Question: you are faced with a flu pandemic, economic extinction, climate disaster and what survivalists nickname TEOTWAWKI, the end of the world as we know it. What do you do? Answer: Go shopping — for survivalist literature.

In the past few months sales of apocalypse-friendly books have rocketed — from new hunker-in-your-bunker thrillers to SAS manuals to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road — which indicates that ordinary folks are preparing for the worst. Not since the words DON’T PANIC appeared in large friendly letters on the cover of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has the publishing industry exploited mayhem so well.

What we are seeing this year, however, is the crossover of survival lit from the way-out-wacky right-wing gun-toting toothless nutters in Nevada to a worldwide audience. Leftwingers and greens with their root cellars and home-canned beans are also buying into the movement. In Britain, Canongate has just published Neil Strauss’s Emergency: One Man’s Story of a Dangerous World and How to Stay Alive in it.

Strauss — whose previous helpful manual was The Game, on picking up women — saw the next big money- making subject coming and personally tested various survival techniques. Darkly comic scenarios show that he can now kill a goat, deliver a baby, shoot, survive in the wild with only a knife, track animals, trap human beings, pick locks, hotwire cars, suture bullet wounds, treat a zoo as a restaurant and escape with a second passport to a small island republic.

I e-mailed him at his well-stocked, heavily armed, designer home in Los Angeles. Strauss’s theory is that we all got too comfortable in the Eighties and Nineties, and then “the house of cards came crashing down around us, particularly in America, with 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, bank collapses, the Government authorising torture, and now the international economic crisis. All of a sudden, the things we thought were the property of history books and dystopian science-fiction novels started happening to us. So I think this trend is a result of a sort of generational awakening — perhaps even a slight panic attack.”

Don’t panic. Instead, try to buy Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse online. It was published by the tiny Ulysses Press a month ago, and is already in its third reprinting in America, and Amazon (where it hit No 6) has a two-month waiting list. HarperCollins is now bidding to publish the paperback.

With a machinegunning mercenary type on the cover, Patriots is part thriller, part survival guide. Unusually for a novel, it has an impressively detailed index that goes from “ambushes, ammunition, anti-personnel mines” and “antivehicular trenches” to “ball-peen hammer as weapon, bartering, bicycle generators, blood transfusions, bullet-resistant vests”, and the inexplicable “butter-knife guns”.

Patriots’ author is James Wesley, Rawles (best not to ask about the comma; Mr Rawles just likes it there, and he has a lot of ammo). He edits SurvivalBlog.com, the internet’s most popular blog on “family preparedness”. I thought “family preparedness” was remembering to do the online Tesco order on Sunday nights, but it turns out that you will need vast supplies of water, canned goods, torches, matches, a couple of assault rifles, first aid kit, surgical gloves, masks, sleeping bags, harpoons, a bow and arrow, raincoats, gas stove, clean underwear, and pets. Or as another survival list puts it: “Keep pets (cats, dogs, rabbits, birds, etc) well fed. They can be additional food sources in an emergency.”

Here, we segue nicely from eating dogs to eating people. Which is wrong, unless you’re a character in Cormac McCarthy’s compelling The Road. The unfilmable post-apocalyptic book has been filmed, but with a cast list that includes “Cannibal #1 and Cannibal #2” it’s been slow in making it comfortably to the screens. Starring Viggo Mortensen, it is rumoured to be having its premiere in October.

Of course, we may all be quarantined at home for swine flu by then, watching reruns of Survivor, The Andromeda Strain and Ray Mears on telly. Re flu, Strauss points out that more people die in car crashes every day, but he does e-mail me this helpful suggestion: “If the outbreak gets worse, the key to surviving it is social distancing. Similar to those who are quarantined, don’t go into work, to public gatherings, to social events, or travel unless absolutely necessary.”

Meanwhile, Rawles has just uploaded a whole slew of flu advice to SurvivalBlog.com. “The epidemic brings into sharp focus the vulnerability of modern, highly mobile and technological societies to viral or bacterial infectious diseases,” he says, with a certain told-you-so in his tone as he rushes off to write another novel.

Unlike Rawles, you may not have stockpiled three years of supplies on your ranch in a secret location, but having the ability to look after yourself, or your family, be it by growing vegetables or building a bunker, is increasingly part of the zeitgeist in an uncertain world. Even children are reading survival tomes such as The Dangerous Book for Boys and Scouting handbooks (the 1911 edition is particularly popular with the apocalypse set). Classics such as Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island also have the right can-do attitude.

Maybe it’s not a cultural shift, but the resurfacing of our primeval instincts to hide out in caves and wait until the mammoths have passed. Either way, DON’T PANIC about TEOTWAWKI — stockpile some books instead.

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy