There’s a rich tradition of dystopian tales in this country, narratives of disaster that have struck a widespread chord by reflecting sociopolitical realities of their times, rendering worst-case scenarios as a warning to change our ways.

The textbook example of this is Shirley Jackson’s classic short story The Lottery, which horrified readers when published in 1948 by imagining that seemingly normal people could commit an act of barbarism against their neighbor. The story debuted in the context of the release of interred Japanese-American citizens, a few years after occupied and fearful Europeans gave up their neighbors to the Nazis. The Lottery and its successors didn’t distract us from terrors of our world, they in fact demanded that we reckon with them.

Contemporary dystopian literature and films, on the other hand, pull their inspiration increasingly from our worst imaginings of ourselves and seem to be closer to reality than not. The line between entertainment and reality blurs to a point of alarm. In an appearance earlier this month at St Francis College in Brooklyn, Margaret Atwood told the audience that dystopia is a feature of 21st century society.

Take the universe conjured in Atwood’s new novel, The Heart Goes Last, where a once middle-ish class couple, now destitute, has to contend with an America undone by financial collapse. In the not-so-distant past of 2008’s economic crash and global recession, we’re dropped in an America that lived beyond her means, with the super wealthy fortified into comforts denied to all those left behind and forced to live in their cars, beg and con their way into work.

To solve the problem of the transient lifestyle and unemployment, a lucky few compete and agree to live in the town of Consilience to participate in the Positron Project, a prison in exchange for free housing program, alternating monthly to work at the prison and live in a house.

Atwood’s dystopia marries our economic nightmares with the prison industrial complex, austerity and unemployment. It sounds frightfully close to real communities in the US like Huntsville, Texas, where residents accept the fact that their existence is sustained by a prison economy and the local joke is “half the population of Huntsville’s under key, and the other half gets paid for their time”. Or alternatively, it sounds like small towns that have seen their depressed employment market shift when new prisons are built, and shape their politics around it, or the slow rise of suburban poor.

Another example is The Walking Dead, which premiered in 2010 while we navigated the aftershocks of a global economic recession. The show resonated with viewers: the zombies were no longer fringe but normalized masses, familiar, like many friends and family jobless from the massive layoffs, clamoring for any work. Moreover, as fans will attest, the zombies are the least of the problem when you measure them against the humanity of the survivors.

It all echoes other horror stories that are real in our society, where we over-police and criminalize the poor. As my colleague Steven Thrasher noted in a recent column, some are even ordered to give blood or face incarceration. The questions that dystopic narratives – and being black, or poor, in America today – raises for all of us boil down to, will I make it through?

Contrast that to The Lottery, which Ruth Franklin wrote in 2013 “anticipates the way we would come to understand the 20th century’s unique lessons about the capacity of ordinary citizens to do evil – from the Nazi camp bureaucracy, to the Communist societies that depended on the betrayal of neighbor by neighbor … In 1948, with the fresh horrors of the Second World War barely receding into memory and the Red Scare just beginning, it is no wonder that the story’s first readers reacted so vehemently to this ugly glimpse of their own faces in the mirror, even if they did not realize exactly what they were looking at.”

We know what we’re looking at, now.

We like to believe we’ll be better than this. I wasn’t alone in recognizing, if not appropriating, the imagery from Susan Collins’s Hunger Games when activist Bree Newsome posed, captured and took down the confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse this summer. The image was striking because it embodied righteous defiance to an old and destructive order. Like a spark, it reignited a movement to remove the flag from other southern state capitals.

This is probably why I find strange comfort in consuming dystopian stories. They are reminders, despite reflecting a dire present, that it’s never too late for us, that we’re not that far gone and can reverse the machinery that makes our nightmares real. Maybe they are a kind of litany for survival, that humanity will continue despite our best efforts to destroy ourselves.