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Built on ISFDB, Wikipedia, Wikidata and Open Library. Curated reading orders carry their reasoning on the page; the rest follow publication order. Data sources & licenses

© Loreful · data: ISFDB · CC BY

More like Adramelech

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Mood

The mood the book leaves you in.

  • The reading experience is propelled by journeys, exploration, and physical risk; excitement and forward momentum dominate over dread or introspection.
  • Joy and loss are deliberately mixed; the resolution grants characters something real while taking something else away, leaving warmth and sorrow together.
  • The book demands work from the reader — dense prose, difficult structure, unfamiliar ideas, or morally uncomfortable material — as part of its intended effect.
  • Grim events, cruelty, or despair dominate the atmosphere, and the book does not soften them with comfort or comic relief.
  • The atmosphere is quietly unsettling — wrongness, unease, and the uncanny pervade the book without necessarily escalating into overt horror.
  • The book is built to move the reader; character feeling is foregrounded and major scenes aim at a strong emotional response.
  • Humor is a primary aim and the prose plays for laughs — comic situations, wit, or dialogue produce sustained comedy, not occasional levity.
  • The book insists that things can improve; effort and decency are shown to matter, and the arc bends toward better outcomes even through hardship.
  • The book teaches as it goes — real facts, history, science, or craft are conveyed in enough depth that learning is part of the reading experience.
  • The book is designed to uplift and motivate, presenting perseverance or achievement in a way that invites the reader to aspire or act.
  • The overall register is cheerful and easygoing; stakes are kept gentle and the book avoids dwelling on pain or dread.
  • Withheld information drives the experience; the book sustains enigmas and secrets the reader wants resolved, whatever its genre.
  • The book is contemplative and inward-looking, giving more weight to thought, memory, and meaning than to external events.
  • Grief, loss, or melancholy set the dominant register, and the book lets sorrow stand rather than resolving it into comfort.
  • Sustained suspense is the point; the book keeps the reader braced for what happens next through danger, pressure, or impending revelation.
  • Playful invention and charm define the register — fanciful conceits, light absurdity, and a narration that delights in its own oddity.

About

What the story runs on.

  • Stories centered on vampires — blood-drinking undead — whether as predators, love interests, or protagonists.
  • Stories centered on witches and the practice of witchcraft — covens, hedge magic, familiars, and the witch's place in her community.
  • Stories in which demons or devils — infernal beings, their bargains, possessions, and hierarchies — drive the plot.
  • Stories about the raised or restless dead — necromancers and their arts, liches, skeletons, and revenants.
  • Stories driven by a curse laid on a person, family, or place, and the struggle to live under it or break it.
  • Stories in which staying alive against nature, catastrophe, or scarcity is the central problem.
  • Stories of growing up — a young protagonist crossing from childhood into adult knowledge and responsibility.
  • Stories about who a character truly is — self-discovery, doubled lives, and the search for a self.
  • Stories about mental unraveling — descent into madness, delusion, and minds at war with themselves.
  • Stories about mourning — living through the death of a loved one and what loss does to the survivors.
  • Stories in which a buried family truth — hidden parentage, crimes, or shames — surfaces and reorders the present.
  • Stories organized around investigating a killing — the case, the clues, and the pursuit of the killer, in any genre's clothing.

Shelf

Where it sits in the library.

    • Fiction built on magic or other supernatural elements that have no scientific explanation.
    • Secondary-world fantasy at large scale, where the fate of nations or the world turns on the protagonists' struggle.
    • Fantasy set in a recognizably modern city or contemporary world where the supernatural intrudes on everyday life.
    • Fantasy that blends in horror's atmosphere and imagery, keeping a fantastical frame around grim or frightening material.
    • Action-driven fantasy following warriors or rogues with personal stakes against sorcerous threats, rather than world-spanning conflicts.
    • Fantasy set in a real historical period or a close analogue of one, with magic woven into the era.
    • Fantasy in which protagonists cross from the ordinary world into another world through a portal or similar passage.
    • Fiction that retells or reworks a traditional fairy tale in a new form or setting.
    • Fantasy drawing directly on myths, legends, and folklore, retelling them or building on their figures and logic.
    • Fantasy of ghosts, vampires, shapeshifters, psychics, and similar phenomena, usually set in an otherwise ordinary world.
    • Fiction mixing science-fictional trappings with overtly magical or impossible elements in one setting.
    • Low-stakes fantasy emphasizing comfort, community, and everyday pleasures over conflict and peril.
    • Speculative fiction of pervasive moral ambiguity, violence, and cynicism that rejects heroic conventions — fantasy and SF alike.
      • Fiction that extrapolates from science and technology — future societies, space travel, or speculative inventions — within at least nominally natural laws.
      • Science fiction of interstellar scope — starships, galactic polities, and adventure across star systems.
      • Science fiction committed to scientific rigor, where technical plausibility constrains the story.
      • Science fiction centered on armed forces and warfare, told largely from a military point of view.
      • Science fiction of networked, corporate-dominated near futures, pairing high technology with social decay.
      • Science fiction styled on nineteenth-century steam-powered technology, often in a Victorian or pseudo-Victorian setting.
      • Fiction depicting an oppressive or catastrophic society, presented as a warning.
      • Fiction set after civilization's collapse, following survivors in the ruins of the old world.
      • Fiction in which characters move between past and future, and the mechanics or consequences of that travel drive the plot.
      • Fiction exploring a world where a historical event went differently and history diverged from ours.
      • Science fiction about humanity's first encounter and communication with an alien intelligence.
      • Science fiction in which extraterrestrial forces attack or occupy Earth and humanity resists.
      • Fiction whose primary aim is to frighten or unsettle the reader through dread, menace, or the monstrous.
      • Horror of vast, indifferent, incomprehensible entities before which humanity is insignificant, in the Lovecraft tradition.
      • Horror of decaying houses, buried family secrets, and oppressive atmosphere in the Gothic literary tradition.
      • Horror centered on hauntings and the returning dead.
      • Horror located in the mind — paranoia, obsession, and unreliable perception rather than external monsters.
      • Horror built around the reanimated dead and survival amid their outbreaks.
      • Horror defined by explicit, transgressive gore that refuses to cut away from violence.
      • Speculative fiction of the strange and uncanny that resists both natural explanation and standard genre categories.
      • Fiction organized around solving a crime or puzzle, typically following an investigator toward the identification of a culprit.
      • A puzzle-first mystery that lays out clues so the culprit's identity can be deduced before the reveal.
      • Crime fiction of moral ambiguity, fatalism, and hard-edged style, set among the corrupt and the doomed.
      • A mystery following the realistic routines of police work — forensics, interviews, and case-building.
      • A gentle mystery with an amateur sleuth, a small community, and violence kept off the page.
      • A mystery set in a past era, where the investigation works within that period's methods and society.
      • Fast-paced fiction driven by imminent danger, pursuit, or high-stakes conspiracy, built to sustain tension.
      • A thriller of espionage — agents, tradecraft, and intelligence services in conflict.
      • A thriller centered on lawyers and the courtroom, where litigation carries the suspense.
      • A thriller driven by detailed contemporary or near-future technology, often military or scientific.
      • A thriller whose tension comes from mental states and manipulation between characters rather than external action.
      • Fiction whose central plot is a romantic relationship and its development toward an emotionally satisfying resolution.
      • Romance in which one or both partners are supernatural beings, blending fantasy elements into the love story.
      • A fantasy-romance hybrid in which the romantic arc and the fantasy plot carry equal weight.
      • Romance set in a past era, with courtship shaped by the period's society and manners.
      • Romance set in the present day, without supernatural or historical elements.
      • Fiction set in a real past period, where the historical setting materially shapes characters and events.
        • General and literary fiction emphasizing prose style, character interiority, or formal ambition over genre plot conventions.
        • Fiction in a realistic world where magical events occur and are treated as ordinary, in the tradition of Latin American literature.
        • Fiction that ridicules people, institutions, or society in order to criticize them.
        • Fiction that plays with narrative convention through metafiction, fragmentation, and self-reference.
        • Fiction propelled by journeys, exploration, and physical peril, where action and survival carry the plot.
        • Adventure fiction of ships and seafaring — naval engagements, voyages, and life at sea.
        • Fiction of the American frontier West — gunmen, ranchers, and lawmen, typically in the late nineteenth century.
        • Fiction centered on soldiers, campaigns, and the experience of warfare, historical or imagined.
          • Fiction written primarily to amuse, using comedic situations, wit, or parody as its organizing principle.
            • Multi-generational fiction following a family or dynasty across decades, with inheritance and kinship as the through-line.
              • Fiction whose world runs on explicit game mechanics — levels, stats, and skills that characters can see and exploit.
                • Fiction about costumed or superpowered heroes and their conflicts with comparable villains.

                Practical

                How long a commitment, whether it stands alone, and whether it has finished.

                Tap a chip to ask for it · tap again to rule it out · once more to clear. Numbers show what would be left.

                • Cover of Exorcist
                  Exorcist

                  series · 6 books · 1971

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                  William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist (1971) follows two Catholic priests trying to save a twelve-year-old girl from a violent demonic possession, and became the basis of the acclaimed 1973 film. Blatty returned to the story in 1983 with Legion, in which police detective Bill Kinderman's investigation of a string of ritual murders leads him back to the aftermath of that exorcism and the fate of Father Karras; Legion was later filmed as The Exorcist III. Other Exorcist books are tie-in and franchise material rather than further novels by Blatty himself.

                • Cover of Rosemary Reilly
                  Rosemary Reilly

                  series · 2 books · 1967

                  completed

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                  Rosemary's Baby follows a young wife in a Gothic Manhattan apartment building who grows increasingly convinced that her elderly neighbors, and even her own husband, are part of a conspiracy surrounding her pregnancy. Ira Levin returned to the character thirty years later in the 1997 sequel Son of Rosemary. Together the two novels form a short, self-contained horror series about faith, control, and motherhood.

                • Cover of Duke de Richleau
                  Duke de Richleau

                  series · 4 books · 1933

                  completed

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                  The Duke de Richleau novels follow Dennis Wheatley's aristocratic adventurer and occultist across four decades of twentieth-century intrigue, moving from a 1930s rescue thriller in The Forbidden Territory into Satanist set-pieces such as The Devil Rides Out and Strange Conflict, then a later case in Gateway to Hell. Wheatley wrote the books out of order over nearly forty years, but their internal chronology matches the order they were published in.

                • Cover of The Omen
                  The Omen

                  series · 5 books · 1976

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                  The Omen book series novelizes and continues the 1976-1981 horror film franchise about Damien Thorn, the secretly substituted child revealed to be the Antichrist. David Seltzer's tie-in novel adapted the original film, and Joseph Howard and Gordon McGill carried the story forward across further volumes (Damien: Omen II, The Final Conflict, and later original sequels), following Damien's rise to power and the escalating attempts to stop him.

                • Cover of Seven Footprints to Satan
                  Seven Footprints to Satan

                  A. Merritt · standalone novel · 1928

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                  From the back cover of Avon book 235: Women beyond compare, luxury without end, slaves of both sexes without number - all these were the incredible bait offered James Kirkham as he came to the throne of Satan. There, seven golden steps above him, sat the devil himself, Evil Incarnate, waiting for Kirkham to accept the hellish challenge. But to climb those seven steps meant a gamble - whose loss would be eternal torment! On Kirkham's daring depended not only a challenge to Hell itself but the life and love of the beautiful girl who had been pledged to him - but who was now enslaved by Satan!

                • Cover of Desperation/Regulators
                  Desperation/Regulators

                  series · 2 books · 1996

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                  Stephen King published Desperation and The Regulators simultaneously in 1996, the first under his own name and the second under his Richard Bachman pseudonym. The two novels are mirror-universe companions: largely the same cast of characters appears in both, recast into different roles and circumstances, with each book's story driven by the same malevolent supernatural entity, Tak.

                • Cover of Horns
                  Horns

                  Joe Hill · standalone novel · 2010

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                  WorldCat: After his childhood sweetheart is brutally killed and suspicion falls on him, Ig Parrish goes on a drinking binge and wakes up with horns on his head, hate in his heart, and an incredible new power which he uses in the name of vengeance.

                • Cover of The Satanist
                  The Satanist

                  Dennis Wheatley · standalone novel · 1960

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                  The Satanist is a black magic/horror novel by Dennis Wheatley. Published in 1960, it is characterized by an anti-communist spy theme. The novel was one of the popular novels of the 1960s, popularizing the tabloid notion of a black mass.

                • Cover of Falling Angel
                  Falling Angel

                  William Hjortsberg · standalone novel · 1978

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                  Falling Angel is a 1978 horror novel by American writer William Hjortsberg. Written in a hardboiled detective style with supernatural themes, it was adapted into the 1987 film Angel Heart.

                • Cover of The Haunting of Toby Jugg
                  The Haunting of Toby Jugg

                  Dennis Wheatley · standalone novel · 1948

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                  The Haunting of Toby Jugg is a 1948 psychological thriller novel on an occult theme by English writer Dennis Wheatley, incorporating his usual themes of satanic possession and madness, in what was at that time a fresh situation: a disabled British airman recovering from his experiences in the last stages of World War II, in which he played a part in the bombardment of Germany.

                • Cover of The Mayfair Witches Saga
                  The Mayfair Witches Saga

                  series · 3 books · 1990

                  completed

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                  Lives of the Mayfair Witches is a trilogy of Gothic supernatural horror fantasy novels by American author Anne Rice. It centers on a family of witches whose fortunes have been guided for generations by a spirit named Lasher. The series began in 1990 with The Witching Hour, which was followed by the sequels Lasher (1993) and Taltos (1994). All three novels debuted at No. 2 on The New York Times Best Seller list.

                • Cover of Melmoth
                  Melmoth

                  series · 9 books · 1820

                  completed

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                • Cover of Talisman
                  Talisman

                  series · 4 books · 1984

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                  Stephen King and Peter Straub's The Talisman follows twelve-year-old Jack Sawyer as he crosses between our world and the Territories, a parallel realm, on a cross-country quest to save his dying mother. The 2001 sequel Black House catches up with Jack decades later as a retired detective drawn into a serial-murder case in small-town Wisconsin that pulls the Territories back into his life. A third book, Other Worlds Than These, was announced in 2025 to complete the trilogy.

                • Cover of To the Devil - a Daughter
                  To the Devil - a Daughter

                  Dennis Wheatley · standalone novel · 1953

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                  Beneath the azure sky of the French Riviera, Christina Mordant looks and behaves like any other attractive girl. But each night as darkness falls, the demon within her betrays its presence. A thousand miles away, deep in the Essex marshes, a priest of Satan is about to achieve his life's ambition: Canon Copely-Syle of Bentford Priory prepares for the virgin sacrifice which will give breath to the foul abomination he has created...

                • Cover of Sleeping Beauties
                  Sleeping Beauties

                  Stephen King & Owen King · standalone novel · 2017

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                  Sleeping Beauties is a novel by Stephen King and his son Owen King, released on September 26, 2017. The book was first mentioned during a promotional appearance on the CBC radio program q. Of the novel, Stephen King stated, "Owen brought me this dynamite idea and I've collaborated a couple of times with Joe. I'm not going to say what the idea is because it's too good."

                • Cover of The Devil and the Dark Water
                  The Devil and the Dark Water

                  Stuart Turton · standalone novel · 2020

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                  The Devil and the Dark Water is a 2020 genre-bending novel by Stuart Turton, combining elements of historical fiction, murder mystery, and horror. Set in 1634, it features a detective trying to solve a series of inexplicable crimes aboard an East Indiaman ship.

                • Cover of The Case Against Satan
                  The Case Against Satan

                  Ray Russell · standalone novel · 1962

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                • Cover of Shrine
                  Shrine

                  James Herbert · standalone novel · 1983

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                  Shrine is a 1983 horror novel by English writer James Herbert, exploring themes of religious ecstasy, mass hysteria, demonic possession, faith healing and Catholicism.

                • Cover of The Demonologist
                  The Demonologist

                  Andrew Pyper · standalone novel · 2012

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                • Cover of Hellraiser
                  Hellraiser

                  series · 5 books · 1991

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                  Clive Barker's The Hellbound Heart introduces the puzzle box that summons the Cenobites and the domestic horror story around it, later adapted into the Hellraiser film series. The Scarlet Gospels, written decades later, brings the character back for a direct confrontation with Barker's other recurring figure, occult detective Harry D'Amour. Other contributors have added further Hellraiser tie-in fiction, including prequel and screenplay-adaptation volumes, expanding the mythology started in the original novella.

                • Cover of Davey Owen
                  Davey Owen

                  series · 2 books · 1987

                  completed

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                  Live Girls is Ray Garton's best-known novel, a horror title that earned a Bram Stoker Award nomination among the roughly 68 books he wrote across a long horror-fiction career. Night Life continues the same series with a second entry published nearly two decades later.

                • Cover of The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray
                  The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray

                  Chris Wooding · standalone novel · 2001

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                  The Haunting Of Alaizabel Cray (2004) is a Gothic steampunk horror/alternate history novel by Chris Wooding about a young man and an amnesiac girl fighting a cult in an alternate Victorian era London.

                • Cover of Pine Cove
                  Pine Cove

                  series · 3 books · 1992

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                  Pine Cove gathers three loosely connected comic novels — Practical Demonkeeping, The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, The Stupidest Angel — that Christopher Moore set in the same fictional small town on the California coast, recycling some of the same eccentric residents even as each book follows its own standalone plot (the first centers on a drifter's demon and the reluctant wizard trying to control it). It's part of the larger shared world Moore uses across most of his comic novels, rather than a continuing story arc.

                • Cover of Mister B. Gone
                  Mister B. Gone

                  Clive Barker · standalone novel · 2007

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                  Mister B. Gone is a short metafiction novel by Clive Barker, published in the United Kingdom and the United States in October 2007.