Loreful
HomeDiscover
Search series, authors…⌘K
Loreful

Reading orders for SF/F series and shared universes — with your place kept in every one.

Explore

UniversesSeriesWorksAuthorsAtlas

Help

FAQAboutSite map

Account & legal

Sign inCreate accountPrivacyTerms

Data

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 Dark Flame

anchored on:fantasyparanormalimmortalitycontemporaryyoung adultpsychic powers+3 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 Watersong
                  Watersong

                  series · 5 books · 2012

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryemotionalparanormalfantasyyoung adult+2 more

                  The Watersong series by the bestselling young adult fantasy paranormal author Amanda Hocking consists of four books: Wake, Lullaby, Tidal and Elegy. Hocking, who previously had success as a self-published author, signed a book deal with St. Martin’s Press worth $2 million.

                • IU
                  Immortals Universe (Alyson Noël)

                  series · 10 books · 2009

                  similar byemotionalcontemporaryparanormalfantasyimmortalityyoung adult+2 more

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

                  series · 3 books · 2010

                  similar byemotionalcontemporaryour worldfantasyyoung adultparanormal+1 more

                  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 The Radleys
                  The Radleys

                  Matt Haig · standalone novel · 2010

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryfantasyparanormalyoung adult+1 more

                  The Radleys is a paranormal fantasy novel for young adults by Matt Haig, published 1 July 2010 by Canongate Books.

                • Cover of The Vampire Diaries
                  The Vampire Diaries

                  series · 13 books · 1991

                  part of The Vampire Diaries Universe

                  similar byemotionalcontemporaryparanormalyoung adult+3 more

                  The Vampire Diaries is a young adult vampire fiction series of novels created by American author L. J. Smith. The story centers on Elena Gilbert, a young human, and her life.

                • Cover of Connected (Kat Stiles)
                  Connected (Kat Stiles)

                  series · 2 books · 2015

                  similar byemotionalour worldcontemporaryparanormaltensepsychic powersyoung adult+1 more

                • Cover of Invisibility
                  Invisibility

                  David Levithan & Andrea Cremer · standalone novel · 2013

                  similar byemotionalour worldcontemporaryparanormalcursesyoung adult+2 more

                  To break his curse of invisibility, a boy is helped by a girl, who is the only one who can see him.

                • Cover of Fallen
                  Fallen

                  series · 7 books · 2009

                  similar byemotionalour worldcontemporaryfantasyyoung adult

                  Lauren Kate's Fallen opens with Luce Price, sent to a reform school in Savannah after a fire she can't explain, where she meets Daniel, a boy she is certain she has met before. The series follows Luce's growing entanglement with fallen angels and a curse of repeated lifetimes across several sequels running through 2015.

                • Cover of Sunshine
                  Sunshine

                  Robin McKinley · standalone novel · 2003

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryfantasyparanormaltense+1 more

                  From the front flap of the Berkley HB first edition: "There are places in the world where darkness rules, where it's unwise to walk. Sunshine knew that. But there hadn't been any trouble out at the lake for years, and she needed a place to be alone for a while. Unfortunately, she wasn't alone. She never heard them coming. Of course you don't, when they're vampires. They took her clothes and sneakers. They dressed her in a long red gown. And they shackled her to the wall of an abandoned mansion - within easy reach of a figure stirring in the moonlight. She knows that he is a vampire. She knows that she's to be his dinner, and that when he is finished with her, she will be dead. Yet, as dawn breaks, she finds that he has not attempted to harm her. And now it is he who needs her to help him survive the day..."

                • Cover of Embrace / The Violet Eden Chapters
                  Embrace / The Violet Eden Chapters

                  series · 5 books · 2010

                  similar byemotionalour worldcontemporaryfantasytenseyoung adult

                • Cover of Old Magic
                  Old Magic

                  Marianne Curley · standalone novel · 2000

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryfantasypsychic powersyoung adult+1 more

                  Kate is at a loss. She meets a boy with curious powers and a bizarre history - but he thinks he is very ordinary. How can she convince him that he has a gift, a gift that he must use to unravel mysteries that have hung over his family for generations? And even if she does persuade him, will his talents prove powerful enough to overcome what lies ahead?

                • Cover of Hero
                  Hero

                  Perry Moore · standalone novel · 2007

                  similar byemotionalour worldcontemporaryfantasytenseyoung adult

                  Hero is a 2007 Lambda-winning novel, and the only novel by film producer and novelist Perry Moore. The fantasy novel is about a teenage superhero, Thom Creed, who must deal with his ex-superhero father's disgrace, his own sexuality, and a murderer stalking the world's heroes.

                • Cover of The Dark Elements
                  The Dark Elements

                  series · 4 books · 2013

                  similar byemotionalour worldcontemporaryfantasyyoung adult+1 more

                • Cover of Meridian (Amber Kizer)
                  Meridian (Amber Kizer)

                  series · 3 books · 2009

                  similar byemotionalour worldcontemporaryparanormalfantasyyoung adult

                • Cover of Every Day
                  Every Day

                  series · 3 books · 2012

                  similar byemotionalour worldcontemporaryfantasyyoung adult

                  David Levithan's Every Day follows A, a consciousness with no fixed body who wakes each morning inside a different person's life, and who falls for a girl named Rhiannon despite the impossibility of ever staying in one body to be with her. The story continues from other perspectives in Another Day and, years later, Someday.

                • Cover of The Last Vampire (Christopher Pike)
                  The Last Vampire (Christopher Pike)

                  series · 9 books · 1994

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryparanormalyoung adult+3 more

                  The Last Vampire series consists of books written by Christopher Pike and chronicles the life of Sita, a 5,000-year-old vampire.

                • Cover of Sleep No More
                  Sleep No More

                  Aprilynne Pike · standalone novel · 2014

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryfantasyparanormaltensepsychic powersyoung adult

                  "Charlotte is a sixteen-year-old Oracle who is not supposed to interfere with her visions of the future, but when she foresees a classmate's murder, she realizes she must break the rules to stop the killer"-- Charlotte is a 16-yr-old Oracle who is not supposed to interfere with her visions of the future, but when she foresees a classmate's murder, she realizes she must break the rules to stop the killer. The plot contains profanity and graphic violence.

                • Cover of Fluke
                  Fluke

                  James Herbert · standalone novel · 1977

                  similar byemotionalour worldcontemporaryfantasy+1 more

                  A dog named Fluke is barely more than a puppy when fragments of a life that isn't his own surface in his mind -- memories of a wife, a daughter, a job, an entire human existence he can't reconcile with the body he's now living in. Driven by those memories, Fluke sets out to find the family he half-remembers, aided by Rumbo, another dog going through the same impossible transformation. James Herbert follows the journey from a dog's-eye view of the world, using Fluke's confusion and determination to ask what, if anything, survives of a person after death. A standalone novel by James Herbert, better known for straightforward horror.

                • Cover of Miss Meteor
                  Miss Meteor

                  Anna-Marie McLemore & Tehlor Kay Mejia · standalone novel · 2020

                  similar byemotionalour worldcontemporaryfantasyyoung adultfriendship

                  Miss Meteor is a 2020 young adult fantasy novel by Tehlor Kay Mejia and Anna-Marie McLemore.

                • VA
                  Vampire Academy Universe

                  series · 19 books · 2007

                  similar bycontemporaryfantasyyoung adult+3 more

                • Cover of The Time Keeper
                  The Time Keeper

                  Mitch Albom · standalone novel · 2012

                  similar byemotionalour worldcontemporaryfantasyimmortality

                  The Time Keeper--a compelling fable about the first man on earth to count the hours. The man who became Father Time. In Mitch Albom's newest work of fiction, the inventor of the world's first clock is punished for trying to measure God's greatest gift. He is banished to a cave for centuries and forced to listen to the voices of all who come after him seeking more days, more years. Eventually, with his soul nearly broken, Father Time is granted his freedom, along with a magical hourglass and a mission: a chance to redeem himself by teaching two earthly people the true meaning of time. He returns to our world--now dominated by the hour-counting he so innocently began--and commences a journey with two unlikely partners: one a teenage girl who is about to give up on life, the other a wealthy old businessman who wants to live forever. To save himself, he must save them both. And stop the world to do so.

                • Cover of The Curse Workers
                  The Curse Workers

                  series · 3 books · 2010

                  similar bycontemporaryour worldfantasytenseyoung adultcurses+1 more

                  Holly Black's Curse Workers trilogy is set in an alternate America where 'curse work' — magic that harms or transforms through touch — is illegal, enforced through gloves and Prohibition-era-style crime families. It follows Cassel Sharpe, the only non-worker in a family of con artists and workers, as he tries to stay out of his family's schemes despite his own hidden connection to their world. The series runs from White Cat through two further novels.

                • Cover of Unearthly
                  Unearthly

                  series · 4 books · 2011

                  similar byemotionalcontemporaryour worldyoung adultfantasy+1 more

                • Cover of Immortal Beloved
                  Immortal Beloved

                  series · 3 books · 2010

                  similar byemotionalcontemporaryour worldimmortalityfantasy+1 more

                  Cate Tiernan's Immortal Beloved follows Nastasya, an immortal who has restarted her life more times than she can count and is tired of her aimless party-girl existence. She retreats to River's Edge, a refuge for wayward immortals, where she begins to confront long-buried secrets about herself and those around her. The story continues across Darkness Falls and Eternally Yours.