Here are three books that brilliantly take the scenic route along dystopian roads

The appeal of the road trip is clear: It is an excuse to embrace the journey rather than the destination — while still having a destination. Think of it as productive freedom. (Could anything be more American?) For all that millennials have killed, the road trip is not one of them. According to market industry reports, road trips skyrocketed after 2015 thanks in part to millennials looking for more adventurous, cheaper trips.

In a book, a long road trip — whether by foot, horseback or souped up classic car — is a chance for readers to soak up the fictional world. In the best books, the trip does not just serve as scenery. It explores political and cultural forces along the way. Those forces are especially stark in post-apocalyptic novels, where the idyllic road trip images — small-town diners, gas station coffee stops and families waving from their porches — have been replaced by something far more sinister.

Here are three books that brilliantly take the scenic route along dystopian roads.

"Wanderers"

By Chuck Wendig (out this month)

Small-town teen Shana wakes up one day to find her little sister, Nessie, walking barefoot in her pajamas on the family farm. Nessie, the first afflicted by a strange sleepwalking sickness, begins traveling slowly on foot to some unknown destination. Soon, other "walkers" join her, and Shana follows along to protect her sister on this odd pilgrimage. Wendig's 800-page novel follows a sprawling cast of characters as they navigate (or help bring about) the collapse of civilization. As characters follow the walkers across small towns in the Midwest, Wendig builds plausible outcomes inspired by real world political events. Wendig's treatment of his characters is warm and moving, but the world they exist in is brutal. The book is relentlessly violent but also uncomfortably close to reality.

"Trail of Lightning"

By Rebecca Roanhorse (2018)

Roanhorse's debut novel, the first in a series, takes place in a future where floods and war have ravaged most of North America. Maggie Hoske is a member of a Navajo tribe that, with the help of gods recently returned to Earth, has isolated itself on its ancestral homeland, protected by magical walls. Maggie, a freelance monster hunter, is tasked with killing a monster who has kidnapped a young girl. But Maggie finds herself embroiled in a much larger conspiracy that takes her on the road in a vintage car throughout the southwest United States alongside (and I cannot stress this enough) a sexy shaman. Together they have run-ins with gods, tricksters, corrupt cops and more. It is a fantastically fun on-the-road buddy comedy action flick rom-com, and it is perfect for summer.

"Station Eleven"

By Emily St. John Mandel (2014)

This dreamy tale interweaves different time periods: Before, during and after a flu epidemic devastates the world's population. The novel primarily follows Kirsten, a performer with the Traveling Symphony, two decades after the epidemic. For 15 years, the troupe of musicians and actors have journeyed across America's remaining towns performing Shakespeare's plays, learning along the way about the cults, new governments and communities that have formed since society's collapse. When the group returns to one town to pick up two symphony members who stayed to start a family, they find something unsettling: The residents, now afraid and unwelcoming, are ruled by a man calling himself the Prophet, and Kirsten's troupe-mates are nowhere to be found. As the group is forced to flee the Prophet, the story jumps back and forth in time, to reveal the characters' stories leading up to the epidemic.

This is a quiet book, one where the aching reality of a doomed relationship or the inner peace of creating art is given the same gravity as the end of the world.