More recently, Emily St. John Mandel’s “Station Eleven” pivots on the pre-plague lives of its characters. Granted, this is a world where self-proclaimed prophets kill and impregnate at will (incidentally, plenty of plots in post-apocalyptic fiction have to do with pregnancy, but, as far as I know, no one in the history of the genre ever has her period). But gore never takes center stage. There’s a rape, mentioned briefly and answered with swift justice. Characters get knife tattoos for every life they take, serving as living headstones, not macabre trophies. But the real nightmare is found in the threat of forgetting or in the memory of unresolved pre-apocalyptic relationships. Hell is defined as “the absence of the people you long for.” “Survival is insufficient,” a character says, and it’s the recollection of art, of lovers, of air conditioning, the way refrigerators lit up when opened — the mundane details of a vanished way of life — that gives this novel its tragic punch. We nod at the violence, as if from a passing car, and keep moving.

In “Find Me,” Laura van den Berg eradicates a mere 400,000 of the population, but what she lacks in body count she makes up for by going straight for the psychological jugular. Here confusion and the scramble to make sense of one’s present and past is not a side effect of the new world, but its defining feature: The characters face an “epidemic of forgetting.” Demonstrating the ability to remember facts is a marker of immunity. And the heroine, Joy, is thoroughly immune; she still has all her bitter memories of moving between foster homes after her mother abandoned her as a baby, and of a creepy Stop & Shop co-worker who “was always trying to play a joke where he snuck up behind me and put a plastic bag over my head, no matter how many times I told him that I did not find this funny at all.” Joy’s adolescence has steeled her for post-plague life.

Shelley, Mandel and van den Berg aren’t in denial of the brutalities of a lawless world. Nor are they more nostalgic than their male counterparts. After all, the unnamed man in “The Road” is plenty moved when he comes across relics of civilization, and Taylor Antrim’s new novel, “Immunity,” weaves disease and depravity into social satire. But it seems as if these women are familiar with Margaret Atwood’s observation that what women fear most from men is murder and what men fear most from women is humiliation. These writers don’t need to destroy the world in order to imagine what it might be like to feel unsafe in it. The threat of violence is not something that’s new to them, and thus they’re less likely to fixate on it in narrative form, opting instead for stories about psychological preservation. It’s hard not to think that women just might be better prepared for the end of the world.

By presenting physical danger as a given and not the main event, these authors are free to move the spotlights elsewhere and create multilayered stories. After all, when the apocalypse comes, you may or may not have to kill (or be killed), but you will assuredly have to be you. And these novels are concerned with how. “There is a part of our story that we do not know how to tell to ourselves,” Joy theorizes in “Find Me,” “and we will away its existence for so long that finally our brain agrees to a trade: I will let you forget this, but you will never feel whole.”