In The Last Murder at the End of the World, Turton draws on the popular premise of surviving in a postapocalyptic setting. By setting his murder mystery 90 years after a deadly fog killed most of the world’s population, Turton explores how people might conceptualize a new world without repeating the mistakes of the past. Postapocalyptic narratives have maintained popularity from the mid-20th century onward because they tap into some of society’s deepest fantasies and anxieties in the technological age. Postapocalyptic narratives do not have to be science fiction: The apocalyptic catastrophe can have natural, supernatural, and manmade causes. Natural disasters, war, technological uprisings, and alien invasion are all possible scenarios that clear the ground for humans—or another race of beings—to start a new civilization.

Postapocalyptic narratives explore human nature by showing how people might behave in extreme scenarios with few resources and limited knowledge of their situation. They raise moral and ethical questions, such as determining the criteria for who lives and dies or whether to share resources with or fight off newcomers. Such questions are central to The Road (2006), a novel by American author Cormac McCarthy. In the novel, a father and his young son navigate a bleak, postapocalyptic landscape on foot to find a safe haven.