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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 Custer's Ghost

anchored on:our worldnorth america19th centuryhistorical fantasyghost storiesmystery & detective+5 more

but

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 in which extraterrestrial beings are central — as characters, cultures, or the object of the plot.
  • 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 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 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.
  • 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 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 Airman
                  Airman

                  Eoin Colfer · standalone novel · 2008

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                  Airman, by Eoin Colfer, is a best-selling historical adventure novel set in the 19th century. It was released in the UK, Ireland and US in January 2008. The novel was shortlisted for the 2009 Carnegie Medal.

                • Cover of The Haunted Hotel
                  The Haunted Hotel

                  Wilkie Collins · standalone novel · 1878

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                  Lord Montbarry breaks off his engagement to Agnes Lockwood and marries the Countess Narona, with whom he lives in a Venetian palace. When he dies, Agnes Lockwood becomes suspicious of the circumstances, and goes to Venice with other family members to investigate. Staying in Montbarry's former residence, they experience a haunting.

                • Cover of The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril
                  The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril

                  Paul Malmont · standalone novel · 2006

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                  From the flaps of the S&S first edition: "The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril casts the rivalry between two of pulp fiction's most legendary writers into its own amazing saga, which bursts from the pages with blood, cruelty, fear, mystery, vengeance, courageous heroes, evil villains, dames in distress, secret identities and disguises, global schemes, hideous deaths, beautiful psychics, deadly superweapons, cliffhanging escapes, and other outrageous pulp lies that just might be completely Ravaged by the devastation of the Great Depression, America turned to the pulp novels for relief, for hope, for heroes. And the pulps delivered in spades. The science fiction story, the hard-boiled detective, and the superhero were all born on these cheap yellow pages, found behind blood-drenched covers dripping with sex and violence. Return now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, enter at your own risk into the dark and dank lair known as the White Horse Tavern, and meet Walter Gibson, the mind behind The Shadow, and Lester Dent, creator of Doc Savage, as they challenge one another to discover what is real and what is pulp. For Gibson, writing a new novel about The Shadow every month is a way to evade his own dark past. For his rival, Dent, creating Doc Savage is an attempt to bring the light of better days to desperate millions. In their lives and loves they are as different from one another as the heroes they've created. But now the hideous murder of the fringe pulp writer H. P. Lovecraft - victim of a mysterious death that literally makes the skin crawl - will set these two men on a collision course with each other, and face to face with a terrifying and very real evil that could have sprung from the pages of their own pulps. From the palaces and battlefields of warlord-plagued China to the seedy waterfronts of Providence, Rhode Island; from frozen seas and cursed islands to the labyrinthine tunnels and secret temples of New York's Chinatown, Dent and Gibson will find themselves in a dangerous race to stop a madman destined to create a new empire of pure evil. Together with the young pulp writer L. Ron Hubbard, a mysterious stranger, and a sexy psychic with a chicken, they will finally step out from behind their creations to take part in a heroic journey far greater than any story they have imagined. Their quest will force Gibson to look beyond the shadows and discover the true evil that lurks in the hearts of men, while Dent will learn that the nature of a true hero is not found in a fictional superman, but in the faith of the woman who challenges death itself to love him. The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril is a swashbuckling, breathtaking romantic epic of magic and love, marriage and fatherhood, ambition and loss, and writers who never forget their deadlines even when facing the end of the world. In its pages is a tale that deftly weaves the lives of its real-life characters into a lie of outrageous proportions that just may tell the truth, but is always thrillingly, unapologetically pulp."

                • Cover of Fata Morgana
                  Fata Morgana

                  William Kotzwinkle · standalone novel · 1977

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                  From the flaps of the Knopf first edition: "In Fata Morgana a celebrated novelist turns conjurer to bring us a supremely theatrical magic show - a rich exotic entertainment of crime, treble-trickery, and legerdermain, with Europe as its stage and the golden leaders of the Uppercrust and the Underworld as its players. The time and place are Paris, 1861 - the extravagant capital of Louis Napoleon and his Empress Eugenie, the gaudy, blatant public arena of Great Whores and fabulous charlatans; the treacherous private labyrinth of Police Inspector Paul Picard and the human prey he stalks. Picard is a hunter of the purest instincts, with an appetite for the ladies, a taste for lemon tarts, and a policeman's nose for hard realities. As the book opens he is on his way to the Opera, for music and murder: among the guests is as elegant a killer as ever sliced his way through Parisian high society, and on his arm is the young woman he means to decapitate tonight. A strange encounter with them precipitates Picard into a new and (apparently) trivial assignment - a case that is fated to disrupt and then transform, irrevocably, his life. At first it seems routine: a man - Ric Lazare - has recently arrived in Paris and in a short time has captured the jaded attention and the favors of the entire city. His aura of opulence, his bewitching wife, Rene, and, above all, his unearthly fortune-telling machine have won him entree to the salons (and the bank vaults) of the most dazzling leaders of society, including, it is whispered, the Emperor himself. But, who - and what - is Lazare? Is he a crook? A master of illusions? A real magician? Or - more terrible - a reincarnation from an Older World? To find the answer, Picard must follow the thread of the man's past. His quest takes him from Paris to Vienna, Nuremberg, Budapest, and on to the dark, menacing valleys and steppes of eastern Hungary, uncovering a trail of deceit and violent death: a fabled toy maker driven to destroy himself and a lifetime's priceless creations... a man ruthlessly killed over a dice game... a beautiful woman purchased at auction, then stolen away... the sudden death of a priest. Beset by intimations of his own mortality, by a sense of inexplicable entrapment in a malign world of mechanical and deadly playthings, by a slowly suffocating conviction that he is undertaking a journey he has made before, Picard, caught up in the quickening pace, returns to Paris - and to a terrifying confrontation with his quarry and his own destiny."

                • Cover of The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque
                  The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque

                  Jeffrey Ford · standalone novel · 2002

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                  "The toast of 1893 New York society, the portraitist Piero Piambo has his pick of choice assignments. Acclaimed by his peers and his "betters," he is a fixture in the city's most opulent salons, yet he fears he has sold his soul to arrive there. But then comes a commission unlike any other - one that will test Piambo's talents, his will .. and his sanity.". "The client is a Mrs. Charbuque, and the offer she makes to the artist is as bizarre and intriguing as it is financially rewarding. Piambo must paint the lady's portrait, and for the service he may name any price. However, though he may question her at length on any topic, he must never look upon his subject. And if the painting ends up a true likeness, his payment will be doubled.". "With sketchbook in hand and his "model" hidden behind an elegant screen, the artist begins his haunting descent into her life and mind. Carried by her words through a strange childhood in a world of ice - where she aided an obsessed, perhaps murderous, father in his study of the divine language of snowflakes - and across a history marked by fame and despair, desire and rage, phantasm and myth, Piambo is alternately seduced and repulsed by the story she has to tell. Yet each session leaves him more determined than ever to unwrap the enigma that is Mrs. Charbuque.". "But while he struggles to capture in oils the face of a woman he has never seen, a series of horrific and inexplicable deaths rocks the outside city. On street corners, in the alleys off the bustling shopping areas, and between the crumbling tenements, anonymous women are dying, their lifeblood flowing freely like tears from their eyes. And the deeper Piambo is drawn into Mrs. Charbuque's world, the more he begins to suspect that these terrible events, his impossible task, and his odd "benefactress" are somehow intimately connected."--BOOK JACKET.

                • Cover of The Seer of Shadows
                  The Seer of Shadows

                  Avi · standalone novel · 2008

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                  In New York City in 1872, fourteen-year-old Horace, a photographer's apprentice, becomes entangled in a plot to create fraudulent spirit photographs, but when Horace accidentally frees the real ghost of a dead girl bent on revenge, his life takes a frightening turn.

                • Cover of Picture the Dead
                  Picture the Dead

                  Adele Griffin & Lisa Brown · standalone novel · 2010

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                  After Jennie Lovell's fiance , Will, is killed during the Civil War, she forms an alliance with a spirit photographer and uses her ability to talk to the dead to investigate the secrets Will was hiding and how he really died.

                • Cover of Whispers from the Dead
                  Whispers from the Dead

                  Joan Lowery Nixon · standalone novel · 1989

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                  "Only Sarah senses the horror. The minute she steps through the door of her family's new home, she feels a smothering cold mist and hears the echo of a scream and a heartbreaking whisper in Spanish: "Help me!" Sarah feels compelled to find out who is trying to reach her. But can she uncover the mysteries of the past before terror strikes again?" — quoted from the back cover of the Laurel-Leaf paperback edition.

                • Cover of The Bandit of Hell's Bend
                  The Bandit of Hell's Bend

                  Edgar Rice Burroughs · standalone novel · 1925

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                  The Bandit of Hell's Bend is a Western fiction novel by American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, published in serial form in the Argosy All-Story Weekly in September and October 1924. The book version was first published by A. C. McClurg on June 4, 1925.

                • Cover of List of 7
                  List of 7

                  series · 2 books · 1993

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                • Cover of Ghost Story
                  Ghost Story

                  Peter Straub · standalone novel · 1979

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                  Four prominent citizens of a small town in upstate New York who share guilt over something that happened in their youth are revisited late in life by a destructive evil force which uses their guilt as an opportunity to destroy them as well as the entire town.

                • Cover of The Thicket
                  The Thicket

                  Joe R. Lansdale · standalone novel · 2013

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                  The Thicket is a mystery/suspense novel written by American author Joe R. Lansdale. It was released by Mulholland Books on September 10, 2013. The title refers to Big Thicket, a heavily forested area in Southeast Texas. This book was selected by the Library Journal as one of the best historical fiction books of 2013. The trade paperback was issued on 10/14/14 by Mulholland Books.

                • Cover of Henry Sturges
                  Henry Sturges

                  series · 2 books · 2010

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                • Cover of Krewe of Hunters - The Night Books
                  Krewe of Hunters - The Night Books

                  series · 3 books · 2013

                  part of Krewe of Hunters

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                • Cover of Karen Memory
                  Karen Memory

                  series · 4 books · 2014

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                • Cover of Floating Staircase
                  Floating Staircase

                  Ronald Malfi · standalone novel · 2010

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                  Floating Staircase is a ghost story/mystery novel by American writer Ronald Malfi. It was published in 2011 by Medallion Press, with a limited edition hardcover collectors edition from Thunderstorm Books, which contained an original author's "Afterward" not in the paperback novel. The novel was nominated by the Horror Writers Association for a Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel, and it won a Gold IPPY Award for best horror novel of 2011.

                • Cover of Allan Quatermain
                  Allan Quatermain

                  series · 25 books · 1885

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                  Allan Quatermain is the protagonist of H. Rider Haggard's 1885 novel King Solomon's Mines, its one sequel Allan Quatermain (1887), twelve prequel novels and four prequel short stories, totalling eighteen works. An English professional big game hunter and adventurer, in film and television he has been portrayed by Richard Chamberlain, Sean Connery, Cedric Hardwicke, Patrick Swayze and Stewart Granger among others.

                • Cover of The War Chief
                  The War Chief

                  series · 3 books · 1927

                  completed

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                • Cover of Dodger
                  Dodger

                  Terry Pratchett · standalone novel · 2012

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                  Dodger is a novel written by Terry Pratchett, set in early Victorian London, and inspired by Charles Dickens's character the Artful Dodger. The book was released on 13 September 2012 in the UK.

                • Cover of The Man Who Was Poe
                  The Man Who Was Poe

                  Avi · standalone novel · 1989

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                  In Providence, R.I., in 1848, Edgar Allan Poe reluctantly investigates the problems of eleven-year-old Edmund, whose family has mysteriously disappeared and whose story suggests a new Poe tale with a ghastly final twist.

                • Cover of The House of the Seven Gables
                  The House of the Seven Gables

                  Nathaniel Hawthorne · standalone novel · 1851

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                  The House of the Seven Gables: A Romance is a Gothic novel written beginning in mid-1850 by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne and published in April 1851 by Ticknor and Fields of Boston. The novel follows a New England family and their ancestral home. In the book, Hawthorne explores themes of guilt, retribution, and atonement, and colors the tale with suggestions of the supernatural and witchcraft. The setting for the book was inspired by the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion, a gabled house in Salem, Massachusetts, belonging to Hawthorne's cousin Susanna Ingersoll, as well as ancestors of Hawthorne who had played a part in the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. The book was well received upon publication and has been adapted several times to film and television.

                • Cover of The Shining Girls
                  The Shining Girls

                  Lauren Beukes · standalone novel · 2013

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                  The Shining Girls is a science fiction thriller novel by South African author Lauren Beukes. The book centers on a mysterious drifter who murders the titular "shining girls" and one victim's attempts to expose him.

                • Cover of The Door Into Summer
                  The Door Into Summer

                  Robert A. Heinlein · standalone novel · 1957

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                  From the first page of the Signet 6th printing: "An electronics engineer invents a wizard robot... only to find himself shanghaied by his ruthless partner and his gold-digging fiancee. The crafty pair forces him to submit to the "long sleep" - suspended animation for thirty years. But when he wakes up in the year 2000 A.D. the inventor makes a startling discovery. He learns that it is possible now to twist time forwards or backwards. And so he returns to the past bent on a mission... of revenge."

                • Cover of The Waterworks
                  The Waterworks

                  E. L. Doctorow · standalone novel · 1994

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                  The Waterworks (1994) is a book by American writer E. L. Doctorow. It was his eighth published novel.