Apocalyptic Log / Literature

• 2666: Ansky's journal depicts how he got caught up in the Great Purge.
• The confessionalist school of poetry frequently deals with themes of mental illness and suicide. Perhaps its most famous member is Sylvia Plath, whose collection of poems Ariel and semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar chronicle her slide into clinical depression and, ultimately, suicide.
• In Andromeda Nebula, 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 Batman: No Man's Land 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.
• The Books of Ember: In The City of Ember, a journal from one of the first residents of Ember is found 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 an elderly Nickie, the protagonist of Yonwood.
• In Bored of the Rings, 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 Bridge of Birds find one of these carved into the wall of an ancient ruined city, describing the monster that ruined it.
• A Canticle for Leibowitz: 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.
• The Cat Who Walks Through Walls 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 whether Richard survives or not.
• Classic Singapore Horror Stories: One of the stories in this anthology, Message In A Bottle, is about a 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 The Collector starts out as the secret diary of the captive and ends up a chronicle of 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.
• 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.
• The Diary of a Young Girl 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 Downer Ending once the Franks were caught in 1944 and sent to various concentration camps; Anne died at Bergen-Belsen in early 1945.
• Discworld:
  • A Hat Full of Sky 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! I'll show them! I'll show them all!!!!!" ranting, and finally completely incoherent random letters.
  • 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. 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 Guards! Guards!, 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 Doctor Who Expanded Universe 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.
• Double Indemnity consists of entries from the main character's diary leading up to his Suicide Pact with the star-crossed love interest. In the film, the story is told from the mortally wounded protagonist's recording on his Dictaphone.
• 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 Dr. Strangelove says that the manuscript was found under a rock in the Great Northern Desert by aliens.
• The titular character in Eden Green, 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 fictional memoir that makes up the backbone of 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 Empire from the Ashes book, Sean and friends find an ancient digital diary documenting the fall of society on that planet, 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 Bracey's and discovered entire colonies of people living there and at other major department stores before he, Ella, and the night watchman were Killed to Uphold the Masquerade.
• An in-story example for Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. 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 Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them 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 Flowers for Algernon 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:
  "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 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 Forbidden Planet has an excellent example of the Apocalyptic Log, in which "Doc" Ostrow, having had a taste of the mental powers provided by the Upgrade Artifact, suggests the answer to the question of how the incredibly advanced Krell Precursors could have been wiped out in an instant: by unleashing invincible monsters from their subconscious minds. As he feared, the effects of the Upgrade Artifact kill him before he can explain any further.
• Frankenstein may or may not be one of these, depending on whether or not you think the sea captain who narrates the Framing Story will rescue his ship from the Arctic ice.
• Arthur Conan Doyle'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 "The Hounds of Tindalos", 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—
• House of Leaves is three apocalyptic logs, embedded within each other; reading the story keeps driving people over the edge.
• The House on the Borderland consists of a brief Framing Story and this.
• How NOT to Write a Novel 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 lizard-men taking over the world.
• Dan Simmons seems to really enjoy these. In Hyperion, the trope is subverted as we get to read the journals from the character as he goes insane from sickness and then as he gets better. In The Terror, it's much nastier, as the journal appears through out the book slowly becoming more and more hopeless until in the final entry, when 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 Jason X: 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 Kiln People, several of the disposable clones of private detective Albert Morris get to describe their own demise in first person. As a lampshade/justification, 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.
• Stephen King:
  • "The End of the Whole Mess", found in the collection Nightmares & Dreamscapes. Like 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 Skeleton Crew, 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 cannibalizing his own body. "Lady fingers they taste like lady fingers."
  • "1922", from the collection Full Dark, No Stars, turns out to be this. In somewhat Lovecraftian fashion, the writer apparently continues to write even as 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... The epilogue indicates that the manuscript was devoured along with the man, subverting the trope.
  • This is also in The Stand, 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 Life as We Knew It trilogy are like this though minus the death ending.
• Lords of Night has the framing device of The Chosen One telling a story about how the Locust People escaped from the Atlantis exhibit at the Smithsonian and ended the world. Later, After the End, he writes about he and his associates tried to put it right.
• The Lord of the Rings:
  • 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. Frár and Lóni and 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.
  • 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.
• H. P. Lovecraft: Many stories consist of apocalyptic logs, usually ending with the narrator in an asylum or clearly about to die.
  • "The Call of Cthulhu".
  • "The Temple" is supposed to be the log of a German submarine commander found in a bottle washed up on the Yucatan peninsula.
  • "Dagon" and "The Thing on the Doorstep" 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.
  • "The Hound (1924)": The story is presented as the final scribblings of a man who is being stalked by a supernatural entity. As he mentally readies himself to commit suicide before the creature gets to him, he jots down a recapitulation as to how it came to this.
  • At the Mountains of Madness 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.
  • "In the Walls of Eryx" 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.
• Marooned in Realtime: 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 The Martian. 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 desperate improvisation and 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. This is not a happy book.
• The Miriam Black novel Blackbirds has Miriam's diary, intended to be one in the making, until 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 Mistborn: The Original Trilogy is a strange inversion. It wasn't apocalyptic for the writer, so much as it was for everyone else. It's more than a thousand years old by the time the heroes find it.
• The Moth Diaries. Or, you know, it might not be that at all.
• "M.S. Found in a Bottle" by Edgar Allan Poe, also a Message in a Bottle. 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 old men with a nonsensical language...
• 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.
• Newsflesh: Near the end of Feed, 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 shot.
• Nina Tanleven: 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.
• Robert Bloch 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 Old Kingdom novel Sabriel, the heroine discovers a magical recording of the last moments of a soldier's life.
• The Ology Series 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.
• Oryx and Crake 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.
• 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 Character Development.
• 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. The pictures aren't reassuring.
• The end of Rant subtly implies a strange subversion 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 Lotus-Eater Machine.
• In Ratman's Notebooks, 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 House of Leaves, 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.
• The Red Tree (2009) is the diary of a woman who committed suicide and details the supernatural (maybe) events that destroyed her sanity and led to her death.
• Septimus Heap: Syrah Syara's diary ends with her reminding herself who she is while succumbing to the Syren's possession.
• In The Sister Verse and the Talons of Ruin, several documents detail an ill-fated experiment to open a black hole for an Eldritch Abomination, so that it can enter the world and ascend humanity. Any subsequent logs describe the world-ending results of that decision.
• John Barnes' The Sky so Big and Black is set in a solar system where they're terraforming Mars for living room. They can't use Earth any more, because it's inhabited by a Hive Mind 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 Action Girl 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.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • In A Storm of Swords, 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.
  • The World of Ice & Fire 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 ...
• The Sound and the Fury 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.
• The Southern Reach Trilogy:
  • The lighthouse in 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 Space Marine Battles 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 as a weapon.
• The Space Odyssey Series: 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 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.
• "The Spider (1908)" 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.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • The Illustrated Star Wars Universe: 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 Galaxy of Fear, 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 feed dead parents to their starving children.
• The Stormlight Archive has an Apocalyptic Log in the form of Dalinar's visions. Since the Apocalyptic Log is from God, they're actually a sort of interactive simulation, intended to give the recipient information about the Desolations. In the later books when Dalinar bonds with the Stormfater, he can enter the visions at will, as well as bring other people along.
• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has Dr Jekyll give the narrator his Apocalyptic Log in the final chapter.
• Strange Objects
  • 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 delirious and barely coherent in his last pages.
  • Being a Scrapbook Story, 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 Being Watched, 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.
• The Taking 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 the painful death of each astronaut and a message from said entity.
• The Third World War: 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 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.
• Till We Have Faces 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.
• The Tomorrow Series: 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."
• Tuf Voyaging: 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, "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 Joe Hill 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 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. However, the ending leaves it ambiguous whether it was an 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 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 Wander, the titular character and Dagger find a diary written by a woman named Doreen. 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 That Was the Last Entry, especially from Dagger's point of view.
• When the Storm Came: 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 turns out to be a sentient monster beyond description.
• Played with in World War Z, which is an oral history of a narrowly-averted Zombie Apocalypse.
• The Yellow Wallpaper is meant to be the journal of a woman losing her sanity.
• The protagonist of The Zombie Autopsies Secret Notebooks From The Apocalypse writes until he falls victim to the zombie virus.

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