"Unique" Post-apocalyptic Stories?

Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill.

Unique post apocalyptic novel wit pretty unique stakes: you find out in the first few pages that humanity is extinct and the earth is populated by androids/robots that are srruggling to survive amidst an apocalypse of their own, with a main character that is living on borrowed time.

Earth Abides by George R. Stewart.

Not so much because the apocalypse itself is unique, but rather because the focus of the story is unique. It's not violence and survival and people killing people, it's about a guy who thinks it's his goal to save those things that he thinks comprise civilization (books and literacy etc).

Robert Brockway's Carrier Wave. >!SETI picks up an infohazardous chain letter which hijacks its victims to spread copies of itself and has already laid waste to at least one alien civilization by a combination of societal collapse through brainwashed zombie apocalypse and throwing all resources into the mass production of radio telescopes.!< Basically the world's only Succinea-themed cosmic horror story.

It’s more grimdark fantasy than science fiction but truly excellent: The Darkness That Comes Before, R. Scott Bakker. First book of the Prince of Nothing trilogy. I don’t ordinarily enjoy fantasy but this book is sui generis. Takes place centuries after the apocalypse; new civilizations and societies have sprung up in the ruins of fallen nations.

Only one group of people even remembers the apocalypse— they suffer dreams of its horror every night— while for everyone else, it is thought of as ancient legend. The story opens at a time when there are rumors of a coming Second Apocalypse.

They are more "literary" but JG Ballard did a bunch of apocalyptic novels. I was most likely too young to get all the metaphors. "The Crystal World" was probably the weirdest.

Christopher Priest's novels are effing weird: "The Inverted World" is fairly apocalyptic.

Amazed nobody has said Day of the Triffids. It's a classic and definitely novel in its approach. It's kind of a double apocalypse: mass blindness and murderous plants, apparently (who knows...) unrelated.

I haven’t read it, but there’s a book by Yahtzee Croshaw called “Jam” where strawberry jam starts eating people and taking over the world

Can’t think of a weirder apocalyptic premise lol

Jeff Carlson's Plague Year series is pretty good. He also did one called Interrupt.

Brian Aldiss' Dracula Unbound is trippy.

There's a trilogy of short stories called The End is Nigh / The End is Now / The End has Come that is pretty good. Some are stand alone, some are stories that carry through all 3 anthologies.

Hollow Kingdom is zombie, but from a rather unique character viewpoint. Funny too.

I don't even know what The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway is about. The blurb sure sounds fun, though.

I can also recommend the 9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9 saga, which is told in a series of Reddit posts and is... quite something.

I hear that Kraken by China Mieville has multiple competing apocalypses, sounds interesting.

"Keep" by China Mieville is a story about the world being undone by a disease that makes ditches spontaneously dig themselves around people who stay in one place for too long, creating moats that trap them.

Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luis Borges is also quite short, and I shouldn't spoil it.

I don't know why you haven't gotten stronger recommendations for The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway. It's exactly what you're looking for, and beautifully written.

Terminal World by Alastair Reynolds

Dust by Charles Pellegrino (insect die off)

The Crystal World by JG Ballard (crystallization)

The Death of Grass by John Christopher (virus kills grass, rice and wheat)

The World in Winter by John Christopher (ice age)

Carlton Mellick III writes Bizarro fiction, which is a mixture of sci-fi, fantasy, horror, romance, and whatever else, resulting in books that are weird for the sake of it. However, they're very good (IMO) and the end of the world occurs in multiple different ways you won't see in any other books:

*Sweet Story: world destroyed when rain is replaced by candy worldwide (like Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs but realistic consequences when it never ends)

*Cuddly Holocaust: sentient toys rise up and place humans in death camps, harvesting their organs to be more 'alive', while tribes of toys fight over the ruined planet

*Bio Melt: a dystopian world where people can only succeed by melding their minds and bodies with other people to create super geniuses with all the skills of their component parts, things get even worse when all the backed up fluid from the melding machines breaks free and unleashes hybrid monsters plus the next stage in human evolution.

*Mouse Trap: alien probes acting as exterminators have set up a seemingly endless number of bizarre lethal traps to wipe out humanity before their masters arrive.

*The Terrible Thing That Happens: the world is a complete nuclear wasteland and the only way the few mutants cling to survival is by way of a haunted grocery store, where the food becomes real if you can get it out during the brief window where the haunting begins and before the ghosts begin the massacre.

*Neverday: Gradually, people all over the world are waking up to the fact that they have been stuck in a Groundhog's Day style loop. Time resets when you go to sleep or die. Staying up past midnight is a very bad idea, as you eventually meet the creatures hatching from the sleeping people and holding humanity forever in place.

I'd argue NK Jemisins Broken Earth Trilogy definitely counts as both weird and different.

Ice nine by vonnegut

The Nitrogen Fix by Hal Clement. All oxygen is gone from our atmosphere, combined with nitrogen by a bacteria.

Ooh. Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde, a humourous, colour-based dsytopia. Probably his best work, but unfortunately other books have similar titles.

Ilona Andrews’ Kate Daniels is post-apocalyptic urban fantasy. Magic returned to the world a while ago, and while magic reigns, modern technology doesn’t work. Planes fell from the sky, skyscrapers collapsed, the whole nine yards. However, magic didn’t stay permanently, and now the world alternates between periods where cars and guns work and periods where madmen can summon demons in the middle of Main Street.

Forever Free by Joe Haldeman.

Slow Apocalypse by John Varley isn’t weird-weird but it does have a more unique setup than a lot of apocalypses.