how it came to this.
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* Creator/HPLovecraft loved these. Many of his stories consist almost entirely of Apocalyptic Logs, usually ending with the narrator in an asylum or clearly about to be eaten by something.
** Including, but not limited to, the seminal "Literature/TheCallOfCthulhu".
** Including, but not limited to, the seminal "Literature/TheCallOfCthulhu".
to:
* Creator/HPLovecraft loved these. Creator/HPLovecraft: Many of his stories consist almost entirely of Apocalyptic Logs, apocalyptic logs, usually ending with the narrator in an asylum or clearly about to be eaten by something.
**Including, but not limited to, the seminal "Literature/TheCallOfCthulhu".
**
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** "Literature/{{Dagon}}" and "Literature/TheThingOnTheDoorstep" are even better examples. As referenced in the page quote, "Dagon" (and a number of other tales) end with the author writing something ''as the horror is entering the room''. Why he actually ''writes'' his final despairing scream is a question only Creator/MontyPython can answer.
** "The Hound", a short story about two grave robbers coming under a strange curse, ends with the final lines revealing that [[spoiler:the entire story was a suicide note -- the narrator could no longer cope with the unfathomable terror]].
** "The Hound", a short story about two grave robbers coming under a strange curse, ends with the final lines revealing that [[spoiler:the entire story was a suicide note -- the narrator could no longer cope with the unfathomable terror]].
to:
** "Literature/{{Dagon}}" and "Literature/TheThingOnTheDoorstep" are even better examples. As referenced in the page quote, "Dagon" (and a number of other tales) end with the author writing something ''as the horror is entering the room''. Why he actually ''writes'' his final despairing scream is a question only Creator/MontyPython can answer.
room''.
**"The Hound", a short "Literature/TheHound1924": The story about two grave robbers coming under a strange curse, ends with is presented as the final lines revealing that [[spoiler:the entire story was writings of a man who is being stalked by a supernatural entity. He is readying himself to commit suicide note -- before the narrator could no longer cope with the unfathomable terror]].creature gets to him, leaving a recapitulation to whomever may find his writings as to how it came to this.
**
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* ''Literature/TwentySixSixtySix'': Ansky's journal depicts how he got caught up in the Great Purge.
* The [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessional_poetry confessionalist school]] of poetry frequently deals with themes of mental illness and suicide. Perhaps its most famous member is Creator/SylviaPlath, whose collection of poems ''Literature/{{Ariel|Plath}}'' and semi-autobiographical novel ''Literature/TheBellJar'' chronicle her slide into clinical depression and, ultimately, suicide.
* In ''Literature/AndromedaNebula'', the starship ''Tantra'', making emergency landing due to lack of fuel, discovers another starship, ''Sail'', which was lost decades ago. There they find a log describing how ''Sail'' was forced to land, and how its inhabitants were killed one by one by some unknown creatures which always attack from the dark.
* The novel of ''ComicBook/BatmanNoMansLand'' is interspliced with entries from a journal written by Barbara Gordon/Oracle chronicling everything from when Gotham City is split off from the United States to its readmission into the Union. It was obviously done in this vein just in case.
* ''Literature/TheBooksOfEmber'': In ''The City of Ember'', a journal from one of the first residents of Ember is found [[spoiler:as Lina and Doon find their way out of the city]]. In the prequel, ''The Prophet of Yonwood'', this log is shown to be the work of [[spoiler:an elderly Nickie, the protagonist of ''Yonwood'']].
* In ''Literature/BoredOfTheRings'', Tim Benzedrine leaves a note for the boggies the morning after they stay with him in which he enters a drug flashback ''while writing''.
* The heroes of ''Literature/BridgeOfBirds'' find one of these carved into the wall of an ancient ruined city, describing the monster that ruined it.
* ''Literature/ACanticleForLeibowitz'': The papers found by Brother Francis in the fallout shelter detail a man with the initials I.L.'s attempts to find a plane to bring his wife to their fallout shelter before America is decimated by nuclear war. He suspects that this man might his long-dead patron saint, Isaac Leibowitz, which is confirmed when he finds a number of Leibowitz's blueprints for the very devices that ended human civilization and killed his wife.
* ''Literature/TheCatWhoWalksThroughWalls'' is written in first person and framed as Richard writing his memoirs. The final {{Cliffhanger}} is written as a recovered journal recording, without revealing to the reader [[spoiler:whether Richard survives or not]].
* ''Literature/ClassicSingaporeHorrorStories'': One of the stories in this anthology, ''Message In A Bottle'', is about a [[MessageinABottle message recovered in a bottle]], which comes from a World War II-era submarine which mysteriously dissappeared during the war. As it turns out, the crew had a run-in with a vengeful sea hag after stealing a cursed locket, which results in all their deaths.
* The second half of ''Literature/TheCollector'' starts out as the secret diary of the captive and ends up a chronicle of [[spoiler:her slow death from pneumonia as she becomes delirious with fever and begs God not to let her die. The narrative resumes from the POV of her captor, who reports that at that point she had fallen into a coma, then succumbed]].
* ''Literature/{{Devolution}}'': Kate's diary entries form the main body of the novel, and serve to chart Greenloop's fall from a high-tech "village of the future" to a devastated, burnt-out wreck due to attacks by an angry Sasquatch troop.
* ''Literature/TheDiaryOfAYoungGirl'' is that of Anne Frank, whose family stayed in hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdan, who unusually for this trope never lost hope even in the horrific shadow of death. It becomes a DownerEnding once the Franks were caught in 1944 and sent to various concentration camps; Anne died at Bergen-Belsen in early 1945.
* ''Literature/{{Discworld}}'':
** ''Literature/AHatFullOfSky'' quotes a few passages from a book recording a wizard's attempts to contain and control a Hiver, a mind-controlling monster that gradually turns whatever creature it possesses into a pathological id. To drive the point home, the last few pages degenerate into "Those ''fools!'' [[TheyCalledMeMad I'll show them!]] I'll show them ''all!!!!!''" ranting, and finally completely incoherent random letters.
** ''Literature/{{Thud}}'' has the numerous, disjointed, seemingly-random-numbered notes left by the painter of ''The Battle of Koom Valley'', who slowly went mad (including thinking alternately that he was being chased by a giant chicken and that he ''was'' a giant chicken). The last one -- only known to be so because it was found under his dead body -- read "It comes! ''It comes!!!''" He was found with his throat full of chicken feathers. [[spoiler: Much, ''much'' more soberly, the same novel also features the dying declarations of the troll and dwarf kings from the original Battle of Koom Valley, who recorded their final words of peace on the story's Macguffin. Everything in the book happens due to fanatical dwarf troll-haters' attempts to suppress this politically-stunning message.]]
** In ''Literature/GuardsGuards'', the last few ''intact'' pages of the Library's copy of ''The Summoning of Dragons'' detail, in nervous handwriting, the author's intent to put his dragon-summoning spell into practice. The rest of the pages have been badly scorched, demonstrating that this didn't end well.
* One ''Franchise/DoctorWhoExpandedUniverse'' novel features a Cyberman-obsessed researcher recording her experiences for future references as she is gradually converted into a Cyberman. Unusual, in that no one gets to discover it -- once she's converted, her original personality is wiped away and she no longer recognises the logic in recording it, and so destroys the recording.
* ''Literature/DoubleIndemnity'' consists of entries from the main character's diary leading up to his SuicidePact with the [[StarCrossedLovers star-crossed]] love interest. In the film, the story is told from the mortally wounded protagonist's recording on his Dictaphone.
* ''Literature/{{Dracula}}'' is assembled from several of these logs (including a captain's log)(, with a few newspaper articles thrown in.
* The introduction to the {{novelization}} of ''Film/DrStrangelove'' says that the manuscript was found under a rock in the Great Northern Desert by aliens.
* The titular character in ''Literature/EdenGreen'', an amateur biologist studying the alien needle symbiote that has infected her best friend, creates an in-universe document of 'important information', of which snippets are shown.
* The [[FictionalDocument fictional memoir]] that makes up the backbone of ''Literature/{{Julian}}'' ends as the titular character invades Persia. The rest is told in diary entries and field dispatches, which become increasingly harried as the campaign goes south.
* In the last ''Literature/EmpireFromTheAshes'' book, Sean and friends find an ancient digital diary documenting the fall of society on that planet, [[spoiler:as the general populous went mad from listening to the dwindling hyperspace transmissions of the Fourth Imperium as a loose bio-weapon killed '''everything''' on '''every''' other world, turning against technology as the source of the disaster]].
* John Collier's "Evening Primrose" is an account of how poet Charles Snell decided to move into [[BrandX Bracey's]] and discovered entire colonies of people living there and at other major department stores before he, Ella, and the night watchman were KilledToUpholdTheMasquerade.
* An in-story example for ''Literature/ExtremelyLoudAndIncrediblyClose''. [[spoiler:Oskar comes home from school early on the morning of September 11, 2001 and finds to the voicemails his father, who works in the WTC, has left on the answering machine. When he calls again, Oskar freezes and listens as his father's last words go to voicemail. He hides the tape out of shame and panic and never tells anyone, but listens to it by himself at times.]]
* Played with in ''Literature/FantasticBeastsAndWhereToFindThem'' in the entry on Lethifolds. Because Lethifolds attack the sleeping and leave nothing behind, it's near impossible to get an accurate tally of people who have been killed by them. It is significantly easier to get a tally of people who have tried to fake their death by Lethifold, as in the case of one man who supposedly left a note as he was being devoured "Oh no, a Lethifold's got me, I'm suffocating!", but was later found to be living with a mistress a few miles away.
* One edition of ''Literature/FlowersForAlgernon'' was specially written to look as if the Progress Reports were actually handwritten by Charlie. The chicken scratch from the start of the book slowly improved as the story progressed, and Charlie's spelling also improved as well. However, take a look at the end and the last sentence:
-->''[[spoiler:"p.p.s. please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bakyard..."]]''
** At the end of the sentence, a long, messy line trails off of the "D" and moves off of the page, indicating that [[spoiler: Charlie died while he was writing his last request. However, on other copies of the book, extra pages after this request are deliberately left blank, leaving open the possibility that Charlie may have regressed to the point of extreme illiteracy instead of death.]]
* W.J. Stuart's {{novelization}} of ''Film/ForbiddenPlanet'' has an excellent example of the Apocalyptic Log, in which "Doc" Ostrow, having had a taste of the mental powers provided by the UpgradeArtifact, suggests the answer to the question of how the incredibly advanced Krell {{Precursors}} could have been wiped out in an instant: by unleashing [[EnemyWithout invincible monsters from their subconscious minds]]. As he feared, the [[MySkullRunnethOver effects]] of the UpgradeArtifact kill him before he can explain any further.
* ''Literature/{{Frankenstein}}'' may or may not be one of these, depending on whether or not you think the sea captain who narrates the FramingStory will rescue his ship from the Arctic ice.
* Creator/ArthurConanDoyle's short story "The Horror of the Heights" details the adventures of an intrepid aviator who flies above 40,000 feet and encounters an "air jungle" -- an entire ecosystem of atmospheric beasts. He barely escapes from a predatory creature on his first flight, and records his intentions to go back up later and explore more thoroughly. The framing story reveals that the aviator's plane was found crashed and the aviator himself missing. All that was found in the plane was a torn, blood-stained journal. The last words are hastily scrawled: "Forty-three thousand feet. I shall never see earth again. They are beneath me, three of them. God help me; it is a dreadful death to die!"
* In "Literature/TheHoundsOfTindalos", a police officer investigating a writer's sudden death finds a few scraps of paper he had written on, the last of which was apparently scribbled as he was attacked and killed by the titular monsters. "The Hounds of Tindalos" deserves extra credit for the doomed writer literally transcribing his dying scream:
-->'''Chalmers' notes:''' Their ''tongues''--ahhhhh--
* ''Literature/HouseOfLeaves'' is ''three'' apocalyptic logs, embedded within each other; reading the story keeps driving people over the edge.
* ''Literature/TheHouseOnTheBorderland'' consists of a brief FramingStory and this.
* ''Literature/HowNOTToWriteANovel'' features one example, "'And One Ring to Bind Them!' Said the Old Cowpoke", wherein a young woman's bubbly ''normal'' diary morphs suddenly into an Apocalyptic Log about [[MakesJustAsMuchSenseInContext lizard-men taking over the world]].
* Creator/DanSimmons seems to really enjoy these. In ''Literature/{{Hyperion|Cantos}}'', the trope is {{subverted|Trope}} as we get to read the journals from the character as he goes insane from sickness and then as he gets better. In ''Literature/TheTerror'', it's much nastier, as the journal appears through out the book slowly becoming more and more hopeless until in the final entry, when [[spoiler:he tells us how he finally managed to kill the people who captured him as he dies of starvation, scurvy and freezing cold]].
* Mentioned in ''Jag Lever Pappa'' ("I live, daddy") by Siri Marie Seim Sønstelie whhich describes the Utøya massacre, where on July 22, 2011 a gunman Andreas Breivik killed 69 people on the Norwegian island Utøya, most of them teenagers, and wounded many others. Siri Sønstelie, a survivor, remembers that while most people caught in the shooting switched their phones off to avoid discovery, others continued to talk and / or send texts, even as they were shot at.
* In ''Film/JasonX: Planet of the Beast'', a space station crew manages to acquire a few of the logs of the ''Blackstar 13'' (a shuttle Jason had gone on a rampage in) before it crashed into a nearby planet. The last log was made by the ship's hiding and rambling cook, and ends with Jason bashing through the door and horribly murdering him.
* In ''Literature/KilnPeople'', several of the disposable clones of private detective Albert Morris get to describe their own demise in first person. As a {{lampshade|Hanging}}/{{justifi|edTrope}}cation, Albert is used to them being unable to return to him for inloading, so he deliberately orders blanks fitted with voice recorders and a compulsion to recite.
* Creator/StephenKing:
** "The End of the Whole Mess", found in the collection ''Literature/NightmaresAndDreamscapes''. Like ''Film/{{Cloverfield}}'', this one is a variation in that the entire story is the Apocalyptic Log and the reader is the one discovering it.
** "Survivor Type", included in the collection ''Literature/SkeletonCrew'', follows a similar tack, with the survivor of a shipwreck recording his time on a tiny rockpile of an island where there's pretty much no local wildlife or edible plants. The spelling and grammar steadily deteriorate as he descends into madness. He eventually resorts to [[ImAHumanitarian cannibalizing]] ''[[{{Autocannibalism}} his own body]]''. [[spoiler:"Lady fingers they taste like lady fingers."]]
** "1922", from the collection ''Literature/FullDarkNoStars'', turns out to be this. In somewhat Lovecraftian fashion, the writer apparently continues to write even as [[spoiler:the supernatural rats that have stalked him since he murdered his wife finally get around to devouring him]]. Of course, it's possible that he's just insane... [[spoiler:The epilogue indicates that the manuscript was devoured along with the man, subverting the trope.]]
** This is also in ''Literature/TheStand'', in the form of Fran's and Harold's diaries--though Fran doesn't die at the end of hers.
* All three books of the ''Literature/LifeAsWeKnewIt'' trilogy are like this though minus the death ending.
* ''Literature/LordsOfNight'' has the framing device of TheChosenOne telling a story about how the Locust People escaped from the Atlantis exhibit at the Smithsonian and ended the world. Later, AfterTheEnd, he writes about he and his associates tried to put it right.
* ''Literature/TheLordOfTheRings'':
** In ''The Fellowship of the Ring'', the Fellowship go into the Mines of Moria, but find out that all the dwarves of Moria had died. They discover a chronicle of Balin's doomed attempt to recover the mines of Moria in the Chamber of Mazarbul. Gandalf finds the log, of the last siege by the orcs; some sections are illegible, but it's enough to convey the gravity of what they were facing.
--->'''Log:''' We cannot get out. We cannot get out. They have taken the Bridge and second hall. Frbr and Luni and Nbli fell there [...] went 5 days ago [...] The pool is up to the wall at Westgate. The Watcher in the Water took Oin. We cannot get out. The end comes, and then drums, drums in the deep. They are coming.
** Gandalf notes that the last three words are written "in a trailing scrawl of elf-letters". The fairly obvious implication is that the author (most likely Ori) wrote these final words just as the last line of defense was breached.
* Creator/HPLovecraft loved these. Many of his stories consist almost entirely of Apocalyptic Logs, usually ending with the narrator in an asylum or clearly about to be eaten by something.
** Including, but not limited to, the seminal "Literature/TheCallOfCthulhu".
** "Literature/TheTemple" is supposed to be the log of a German submarine commander found in a bottle washed up on the Yucatan peninsula.
** "Literature/{{Dagon}}" and "Literature/TheThingOnTheDoorstep" are even better examples. As referenced in the page quote, "Dagon" (and a number of other tales) end with the author writing something ''as the horror is entering the room''. Why he actually ''writes'' his final despairing scream is a question only Creator/MontyPython can answer.
** "The Hound", a short story about two grave robbers coming under a strange curse, ends with the final lines revealing that [[spoiler:the entire story was a suicide note -- the narrator could no longer cope with the unfathomable terror]].
** ''Literature/AtTheMountainsOfMadness'' could be considered a variation of sorts. It's written as an account by one of the surviving members of the expedition regarding just what the heck happened, but it still serves a similar function. Lake's report on his discovery would be closer to a straight example, though it doesn't record the actual horror that he experiences. Also in a weird, twisted sense, the artwork which tells the story of the rise of the ancient empire of the Elder-Things, and their fall at the hands of the Shoggoths.
** "Literature/InTheWallsOfEryx" is the recordings of the final days of a space explorer and prospector trapped in an invisible maze on the planet Venus, running low in oxygen and water.
* ''Literature/MaroonedInRealtime'': The diary of the person marooned in real time, while the rest of the survivors of the Singularity used stasis fields to leap forward in time. Decades long record of attempting to change the appearance of the surface of the planet enough to trigger the observation satellites. The hero has to be sedated after reading it.
* Played with in ''Literature/TheMartian''. There are several moments in the story when Mark Watney ''believes'' he's writing one of these, but they always end up followed by a second log entry explaining the feat of [[{{MacGyvering}} desperate improvisation]] and [[{{Determinator}} sheer bloody-minded will to live]] that he used to get himself out of whatever predicament he'd been in beforehand.
* In the historical novel ''Mila 18'', one person decides to keep a log of his starving to death as a Jew in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. He figures that since he is starving, he might as well contribute to science with full logs of all the effects. That is not the only instance of Apocalyptic Log, as other Jews also record the atrocities and their resistance for posterity. [[DownerEnding This is not a happy book]].
* The ''Literature/MiriamBlack'' novel ''Blackbirds'' has [[spoiler:Miriam's diary]], intended to be one in the making, until [[spoiler:Ingersoll intuits her intentions, and Harriet subsequently tries to get her to go through with it. The one thing that stops Miriam from killing herself? Realizing that Harriet was eagerly listening in on the other side of the door, waiting]].
* The Lord Ruler's personal log from ''Literature/MistbornTheOriginalTrilogy'' is a strange {{inver|tedTrope}}sion. It wasn't apocalyptic for the writer, [[TheBadGuyWins so much as it was for everyone else]]. It's more than a thousand years old by the time the heroes find it.
* ''Literature/TheMothDiaries''. [[spoiler:Or, you know, it might not be that at all.]]
* "[[https://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/msfndg.htm M.S. Found in a Bottle]]" by Creator/EdgarAllanPoe, also a MessageInABottle. The protagonist states that he's writing the account for posterity, and that if he is about to die or suffer some other fate that would render him incapable of finishing the story, he will put it in the titular bottle and throw it in the sea. He apparently does so when he goes down a whirlpool on a ship full of [[TheUnintelligible old men with a nonsensical language]]...
* ''Literature/{{Neverwhere}}'': Not a scientific log, but a video recording left by Door's father, as he is increasingly fearing for his life, that ends with his almost on-screen death.
* ''Literature/{{Newsflesh}}'': Near the end of ''Feed'', [[spoiler:Georgia's last blog-post]] begins very coherently but slowly degrades as zombie-fication nears completion. The writing stops mid-word when the author is [[MercyKill shot]].
* ''Literature/NinaTanleven'': In ''The Ghost Wore Gray'', Captain Gray kept a diary of his journey to New York, which Nine and Chris find in a secret compartment of the chest he'd used to carry the treasure he'd been entrusted with. The last entry is his requesting writing supplies so he can make a map and a will; Nine and Chris later find, via a book about Samson Carter, that Captain Gray had to be hidden from his enemies on the same day of that last entry, and died in his hiding place.
* Creator/RobertBloch wrote a story ''titled'' "Notebook Found in a Deserted House", which is basically a 12-year-old boy writing down everything that happened to him in a notebook while he's hiding from the horror that's literally just outside his house. It suddenly ends mid-sentence just as he's found.
* In the ''Literature/OldKingdom'' novel ''Sabriel'', the heroine discovers a magical recording of the last moments of a soldier's life.
* The ''Literature/OlogySeries'' features several among its installments, usually featuring the alleged author of the book and the tragic end of their research expedition. (''Egyptology'', ''Pirateology'', etc.). One exception that formula is ''Mythology'', where the log is of a man who borrowed the book and wrote notes in the margins.
* ''Literature/OryxAndCrake'' has a very short, but no less creepy, variation, found by the protagonist after a devastating global pandemic:
-->''Beside a vase of withered flowers and a framed father-and-son snapshot -- the child was a boy then, seven or eight -- there's a telephone scratch pad. Scrawled across the top page are the words GET LAWN MOWED. Then, in smaller, fainter letters, ''Call clinic''... The ballpoint pen is still on the paper, as if dropped from a slackening hand: it must have come suddenly, right then, the sickness and the realization of it both.''
* In ''Orphans in the Sky'', a hidden log found by the original crew's remote descendants details the mutiny that led to their spaceship being lost in space and its inhabitants forgetting that there ever was anything Outside the Ship.
* ''Literature/{{Otherland}}'' uses this trope in a rather interesting way by having the narrative point of view occasionally shift to Martine Desroubin's subvocalized journal entries. The segments are thus effectively an apocalyptic log in the progress of being written. They're doubly intriguing because she is blind and is therefore writing solely from her own experiences and perspective. Later, her journals are recovered from Otherland and she spends time reading them to analyze her own CharacterDevelopment.
* Don Tumasonis' horror story "The Prospect Cards" is a sales catalog of very odd postcards. The back of each card has a fragment of the log from an expedition intended to milk an isolated tribe of all their wealth, while the front has a picture that hints at each expedition member's fate. [[spoiler:The pictures aren't reassuring.]]
* The end of ''Literature/{{Rant}}'' subtly implies a strange {{subver|tedTrope}}sion of this. The interviews that make up the story are from a world that doesn't exist, but only because the events of the story caused it to cease existing. What's worse is that the story not only fails to tell the reader how to avert this "apocalypse" from happening again, it states that it can't be stopped, that it '''will''' happen again, and that nobody will ever notice except for the twisted degenerates that figured out how to pull this trick. Except for the few people who have become gods through murder and rape, reality is one big LotusEaterMachine.
* In ''Literature/RatmansNotebooks'', the titular character's diary has become this by the end of the story.
* "The Raw Shark Texts" begins with the main character having no recollection of himself, slowly reconstructing his history from an Apocalyptic Log he left for himself before the incident that resulted in his amnesia. At least, this might be what is happening -- much like ''Literature/HouseOfLeaves'', the boundaries of reality and the text are somewhat thin.
* ''Crisis Report'', found in ''Red Planet & Other Stories'' by Kevin Griffis, is an apocalyptic ''report'' clinically detailing the collapse of civilization. Corpse piles, indeed.
* ''Literature/TheRedTree2009'' is the diary of a woman who committed suicide and details the supernatural ([[UnreliableNarrator maybe]]) events that destroyed her sanity and led to her death.
* ''Literature/SeptimusHeap'': Syrah Syara's diary ends with her reminding herself who she is while succumbing to the Syren's possession.
* In ''Literature/TheSisterVerseAndTheTalonsOfRuin'', several documents detail an ill-fated experiment to open a black hole for an EldritchAbomination, so that it can enter the world and ascend humanity. Any subsequent logs describe the world-ending results of that decision.
* John Barnes' ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sky_So_Big_and_Black The Sky so Big and Black]]'' is set in a solar system where they're {{terraform}}ing Mars for living room. They can't use Earth any more, because it's inhabited by a HiveMind united by a behavioural meme, Resuna, which is aggressively trying to spread itself to the rest of humanity (it just wants to help!). The novel is the log of a psychiatrist going over and adding to his notes of his latest patient, plucky ActionGirl Teri, and is one part her adventures terraforming, one part a discussion of exactly how memes work to take over a person, and one part, well, where these two things intersect. The psychiatrist catches the meme off Teri, and the entries in his log show his mind going.
* ''Literature/ASongOfIceAndFire'':
** In ''Literature/AStormOfSwords'', Sam's messages to Castle Black during an attack by wights take this form, as they start out informative but become terrified and hasty as the battle turns against them.
** ''Literature/TheWorldOfIceAndFire'' records the events of the "Tragedy at Summerhall" but a "ink mishap" led to much of the account unintelligible except for a few sentences.
--->''the blood of the dragon gathered in one ...\\
... seven eggs, to honor the seven gods, though the king's own septon had warned ...\\
... pyromancers ...\\
... wild fire ...\\
... flames grew out of control ... towering ... burned so hot that ...\\
... died, but for the valor of the Lord Comman ...''
* ''Literature/TheSoundAndTheFury'' has a depiction of one character's breakdown that works in many of the modern conventions, including using worsening punctuation and capitalization to show the character breaking down, a blackout that starts abruptly mid-sentence, and said blackout is filled with a just barely comprehensible, completely unpunctuated or attributed flashback about the source of the character's trauma, followed by a sudden, temporary jerk back to the present, in which we get to find out what happened while he blacked out.
* ''Literature/TheSouthernReachTrilogy'':
** The lighthouse in [[EldritchLocation Area X]] contains whole piles of apocalyptic logs: all expedition members keep a notebook of their experiences, and the notebooks of expeditions which never return always find their way to the lighthouse. By the time the biologist finds it, the pile has become alarmingly large.
** In ''Acceptance'', the lighthouse keeper's journal details odd jobs and animal sightings around the lighthouse but gradually degenerates into apocalyptic babbling and unintelligible scribbles.
* In the ''Literature/SpaceMarineBattles'' novel ''Malodrax'', Lysander manages to obtain ''Being A Description Of Malodrax And Its Foulness'', written by a heretic Inquisitor as he was dying on the planet. It's useful both as a source of information and [[ThrowTheBookAtThem as a weapon.]]
* ''Literature/TheSpaceOdysseySeries'': In ''2010'', while approaching Jupiter space, the ''Leonov'' picks up a transmission directed at it from the surface of Europa. It's a taikonaut describing the fate of a Chinese mission to the moon in the spirit of "let the next guy know what killed you" and [[spoiler:claim credit for discovering life on Europa]]. The ship destroyed, no rescue in reach, and without the equipment to record a log or know if he was being received, he just kept repeating his message over and over until his suit's life support gave out.
* "Literature/TheSpider1908" features a hotel room which guests always end up hanging themselves, and it mostly consists of the journal of Richard Bracquemont, a medical student who offers to investigate.
* ''Franchise/StarWarsLegends'':
** ''Literature/TheIllustratedStarWarsUniverse'': the Dagobah chapter features a Republic survey team led by Halka Four-Den being sent to study the planet, only to end up being stranded there long past their pickup date thanks to the confusion kicked up by the rise of the Empire. With increasingly hostile wildlife beginning to resist the team's presence, Halka records the death of several team-mates over the final weeks as she tries to call for help. By the time a passing ship responds to the distress call, Halka and her remaining teammates have long since vanished and are presumed dead.
** In ''Literature/GalaxyOfFear'', a visit to Dagobah uncovers the malnourished and uneducated offspring of a survey team which had been left stranded on the planet - heavily implied to be the team featured in the previous book. By now, the original team-mates are all dead of fever, animal attacks, or starvation, though the last adult left a datapad behind, with longer and longer gaps between entries as the item's power ran out. The last entry has the last adult (heavily implied to be Halka Four-Den herself) on her deathbed, weeping as she confesses that they've been forced to [[spoiler: [[NoPartyLikeADonnerParty feed dead parents to their starving children]].]]
* ''Literature/TheStormlightArchive'' has an Apocalyptic Log in the form of [[spoiler:Dalinar's visions]]. Since the Apocalyptic Log is [[spoiler:from God]], they're actually a sort of interactive simulation, intended to give the recipient information about the Desolations. In the later books when [[spoiler:Dalinar bonds with the Stormfater, he can enter the visions at will, as well as bring other people along]].
* ''Literature/TheStrangeCaseOfDrJekyllAndMrHyde'' has Dr Jekyll give the narrator his Apocalyptic Log in the final chapter.
* ''Literature/StrangeObjects''
** Half the novel is taken up by the serialized journal of Wouter Loos, one of two convicted killers marooned on the western coast of Australia in 1629. At first a straightforward record of Loos and his "friend," Jan Pelgrom, attempting to seek shelter with a local tribe, the journal slowly becomes more and more supernatural -- especially with the introduction of a mysterious ruby ring that Pelgrom wears. However, the truth of this particular matter is never quite resolved, as the most overt record of anyone displaying magical power is in the final chapter -- by which time, Loos is [[UnreliableNarrator delirious]] and barely coherent in his last pages.
** Being a ScrapbookStory, ''Strange Objects'' also includes diary entries written in 1986 by the scrapbook's "compiler," Steven Messenger. The diary begins with Messenger's accidental discovery of a small cache of artefacts that once belonged to Loos and Pelgrom: though most of them are quickly handed over to the authorities, Messenger succeeds in taking one -- a small jewelled ring, which he keeps on a necklace. As the months pass, he begins to experience a feeling of BeingWatched, and frequently mentions encountering a silent "double" of himself. Eventually, Steven begins wearing the ring on his finger; according to the epilogue, he vanished from his home soon after and was never seen again.
* ''Literature/TheTaking'' features an audio recording from the International Space Station, wherein the astronauts discuss how a strange craft seems to have docked with them, and whether or not the inhabitants might be peaceable, right up until an entity boards the station. The audio ends with [[spoiler:the painful death of each astronaut and a message from said entity]].
* ''Literature/TheThirdWorldWar: August 1985'' includes excerpts from the emergency logs of three communities during the war and pulls this twice. The first log ends when the building it is in is destroyed by a bombing raid (with a statement that the book was found in the ruins), but resumes with the backup copy describing the situation. The second, from an area in central Birmingham, ends with [[spoiler:the warning of Birmingham's imminent nuclear destruction being received, stopping mid-word. A statement follows that its charred remains were found in the destroyed building]].
* ''Literature/TillWeHaveFaces'' has Orual break off in mid-sentence, followed by a section (in italics) saying that she had been found dead with her head on the book. Unusually, she was not writing about her impending death; once she commented at the beginning of Part II that she wished she had time to do it over, but since time is short she will just go on, she never again alludes to knowing that she hasn't got much time.
* ''Literature/TheTomorrowSeries'': The book ''Tomorrow, When the War Began'' includes a letter to one of the main characters from her father, early in the text. The sentiment is something like, "I'm going home to destroy this letter as soon as possible, so if you find this letter, I'm right and something is very, very wrong. ''Go bush''."
* ''Literature/TufVoyaging'': The beginning of the (chronologically) first story, "The Plague Star", is a diary left by the last survivor of diseases sent by the title object, a biowar seedship of the Terran Ecological Engineering Corps. It describes how the plagues killed the alien inhabitants of the planet, his wife, and finally himself.
* There's an article in a 1982 issue of ''Twilight Zone'' magazine, [[https://lovecraftzine.com/2013/09/25/thoughts-on-silly-mythos-endings-by-robert-m-price-and-a-writing-contest-with-prizes/ "Thoughts on Silly Mythos Endings"]], that delineates the best of these and offers a contest to see who can come up with more.
* The short story "Twitterings from the Circus of the Dead" by Creator/JoeHill takes the form of a teenager's Twitter account, which she updates while on a road trip with her family. When they stop by at [[CircusOfFear the titular circus]], which turns out to have real zombies that the staff sic on the unsuspecting audience, it quickly turns into this as she tweets about most of her family being killed and how horrific it is. [[spoiler:However, the ending leaves it {{ambiguous|Ending}} whether it was an [[AlternateRealityGame ARG]] promoting the circus or whether the former is just a cover-up so the circus staff can continue killing people unmolested.]]
* The Australian novel ''Underground'' is essentially a set of memoirs written by Leo James -- washed-up property developer and brother to the [[PresidentEvil tyrannical Australian Prime Minister]] -- during his imprisonment in the near-abandoned Parliament House. In these memoirs, he records the events that led to the permanent state of emergency, his unwanted travels up and down Australia's east coast, his capture and the weeks of torture and imprisonment that followed. The memoirs and the novel end with the moments before Leo's execution:
-->'''Leo:''' I hear marching footsteps in the hall outside. Orders yelled. I think the fuckers are actually going to shoot me in ''here''. And God help them, they sound Australian.
* In ''Literature/{{Wander}}'', the titular character and Dagger find a diary written by a woman named Doreen. [[spoiler:In it, she mentions befriending a man named Temple, someone Wander has prior experience with, so she immediately puts two and two together and realizes she was murdered.]] Doubles as ThatWasTheLastEntry, especially from Dagger's point of view.
* ''Literature/WhenTheStormCame'': The story is a personal account of events by a small town citizen telling of their town being destroyed by a very abnormal freak storm, which [[CosmicHorrorReveal turns out to be a sentient monster beyond description]].
* Played with in ''Literature/WorldWarZ'', which is an oral history of a narrowly-averted ZombieApocalypse.
* ''Literature/TheYellowWallpaper'' is meant to be the journal of a woman losing her sanity.
* The protagonist of ''Literature/TheZombieAutopsiesSecretNotebooksFromTheApocalypse'' writes until he falls victim to the zombie virus.
----
* The [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessional_poetry confessionalist school]] of poetry frequently deals with themes of mental illness and suicide. Perhaps its most famous member is Creator/SylviaPlath, whose collection of poems ''Literature/{{Ariel|Plath}}'' and semi-autobiographical novel ''Literature/TheBellJar'' chronicle her slide into clinical depression and, ultimately, suicide.
* In ''Literature/AndromedaNebula'', the starship ''Tantra'', making emergency landing due to lack of fuel, discovers another starship, ''Sail'', which was lost decades ago. There they find a log describing how ''Sail'' was forced to land, and how its inhabitants were killed one by one by some unknown creatures which always attack from the dark.
* The novel of ''ComicBook/BatmanNoMansLand'' is interspliced with entries from a journal written by Barbara Gordon/Oracle chronicling everything from when Gotham City is split off from the United States to its readmission into the Union. It was obviously done in this vein just in case.
* ''Literature/TheBooksOfEmber'': In ''The City of Ember'', a journal from one of the first residents of Ember is found [[spoiler:as Lina and Doon find their way out of the city]]. In the prequel, ''The Prophet of Yonwood'', this log is shown to be the work of [[spoiler:an elderly Nickie, the protagonist of ''Yonwood'']].
* In ''Literature/BoredOfTheRings'', Tim Benzedrine leaves a note for the boggies the morning after they stay with him in which he enters a drug flashback ''while writing''.
* The heroes of ''Literature/BridgeOfBirds'' find one of these carved into the wall of an ancient ruined city, describing the monster that ruined it.
* ''Literature/ACanticleForLeibowitz'': The papers found by Brother Francis in the fallout shelter detail a man with the initials I.L.'s attempts to find a plane to bring his wife to their fallout shelter before America is decimated by nuclear war. He suspects that this man might his long-dead patron saint, Isaac Leibowitz, which is confirmed when he finds a number of Leibowitz's blueprints for the very devices that ended human civilization and killed his wife.
* ''Literature/TheCatWhoWalksThroughWalls'' is written in first person and framed as Richard writing his memoirs. The final {{Cliffhanger}} is written as a recovered journal recording, without revealing to the reader [[spoiler:whether Richard survives or not]].
* ''Literature/ClassicSingaporeHorrorStories'': One of the stories in this anthology, ''Message In A Bottle'', is about a [[MessageinABottle message recovered in a bottle]], which comes from a World War II-era submarine which mysteriously dissappeared during the war. As it turns out, the crew had a run-in with a vengeful sea hag after stealing a cursed locket, which results in all their deaths.
* The second half of ''Literature/TheCollector'' starts out as the secret diary of the captive and ends up a chronicle of [[spoiler:her slow death from pneumonia as she becomes delirious with fever and begs God not to let her die. The narrative resumes from the POV of her captor, who reports that at that point she had fallen into a coma, then succumbed]].
* ''Literature/{{Devolution}}'': Kate's diary entries form the main body of the novel, and serve to chart Greenloop's fall from a high-tech "village of the future" to a devastated, burnt-out wreck due to attacks by an angry Sasquatch troop.
* ''Literature/TheDiaryOfAYoungGirl'' is that of Anne Frank, whose family stayed in hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdan, who unusually for this trope never lost hope even in the horrific shadow of death. It becomes a DownerEnding once the Franks were caught in 1944 and sent to various concentration camps; Anne died at Bergen-Belsen in early 1945.
* ''Literature/{{Discworld}}'':
** ''Literature/AHatFullOfSky'' quotes a few passages from a book recording a wizard's attempts to contain and control a Hiver, a mind-controlling monster that gradually turns whatever creature it possesses into a pathological id. To drive the point home, the last few pages degenerate into "Those ''fools!'' [[TheyCalledMeMad I'll show them!]] I'll show them ''all!!!!!''" ranting, and finally completely incoherent random letters.
** ''Literature/{{Thud}}'' has the numerous, disjointed, seemingly-random-numbered notes left by the painter of ''The Battle of Koom Valley'', who slowly went mad (including thinking alternately that he was being chased by a giant chicken and that he ''was'' a giant chicken). The last one -- only known to be so because it was found under his dead body -- read "It comes! ''It comes!!!''" He was found with his throat full of chicken feathers. [[spoiler: Much, ''much'' more soberly, the same novel also features the dying declarations of the troll and dwarf kings from the original Battle of Koom Valley, who recorded their final words of peace on the story's Macguffin. Everything in the book happens due to fanatical dwarf troll-haters' attempts to suppress this politically-stunning message.]]
** In ''Literature/GuardsGuards'', the last few ''intact'' pages of the Library's copy of ''The Summoning of Dragons'' detail, in nervous handwriting, the author's intent to put his dragon-summoning spell into practice. The rest of the pages have been badly scorched, demonstrating that this didn't end well.
* One ''Franchise/DoctorWhoExpandedUniverse'' novel features a Cyberman-obsessed researcher recording her experiences for future references as she is gradually converted into a Cyberman. Unusual, in that no one gets to discover it -- once she's converted, her original personality is wiped away and she no longer recognises the logic in recording it, and so destroys the recording.
* ''Literature/DoubleIndemnity'' consists of entries from the main character's diary leading up to his SuicidePact with the [[StarCrossedLovers star-crossed]] love interest. In the film, the story is told from the mortally wounded protagonist's recording on his Dictaphone.
* ''Literature/{{Dracula}}'' is assembled from several of these logs (including a captain's log)(, with a few newspaper articles thrown in.
* The introduction to the {{novelization}} of ''Film/DrStrangelove'' says that the manuscript was found under a rock in the Great Northern Desert by aliens.
* The titular character in ''Literature/EdenGreen'', an amateur biologist studying the alien needle symbiote that has infected her best friend, creates an in-universe document of 'important information', of which snippets are shown.
* The [[FictionalDocument fictional memoir]] that makes up the backbone of ''Literature/{{Julian}}'' ends as the titular character invades Persia. The rest is told in diary entries and field dispatches, which become increasingly harried as the campaign goes south.
* In the last ''Literature/EmpireFromTheAshes'' book, Sean and friends find an ancient digital diary documenting the fall of society on that planet, [[spoiler:as the general populous went mad from listening to the dwindling hyperspace transmissions of the Fourth Imperium as a loose bio-weapon killed '''everything''' on '''every''' other world, turning against technology as the source of the disaster]].
* John Collier's "Evening Primrose" is an account of how poet Charles Snell decided to move into [[BrandX Bracey's]] and discovered entire colonies of people living there and at other major department stores before he, Ella, and the night watchman were KilledToUpholdTheMasquerade.
* An in-story example for ''Literature/ExtremelyLoudAndIncrediblyClose''. [[spoiler:Oskar comes home from school early on the morning of September 11, 2001 and finds to the voicemails his father, who works in the WTC, has left on the answering machine. When he calls again, Oskar freezes and listens as his father's last words go to voicemail. He hides the tape out of shame and panic and never tells anyone, but listens to it by himself at times.]]
* Played with in ''Literature/FantasticBeastsAndWhereToFindThem'' in the entry on Lethifolds. Because Lethifolds attack the sleeping and leave nothing behind, it's near impossible to get an accurate tally of people who have been killed by them. It is significantly easier to get a tally of people who have tried to fake their death by Lethifold, as in the case of one man who supposedly left a note as he was being devoured "Oh no, a Lethifold's got me, I'm suffocating!", but was later found to be living with a mistress a few miles away.
* One edition of ''Literature/FlowersForAlgernon'' was specially written to look as if the Progress Reports were actually handwritten by Charlie. The chicken scratch from the start of the book slowly improved as the story progressed, and Charlie's spelling also improved as well. However, take a look at the end and the last sentence:
-->''[[spoiler:"p.p.s. please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bakyard..."]]''
** At the end of the sentence, a long, messy line trails off of the "D" and moves off of the page, indicating that [[spoiler: Charlie died while he was writing his last request. However, on other copies of the book, extra pages after this request are deliberately left blank, leaving open the possibility that Charlie may have regressed to the point of extreme illiteracy instead of death.]]
* W.J. Stuart's {{novelization}} of ''Film/ForbiddenPlanet'' has an excellent example of the Apocalyptic Log, in which "Doc" Ostrow, having had a taste of the mental powers provided by the UpgradeArtifact, suggests the answer to the question of how the incredibly advanced Krell {{Precursors}} could have been wiped out in an instant: by unleashing [[EnemyWithout invincible monsters from their subconscious minds]]. As he feared, the [[MySkullRunnethOver effects]] of the UpgradeArtifact kill him before he can explain any further.
* ''Literature/{{Frankenstein}}'' may or may not be one of these, depending on whether or not you think the sea captain who narrates the FramingStory will rescue his ship from the Arctic ice.
* Creator/ArthurConanDoyle's short story "The Horror of the Heights" details the adventures of an intrepid aviator who flies above 40,000 feet and encounters an "air jungle" -- an entire ecosystem of atmospheric beasts. He barely escapes from a predatory creature on his first flight, and records his intentions to go back up later and explore more thoroughly. The framing story reveals that the aviator's plane was found crashed and the aviator himself missing. All that was found in the plane was a torn, blood-stained journal. The last words are hastily scrawled: "Forty-three thousand feet. I shall never see earth again. They are beneath me, three of them. God help me; it is a dreadful death to die!"
* In "Literature/TheHoundsOfTindalos", a police officer investigating a writer's sudden death finds a few scraps of paper he had written on, the last of which was apparently scribbled as he was attacked and killed by the titular monsters. "The Hounds of Tindalos" deserves extra credit for the doomed writer literally transcribing his dying scream:
-->'''Chalmers' notes:''' Their ''tongues''--ahhhhh--
* ''Literature/HouseOfLeaves'' is ''three'' apocalyptic logs, embedded within each other; reading the story keeps driving people over the edge.
* ''Literature/TheHouseOnTheBorderland'' consists of a brief FramingStory and this.
* ''Literature/HowNOTToWriteANovel'' features one example, "'And One Ring to Bind Them!' Said the Old Cowpoke", wherein a young woman's bubbly ''normal'' diary morphs suddenly into an Apocalyptic Log about [[MakesJustAsMuchSenseInContext lizard-men taking over the world]].
* Creator/DanSimmons seems to really enjoy these. In ''Literature/{{Hyperion|Cantos}}'', the trope is {{subverted|Trope}} as we get to read the journals from the character as he goes insane from sickness and then as he gets better. In ''Literature/TheTerror'', it's much nastier, as the journal appears through out the book slowly becoming more and more hopeless until in the final entry, when [[spoiler:he tells us how he finally managed to kill the people who captured him as he dies of starvation, scurvy and freezing cold]].
* Mentioned in ''Jag Lever Pappa'' ("I live, daddy") by Siri Marie Seim Sønstelie whhich describes the Utøya massacre, where on July 22, 2011 a gunman Andreas Breivik killed 69 people on the Norwegian island Utøya, most of them teenagers, and wounded many others. Siri Sønstelie, a survivor, remembers that while most people caught in the shooting switched their phones off to avoid discovery, others continued to talk and / or send texts, even as they were shot at.
* In ''Film/JasonX: Planet of the Beast'', a space station crew manages to acquire a few of the logs of the ''Blackstar 13'' (a shuttle Jason had gone on a rampage in) before it crashed into a nearby planet. The last log was made by the ship's hiding and rambling cook, and ends with Jason bashing through the door and horribly murdering him.
* In ''Literature/KilnPeople'', several of the disposable clones of private detective Albert Morris get to describe their own demise in first person. As a {{lampshade|Hanging}}/{{justifi|edTrope}}cation, Albert is used to them being unable to return to him for inloading, so he deliberately orders blanks fitted with voice recorders and a compulsion to recite.
* Creator/StephenKing:
** "The End of the Whole Mess", found in the collection ''Literature/NightmaresAndDreamscapes''. Like ''Film/{{Cloverfield}}'', this one is a variation in that the entire story is the Apocalyptic Log and the reader is the one discovering it.
** "Survivor Type", included in the collection ''Literature/SkeletonCrew'', follows a similar tack, with the survivor of a shipwreck recording his time on a tiny rockpile of an island where there's pretty much no local wildlife or edible plants. The spelling and grammar steadily deteriorate as he descends into madness. He eventually resorts to [[ImAHumanitarian cannibalizing]] ''[[{{Autocannibalism}} his own body]]''. [[spoiler:"Lady fingers they taste like lady fingers."]]
** "1922", from the collection ''Literature/FullDarkNoStars'', turns out to be this. In somewhat Lovecraftian fashion, the writer apparently continues to write even as [[spoiler:the supernatural rats that have stalked him since he murdered his wife finally get around to devouring him]]. Of course, it's possible that he's just insane... [[spoiler:The epilogue indicates that the manuscript was devoured along with the man, subverting the trope.]]
** This is also in ''Literature/TheStand'', in the form of Fran's and Harold's diaries--though Fran doesn't die at the end of hers.
* All three books of the ''Literature/LifeAsWeKnewIt'' trilogy are like this though minus the death ending.
* ''Literature/LordsOfNight'' has the framing device of TheChosenOne telling a story about how the Locust People escaped from the Atlantis exhibit at the Smithsonian and ended the world. Later, AfterTheEnd, he writes about he and his associates tried to put it right.
* ''Literature/TheLordOfTheRings'':
** In ''The Fellowship of the Ring'', the Fellowship go into the Mines of Moria, but find out that all the dwarves of Moria had died. They discover a chronicle of Balin's doomed attempt to recover the mines of Moria in the Chamber of Mazarbul. Gandalf finds the log, of the last siege by the orcs; some sections are illegible, but it's enough to convey the gravity of what they were facing.
--->'''Log:''' We cannot get out. We cannot get out. They have taken the Bridge and second hall. Frbr and Luni and Nbli fell there [...] went 5 days ago [...] The pool is up to the wall at Westgate. The Watcher in the Water took Oin. We cannot get out. The end comes, and then drums, drums in the deep. They are coming.
** Gandalf notes that the last three words are written "in a trailing scrawl of elf-letters". The fairly obvious implication is that the author (most likely Ori) wrote these final words just as the last line of defense was breached.
* Creator/HPLovecraft loved these. Many of his stories consist almost entirely of Apocalyptic Logs, usually ending with the narrator in an asylum or clearly about to be eaten by something.
** Including, but not limited to, the seminal "Literature/TheCallOfCthulhu".
** "Literature/TheTemple" is supposed to be the log of a German submarine commander found in a bottle washed up on the Yucatan peninsula.
** "Literature/{{Dagon}}" and "Literature/TheThingOnTheDoorstep" are even better examples. As referenced in the page quote, "Dagon" (and a number of other tales) end with the author writing something ''as the horror is entering the room''. Why he actually ''writes'' his final despairing scream is a question only Creator/MontyPython can answer.
** "The Hound", a short story about two grave robbers coming under a strange curse, ends with the final lines revealing that [[spoiler:the entire story was a suicide note -- the narrator could no longer cope with the unfathomable terror]].
** ''Literature/AtTheMountainsOfMadness'' could be considered a variation of sorts. It's written as an account by one of the surviving members of the expedition regarding just what the heck happened, but it still serves a similar function. Lake's report on his discovery would be closer to a straight example, though it doesn't record the actual horror that he experiences. Also in a weird, twisted sense, the artwork which tells the story of the rise of the ancient empire of the Elder-Things, and their fall at the hands of the Shoggoths.
** "Literature/InTheWallsOfEryx" is the recordings of the final days of a space explorer and prospector trapped in an invisible maze on the planet Venus, running low in oxygen and water.
* ''Literature/MaroonedInRealtime'': The diary of the person marooned in real time, while the rest of the survivors of the Singularity used stasis fields to leap forward in time. Decades long record of attempting to change the appearance of the surface of the planet enough to trigger the observation satellites. The hero has to be sedated after reading it.
* Played with in ''Literature/TheMartian''. There are several moments in the story when Mark Watney ''believes'' he's writing one of these, but they always end up followed by a second log entry explaining the feat of [[{{MacGyvering}} desperate improvisation]] and [[{{Determinator}} sheer bloody-minded will to live]] that he used to get himself out of whatever predicament he'd been in beforehand.
* In the historical novel ''Mila 18'', one person decides to keep a log of his starving to death as a Jew in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. He figures that since he is starving, he might as well contribute to science with full logs of all the effects. That is not the only instance of Apocalyptic Log, as other Jews also record the atrocities and their resistance for posterity. [[DownerEnding This is not a happy book]].
* The ''Literature/MiriamBlack'' novel ''Blackbirds'' has [[spoiler:Miriam's diary]], intended to be one in the making, until [[spoiler:Ingersoll intuits her intentions, and Harriet subsequently tries to get her to go through with it. The one thing that stops Miriam from killing herself? Realizing that Harriet was eagerly listening in on the other side of the door, waiting]].
* The Lord Ruler's personal log from ''Literature/MistbornTheOriginalTrilogy'' is a strange {{inver|tedTrope}}sion. It wasn't apocalyptic for the writer, [[TheBadGuyWins so much as it was for everyone else]]. It's more than a thousand years old by the time the heroes find it.
* ''Literature/TheMothDiaries''. [[spoiler:Or, you know, it might not be that at all.]]
* "[[https://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/msfndg.htm M.S. Found in a Bottle]]" by Creator/EdgarAllanPoe, also a MessageInABottle. The protagonist states that he's writing the account for posterity, and that if he is about to die or suffer some other fate that would render him incapable of finishing the story, he will put it in the titular bottle and throw it in the sea. He apparently does so when he goes down a whirlpool on a ship full of [[TheUnintelligible old men with a nonsensical language]]...
* ''Literature/{{Neverwhere}}'': Not a scientific log, but a video recording left by Door's father, as he is increasingly fearing for his life, that ends with his almost on-screen death.
* ''Literature/{{Newsflesh}}'': Near the end of ''Feed'', [[spoiler:Georgia's last blog-post]] begins very coherently but slowly degrades as zombie-fication nears completion. The writing stops mid-word when the author is [[MercyKill shot]].
* ''Literature/NinaTanleven'': In ''The Ghost Wore Gray'', Captain Gray kept a diary of his journey to New York, which Nine and Chris find in a secret compartment of the chest he'd used to carry the treasure he'd been entrusted with. The last entry is his requesting writing supplies so he can make a map and a will; Nine and Chris later find, via a book about Samson Carter, that Captain Gray had to be hidden from his enemies on the same day of that last entry, and died in his hiding place.
* Creator/RobertBloch wrote a story ''titled'' "Notebook Found in a Deserted House", which is basically a 12-year-old boy writing down everything that happened to him in a notebook while he's hiding from the horror that's literally just outside his house. It suddenly ends mid-sentence just as he's found.
* In the ''Literature/OldKingdom'' novel ''Sabriel'', the heroine discovers a magical recording of the last moments of a soldier's life.
* The ''Literature/OlogySeries'' features several among its installments, usually featuring the alleged author of the book and the tragic end of their research expedition. (''Egyptology'', ''Pirateology'', etc.). One exception that formula is ''Mythology'', where the log is of a man who borrowed the book and wrote notes in the margins.
* ''Literature/OryxAndCrake'' has a very short, but no less creepy, variation, found by the protagonist after a devastating global pandemic:
-->''Beside a vase of withered flowers and a framed father-and-son snapshot -- the child was a boy then, seven or eight -- there's a telephone scratch pad. Scrawled across the top page are the words GET LAWN MOWED. Then, in smaller, fainter letters, ''Call clinic''... The ballpoint pen is still on the paper, as if dropped from a slackening hand: it must have come suddenly, right then, the sickness and the realization of it both.''
* In ''Orphans in the Sky'', a hidden log found by the original crew's remote descendants details the mutiny that led to their spaceship being lost in space and its inhabitants forgetting that there ever was anything Outside the Ship.
* ''Literature/{{Otherland}}'' uses this trope in a rather interesting way by having the narrative point of view occasionally shift to Martine Desroubin's subvocalized journal entries. The segments are thus effectively an apocalyptic log in the progress of being written. They're doubly intriguing because she is blind and is therefore writing solely from her own experiences and perspective. Later, her journals are recovered from Otherland and she spends time reading them to analyze her own CharacterDevelopment.
* Don Tumasonis' horror story "The Prospect Cards" is a sales catalog of very odd postcards. The back of each card has a fragment of the log from an expedition intended to milk an isolated tribe of all their wealth, while the front has a picture that hints at each expedition member's fate. [[spoiler:The pictures aren't reassuring.]]
* The end of ''Literature/{{Rant}}'' subtly implies a strange {{subver|tedTrope}}sion of this. The interviews that make up the story are from a world that doesn't exist, but only because the events of the story caused it to cease existing. What's worse is that the story not only fails to tell the reader how to avert this "apocalypse" from happening again, it states that it can't be stopped, that it '''will''' happen again, and that nobody will ever notice except for the twisted degenerates that figured out how to pull this trick. Except for the few people who have become gods through murder and rape, reality is one big LotusEaterMachine.
* In ''Literature/RatmansNotebooks'', the titular character's diary has become this by the end of the story.
* "The Raw Shark Texts" begins with the main character having no recollection of himself, slowly reconstructing his history from an Apocalyptic Log he left for himself before the incident that resulted in his amnesia. At least, this might be what is happening -- much like ''Literature/HouseOfLeaves'', the boundaries of reality and the text are somewhat thin.
* ''Crisis Report'', found in ''Red Planet & Other Stories'' by Kevin Griffis, is an apocalyptic ''report'' clinically detailing the collapse of civilization. Corpse piles, indeed.
* ''Literature/TheRedTree2009'' is the diary of a woman who committed suicide and details the supernatural ([[UnreliableNarrator maybe]]) events that destroyed her sanity and led to her death.
* ''Literature/SeptimusHeap'': Syrah Syara's diary ends with her reminding herself who she is while succumbing to the Syren's possession.
* In ''Literature/TheSisterVerseAndTheTalonsOfRuin'', several documents detail an ill-fated experiment to open a black hole for an EldritchAbomination, so that it can enter the world and ascend humanity. Any subsequent logs describe the world-ending results of that decision.
* John Barnes' ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sky_So_Big_and_Black The Sky so Big and Black]]'' is set in a solar system where they're {{terraform}}ing Mars for living room. They can't use Earth any more, because it's inhabited by a HiveMind united by a behavioural meme, Resuna, which is aggressively trying to spread itself to the rest of humanity (it just wants to help!). The novel is the log of a psychiatrist going over and adding to his notes of his latest patient, plucky ActionGirl Teri, and is one part her adventures terraforming, one part a discussion of exactly how memes work to take over a person, and one part, well, where these two things intersect. The psychiatrist catches the meme off Teri, and the entries in his log show his mind going.
* ''Literature/ASongOfIceAndFire'':
** In ''Literature/AStormOfSwords'', Sam's messages to Castle Black during an attack by wights take this form, as they start out informative but become terrified and hasty as the battle turns against them.
** ''Literature/TheWorldOfIceAndFire'' records the events of the "Tragedy at Summerhall" but a "ink mishap" led to much of the account unintelligible except for a few sentences.
--->''the blood of the dragon gathered in one ...\\
... seven eggs, to honor the seven gods, though the king's own septon had warned ...\\
... pyromancers ...\\
... wild fire ...\\
... flames grew out of control ... towering ... burned so hot that ...\\
... died, but for the valor of the Lord Comman ...''
* ''Literature/TheSoundAndTheFury'' has a depiction of one character's breakdown that works in many of the modern conventions, including using worsening punctuation and capitalization to show the character breaking down, a blackout that starts abruptly mid-sentence, and said blackout is filled with a just barely comprehensible, completely unpunctuated or attributed flashback about the source of the character's trauma, followed by a sudden, temporary jerk back to the present, in which we get to find out what happened while he blacked out.
* ''Literature/TheSouthernReachTrilogy'':
** The lighthouse in [[EldritchLocation Area X]] contains whole piles of apocalyptic logs: all expedition members keep a notebook of their experiences, and the notebooks of expeditions which never return always find their way to the lighthouse. By the time the biologist finds it, the pile has become alarmingly large.
** In ''Acceptance'', the lighthouse keeper's journal details odd jobs and animal sightings around the lighthouse but gradually degenerates into apocalyptic babbling and unintelligible scribbles.
* In the ''Literature/SpaceMarineBattles'' novel ''Malodrax'', Lysander manages to obtain ''Being A Description Of Malodrax And Its Foulness'', written by a heretic Inquisitor as he was dying on the planet. It's useful both as a source of information and [[ThrowTheBookAtThem as a weapon.]]
* ''Literature/TheSpaceOdysseySeries'': In ''2010'', while approaching Jupiter space, the ''Leonov'' picks up a transmission directed at it from the surface of Europa. It's a taikonaut describing the fate of a Chinese mission to the moon in the spirit of "let the next guy know what killed you" and [[spoiler:claim credit for discovering life on Europa]]. The ship destroyed, no rescue in reach, and without the equipment to record a log or know if he was being received, he just kept repeating his message over and over until his suit's life support gave out.
* "Literature/TheSpider1908" features a hotel room which guests always end up hanging themselves, and it mostly consists of the journal of Richard Bracquemont, a medical student who offers to investigate.
* ''Franchise/StarWarsLegends'':
** ''Literature/TheIllustratedStarWarsUniverse'': the Dagobah chapter features a Republic survey team led by Halka Four-Den being sent to study the planet, only to end up being stranded there long past their pickup date thanks to the confusion kicked up by the rise of the Empire. With increasingly hostile wildlife beginning to resist the team's presence, Halka records the death of several team-mates over the final weeks as she tries to call for help. By the time a passing ship responds to the distress call, Halka and her remaining teammates have long since vanished and are presumed dead.
** In ''Literature/GalaxyOfFear'', a visit to Dagobah uncovers the malnourished and uneducated offspring of a survey team which had been left stranded on the planet - heavily implied to be the team featured in the previous book. By now, the original team-mates are all dead of fever, animal attacks, or starvation, though the last adult left a datapad behind, with longer and longer gaps between entries as the item's power ran out. The last entry has the last adult (heavily implied to be Halka Four-Den herself) on her deathbed, weeping as she confesses that they've been forced to [[spoiler: [[NoPartyLikeADonnerParty feed dead parents to their starving children]].]]
* ''Literature/TheStormlightArchive'' has an Apocalyptic Log in the form of [[spoiler:Dalinar's visions]]. Since the Apocalyptic Log is [[spoiler:from God]], they're actually a sort of interactive simulation, intended to give the recipient information about the Desolations. In the later books when [[spoiler:Dalinar bonds with the Stormfater, he can enter the visions at will, as well as bring other people along]].
* ''Literature/TheStrangeCaseOfDrJekyllAndMrHyde'' has Dr Jekyll give the narrator his Apocalyptic Log in the final chapter.
* ''Literature/StrangeObjects''
** Half the novel is taken up by the serialized journal of Wouter Loos, one of two convicted killers marooned on the western coast of Australia in 1629. At first a straightforward record of Loos and his "friend," Jan Pelgrom, attempting to seek shelter with a local tribe, the journal slowly becomes more and more supernatural -- especially with the introduction of a mysterious ruby ring that Pelgrom wears. However, the truth of this particular matter is never quite resolved, as the most overt record of anyone displaying magical power is in the final chapter -- by which time, Loos is [[UnreliableNarrator delirious]] and barely coherent in his last pages.
** Being a ScrapbookStory, ''Strange Objects'' also includes diary entries written in 1986 by the scrapbook's "compiler," Steven Messenger. The diary begins with Messenger's accidental discovery of a small cache of artefacts that once belonged to Loos and Pelgrom: though most of them are quickly handed over to the authorities, Messenger succeeds in taking one -- a small jewelled ring, which he keeps on a necklace. As the months pass, he begins to experience a feeling of BeingWatched, and frequently mentions encountering a silent "double" of himself. Eventually, Steven begins wearing the ring on his finger; according to the epilogue, he vanished from his home soon after and was never seen again.
* ''Literature/TheTaking'' features an audio recording from the International Space Station, wherein the astronauts discuss how a strange craft seems to have docked with them, and whether or not the inhabitants might be peaceable, right up until an entity boards the station. The audio ends with [[spoiler:the painful death of each astronaut and a message from said entity]].
* ''Literature/TheThirdWorldWar: August 1985'' includes excerpts from the emergency logs of three communities during the war and pulls this twice. The first log ends when the building it is in is destroyed by a bombing raid (with a statement that the book was found in the ruins), but resumes with the backup copy describing the situation. The second, from an area in central Birmingham, ends with [[spoiler:the warning of Birmingham's imminent nuclear destruction being received, stopping mid-word. A statement follows that its charred remains were found in the destroyed building]].
* ''Literature/TillWeHaveFaces'' has Orual break off in mid-sentence, followed by a section (in italics) saying that she had been found dead with her head on the book. Unusually, she was not writing about her impending death; once she commented at the beginning of Part II that she wished she had time to do it over, but since time is short she will just go on, she never again alludes to knowing that she hasn't got much time.
* ''Literature/TheTomorrowSeries'': The book ''Tomorrow, When the War Began'' includes a letter to one of the main characters from her father, early in the text. The sentiment is something like, "I'm going home to destroy this letter as soon as possible, so if you find this letter, I'm right and something is very, very wrong. ''Go bush''."
* ''Literature/TufVoyaging'': The beginning of the (chronologically) first story, "The Plague Star", is a diary left by the last survivor of diseases sent by the title object, a biowar seedship of the Terran Ecological Engineering Corps. It describes how the plagues killed the alien inhabitants of the planet, his wife, and finally himself.
* There's an article in a 1982 issue of ''Twilight Zone'' magazine, [[https://lovecraftzine.com/2013/09/25/thoughts-on-silly-mythos-endings-by-robert-m-price-and-a-writing-contest-with-prizes/ "Thoughts on Silly Mythos Endings"]], that delineates the best of these and offers a contest to see who can come up with more.
* The short story "Twitterings from the Circus of the Dead" by Creator/JoeHill takes the form of a teenager's Twitter account, which she updates while on a road trip with her family. When they stop by at [[CircusOfFear the titular circus]], which turns out to have real zombies that the staff sic on the unsuspecting audience, it quickly turns into this as she tweets about most of her family being killed and how horrific it is. [[spoiler:However, the ending leaves it {{ambiguous|Ending}} whether it was an [[AlternateRealityGame ARG]] promoting the circus or whether the former is just a cover-up so the circus staff can continue killing people unmolested.]]
* The Australian novel ''Underground'' is essentially a set of memoirs written by Leo James -- washed-up property developer and brother to the [[PresidentEvil tyrannical Australian Prime Minister]] -- during his imprisonment in the near-abandoned Parliament House. In these memoirs, he records the events that led to the permanent state of emergency, his unwanted travels up and down Australia's east coast, his capture and the weeks of torture and imprisonment that followed. The memoirs and the novel end with the moments before Leo's execution:
-->'''Leo:''' I hear marching footsteps in the hall outside. Orders yelled. I think the fuckers are actually going to shoot me in ''here''. And God help them, they sound Australian.
* In ''Literature/{{Wander}}'', the titular character and Dagger find a diary written by a woman named Doreen. [[spoiler:In it, she mentions befriending a man named Temple, someone Wander has prior experience with, so she immediately puts two and two together and realizes she was murdered.]] Doubles as ThatWasTheLastEntry, especially from Dagger's point of view.
* ''Literature/WhenTheStormCame'': The story is a personal account of events by a small town citizen telling of their town being destroyed by a very abnormal freak storm, which [[CosmicHorrorReveal turns out to be a sentient monster beyond description]].
* Played with in ''Literature/WorldWarZ'', which is an oral history of a narrowly-averted ZombieApocalypse.
* ''Literature/TheYellowWallpaper'' is meant to be the journal of a woman losing her sanity.
* The protagonist of ''Literature/TheZombieAutopsiesSecretNotebooksFromTheApocalypse'' writes until he falls victim to the zombie virus.
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