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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 Being Marcus

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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.
  • The book works as comfort reading — low tension, a soothing pace, and an atmosphere the reader can unwind in.
  • 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 witches and the practice of witchcraft — covens, hedge magic, familiars, and the witch's place in her community.
  • Stories centered on wizards, mages, and other learned practitioners of magic as protagonists or masters.
  • Stories in which gods and deities act as characters — walking the world, meddling in mortal lives, or dying.
  • Stories structured as a quest — a journey undertaken to find, deliver, or destroy something of great import.
  • Stories in which staying alive against nature, catastrophe, or scarcity is the central problem.
  • Stories of lovers kept apart by law, family, faith, or station, where the obstacle to love is the plot.
  • Stories in which a friendship — its making, testing, or loss — is the emotional center.
  • 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 in which a buried family truth — hidden parentage, crimes, or shames — surfaces and reorders the present.
  • Stories driven by maneuvering for power — factions, conspiracies, and statecraft conducted in shadow.
  • Stories in which war itself is the subject — combat, occupation, and what warfare does to soldiers and civilians.

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 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 of dreamlike, irrational imagery and logic that breaks from realistic representation.
        • 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 Stardust
                  Stardust

                  Neil Gaiman · standalone novel · 1998

                  similar byfantasy+1 more

                  Stardust is a 1999 fantasy novel by British writer Neil Gaiman, usually published with illustrations by Charles Vess. Stardust has a different tone and style from most of Gaiman's prose fiction, being consciously written in the tradition of pre-Tolkien English fantasy, following in the footsteps of authors such as Lord Dunsany and Hope Mirrlees. It is concerned with the adventures of a young man from the village of Wall, which borders the magical land of Faerie.

                • Cover of Inferno
                  Inferno

                  series · 2 books · 1976

                  similar byfantasyafterlife & underworld

                  In Inferno, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle send a science fiction writer to his death and drop him into a modern-dress version of Dante's nine circles of Hell, where he must reason his way toward understanding why he has been damned. The 1976 novel was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and the authors returned to the same character decades later in a sequel, Escape from Hell. Together the two books form a self-contained pair rather than an open-ended series.

                • Cover of Earthsea Cycle
                  Earthsea Cycle

                  series · 18 books · 1964

                  completed

                  part of Earthsea

                  similar byfantasy

                  The Earthsea Cycle, also known as Earthsea, is a series of high fantasy books written by American author Ursula K. Le Guin. Beginning with A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1970), and The Farthest Shore (1972), the series was continued in Tehanu (1990), and Tales from Earthsea and The Other Wind. In 2018, all the novels and short stories were published in a single volume, The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition, with artwork by Charles Vess.

                • Cover of The Lovely Bones
                  The Lovely Bones

                  Alice Sebold · standalone novel · 2001

                  similar byafterlife & underworld+1 more

                  The Lovely Bones is a 2002 novel by American writer Alice Sebold. It is the story of a teenage girl who, after being raped and murdered, watches from a personal heaven as her family and friends struggle to move on with their lives while she comes to terms with her own death. The novel received critical praise and became an instant bestseller.

                • Cover of The Coming Race
                  The Coming Race

                  Edward Bulwer-Lytton · standalone novel · 1871

                  similar by+2 more

                  The Coming Race, an early science-fiction work, with its superman race the Vril-ya descended from the same ancestors as the great Aryan family, from which in varied streams has flowed the dominant civilization of the world spawned a occult secret society known as the Vril Society or Luminous Lodge - its philosphy and swastika symbol profoundly influenced the Nazis. Please Note: This book has been reformatted to be easy to read in true text, not scanned images that can sometimes be difficult to decipher. The Microsoft eBook has a contents page linked to the chapter headings for easy navigation. The Adobe eBook has bookmarks at chapter headings and is printable up to two full copies per year. Both versions are text searchable.

                • Cover of Skinjacker Trilogy
                  Skinjacker Trilogy

                  series · 4 books · 2006

                  similar byfantasyafterlife & underworld

                  Everlost strands two fourteen-year-olds, Nick and Allie, killed together in a car crash, in the afterlife-adjacent realm of Everlost — a shadow world where lost children (Afterlights) linger among perfect, unbroken echoes of buildings and places the living have destroyed or torn down. Neal Shusterman's Skinjacker trilogy takes its name from Allie's rare and dangerous power to "skinjack," or possess, the bodies of the living, which she and Nick explore across Everwild and Everfound as they try to understand what Everlost actually is.

                • Cover of What Dreams May Come
                  What Dreams May Come

                  Richard Matheson · standalone novel · 1978

                  similar byfantasyafterlife & underworld

                  A man who dies and finds himself in the afterlife is concerned about the state of mind of his widow, who doesn't believe in life after death.

                • Cover of All Hallows' Eve
                  All Hallows' Eve

                  Charles Williams · standalone novel · 1945

                  similar byfantasy+1 more

                  All Hallows' Eve is the last of the seven novels of the supernatural written by Charles Williams. Published by Faber and Faber in 1945, it went through three impressions that year and another in 1947. In 1948 it was published in the US by Pellegrini & Cudahy with an introduction by T. S. Eliot. There were two later translations into Italian and Spanish.

                • Cover of Kingdom of the Wicked (Kerri Maniscalco)
                  Kingdom of the Wicked (Kerri Maniscalco)

                  series · 6 books · 2020

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                  Kerri Maniscalco's trilogy follows Emilia, a Sicilian witch whose twin sister is murdered by a serial killer targeting witches, forcing her into an uneasy bargain with Wrath, one of the seven princes of Hell, to hunt the culprit. Kingdom of the Wicked and its sequels, Kingdom of the Cursed and Kingdom of the Feared, escalate from that investigation into a wider entanglement with the political rivalries of Hell itself. The series pairs a murder-mystery hook with a slow-burn romance between Emilia and Wrath.

                • Cover of Damned Trilogy
                  Damned Trilogy

                  series · 2 books · 2011

                  similar byafterlife & underworld+1 more

                  Chuck Palahniuk's Damned follows Madison Spencer, a sharp-tongued thirteen-year-old who wakes up dead and navigates a bureaucratic, telemarketing-riddled Hell, phoning the living to warn them before she's through. Its sequel, Doomed, continues her afterlife story; despite the 'trilogy' label, only these two books have been published.

                • Cover of Under the Whispering Door
                  Under the Whispering Door

                  TJ Klune · standalone novel · 2021

                  similar byfantasyafterlife & underworld

                  A Man Called Ove meets The Good Place in Under the Whispering Door, a delightful queer love story from TJ Klune, author of the New York Times and USA Today bestseller The House in the Cerulean Sea. **Welcome to Charon's Crossing. The tea is hot, the scones are fresh, and the dead are just passing through.** When a reaper comes to collect Wallace from his own funeral, Wallace begins to suspect he might be dead. And when Hugo, the owner of a peculiar tea shop, promises to help him cross over, Wallace decides he’s definitely dead. But even in death he’s not ready to abandon the life he barely lived, so when Wallace is given one week to cross over, he sets about living a lifetime in seven days. Hilarious, haunting, and kind, Under the Whispering Door is an uplifting story about a life spent at the office and a death spent building a home.

                • Cover of Associated Shades
                  Associated Shades

                  series · 5 books · 1896

                  completed

                  similar byfantasyafterlife & underworld

                  John Kendrick Bangs was an American writer, humorist, editor and satirist.

                • Cover of Katabasis
                  Katabasis

                  R. F. Kuang · standalone novel · 2025

                  similar byfantasyafterlife & underworld

                  Katabasis is a 2025 fantasy novel by American writer R. F. Kuang. It was released on August 26, 2025. The novel follows two magicians, doctoral candidates, who must venture into hell to save their thesis advisor in order to receive letters of recommendation.

                • Cover of The Great Divorce
                  The Great Divorce

                  C. S. Lewis · standalone novel · 1945

                  similar byfantasyafterlife & underworld

                  The Great Divorce is a novel by the British author C. S. Lewis, published in 1945, based on a theological dream vision of his in which he reflects on the Christian conceptions of Heaven and Hell.

                • ST
                  Singapore Three

                  series · 16 books · 1999

                  similar by+2 more

                • Cover of Narnia
                  Narnia

                  series · 26 books · 1950

                  part of Narnia Universe

                  similar byfantasy

                  The Chronicles of Narnia is a series of seven portal fantasy novels by British author C. S. Lewis. Illustrated by Pauline Baynes and originally published between 1950 and 1956, the series is set in the fictional realm of Narnia, a fantasy world of magic, mythical beasts, and talking animals. It narrates the adventures of various children who play central roles in the unfolding history of the Narnian world. Except in The Horse and His Boy, the protagonists are all children from the real world who are magically transported to Narnia, where they are sometimes called upon by the lion Aslan to protect Narnia from evil. The books span the entire history of Narnia, from its creation in The Magician's Nephew to its eventual destruction in The Last Battle.

                • Cover of The Taker / Immortal
                  The Taker / Immortal

                  series · 5 books · 2011

                  similar by+2 more

                  Alma Katsu's The Taker opens the Immortal trilogy (plus a linked prequel novella) when a young doctor named Luke meets a woman who reveals she is immortal, and hears how she was abandoned by a lover two centuries earlier and made eternal by a centuries-old Hungarian count who abducted her. The dark historical fantasy continues across The Reckoning and The Descent, with The Devil's Scribe serving as a prequel novella.

                • Cover of The Cronus Chronicles
                  The Cronus Chronicles

                  series · 3 books · 2006

                  similar byfantasy+1 more

                • Cover of Samuel Johnson
                  Samuel Johnson

                  series · 3 books · 2009

                  similar byfantasy+1 more

                  John Connolly's Samuel Johnson trilogy follows an ordinary boy and his dachshund, Boswell, who accidentally open a portal to Hell in his English hometown and end up as the unlikely last line of defense against the demons who pour through, beginning with The Gates. The comic horror trilogy continues through Hell's Bells and The Creeps.

                • Cover of Angels Unlimited
                  Angels Unlimited

                  series · 12 books · 2001

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                  Angels Unlimited is the title of a series of novels written for teenagers by the British author Annie Dalton. The protagonist is Melanie Beeby, who died on the day after her thirteenth birthday and soon found herself at the Angel Academy in heaven. As of July 2013, there are twelve novels, three omnibus books, and now twelve updated and revised ebooks. The overall title of the series has also been changed to Angel Academy.

                • Cover of To Reign in Hell
                  To Reign in Hell

                  Steven Brust · standalone novel · 1984

                  similar byfantasyafterlife & underworld

                  To Reign in Hell is a 1984 fantasy novel by American writer Steven Brust. It deals with the revolt of angels in Heaven from a point of view that casts Satan as a sympathetic protagonist. The novel appears to be heavily influenced by John Milton's Paradise Lost.

                • Cover of Halo (Alexandra Adornetto)
                  Halo (Alexandra Adornetto)

                  series · 3 books · 2010

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                  Alexandra Adornetto's Halo trilogy follows three angels sent to a small American town to counter a rising darkness, centered on Bethany, the youngest of them, who falls in love with a mortal boy despite the assignment's rules. Hades and Heaven escalate the conflict between her human attachments and her angelic duties. The series belongs to the wave of angel-themed YA romance that followed the mid-2000s vampire boom.

                • Cover of Ferryman
                  Ferryman

                  series · 3 books · 2013

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                • Cover of Summerland
                  Summerland

                  Hannu Rajaniemi · standalone novel · 2018

                  similar byafterlife & underworld+1 more

                  "How do you catch a spy who's already dead?" Loss is a thing of the past. Murder is obsolete. Death is just the beginning. In 1938, death is no longer feared but exploited. Since the discovery of the afterlife, the British Empire has extended its reach into Summerland, a metropolis for the recently deceased. Yet Britain isn't the only contender for power in this life and the next. The Soviets have spies in Summerland, and the technology to build their own god. When SIS agent Rachel White gets a lead on one of the Soviet moles, blowing the whistle puts her hard-earned career at risk. The spy has friends in high places, and she will have to go rogue to bring him in.