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 Sun

anchored on:contemporaryurban fantasy

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 October Daye
                  October Daye

                  series · 42 books · 2009

                  similar byfaeurban fantasycontemporary+2 more

                  October Daye is a New York Times Best Selling series of urban fantasy novels by American author Seanan McGuire. They follow October "Toby" Daye, a half-fae changeling and reluctant hero of the realm.

                • Cover of Wicked Lovely
                  Wicked Lovely

                  series · 17 books · 2007

                  similar byfaeurban fantasyour worldcontemporaryyoung adult+1 more

                  Melissa Marr's Wicked Lovely opens a YA urban-fantasy series about Aislinn, a teenage girl who has always been able to see faeries and has spent her life following her grandmother's rules to avoid their notice - until Keenan, the Summer King, decides she is meant to be his queen. Later books widen out to other faerie courts and other narrators drawn into the same modern-day faerie politics layered invisibly over ordinary life. It helped kick off the mid-2000s wave of YA faerie romance.

                • Cover of Modern Tale of Faerie
                  Modern Tale of Faerie

                  series · 4 books · 2002

                  similar byfaeurban fantasyour worldcontemporaryyoung adult+1 more

                  Tithe opens Holly Black's Modern Faerie Tales with Kaye Fierch, a teenage drifter who discovers she's a changeling with real faerie blood after returning to her childhood home on the Jersey Shore, and gets pulled into the political violence of the local faerie courts. The trilogy, continuing through Valiant and Ironside, keeps its "suburban fantasy" grounded in ordinary New Jersey settings rather than a storybook otherworld.

                • Cover of War for the Oaks
                  War for the Oaks

                  series · 2 books · 1987

                  similar byfaeurban fantasycontemporary+2 more

                  Emma Bull's 1987 urban fantasy debut follows Minneapolis rock singer Eddi McCandry after a faerie noble conscripts her into the ancient war between the Seelie and Unseelie Courts, forcing her to keep her band and her life together while fighting a battle she never asked for in her own city. Widely credited with helping found the urban fantasy genre, it won the Locus Award for Best First Novel.

                • Cover of Meredith Gentry
                  Meredith Gentry

                  series · 10 books · 2000

                  similar byfaeurban fantasyour worldcontemporary+1 more

                  The Merry Gentry series is a series of urban fantasy novels by New York Times bestselling author Laurell K. Hamilton. The series is told through the lens of the titular character Meredith "Merry" Gentry, a faerie princess turned private investigator in a world where faeries exist and are known to the general public. The first book in the series, A Kiss of Shadows, was released by Del Rey on October 3, 2000. There are currently nine books in the series.

                • Cover of The Hollows
                  The Hollows

                  series · 39 books · 2004

                  similar byurban fantasycontemporary+1 more

                  The Hollows is a series of urban fantasy novels by Kim Harrison, originally published by HarperCollins Publishers and by Ace Books since 2020. The series includes 18 novels, numerous novellas and short stories, two graphic novels, and one compendium resource; a 19th novel, Absolute Demon, is forthcoming in 2027.

                • Cover of Cainsville
                  Cainsville

                  series · 21 books · 2011

                  similar byurban fantasymysteriouscontemporary+1 more

                • Cover of Singer of Souls
                  Singer of Souls

                  series · 2 books · 2005

                  similar byfaeurban fantasycontemporary+3 more

                • Cover of Hollow Star Saga
                  Hollow Star Saga

                  series · 4 books · 2021

                  similar byurban fantasyour worldcontemporaryyoung adult

                • Cover of Echo
                  Echo

                  series · 3 books · 2015

                  similar byurban fantasycontemporaryyoung adult+3 more

                • Cover of Songs of Earth and Power
                  Songs of Earth and Power

                  series · 2 books · 1984

                  completed

                  similar byfaecontemporary+3 more

                  Greg Bear's two-book Songs of Earth and Power series opens with The Infinity Concerto, in which teenage Michael Perrin is drawn into the realm of the Sidhe — beings once said to have inspired Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan' — while searching for a mythic Song of Power. The sequel, The Serpent Mage, continues Michael's story in that world.

                • Cover of Wondrous Strange
                  Wondrous Strange

                  series · 3 books · 2009

                  similar byfaeurban fantasyour worldcontemporaryyoung adult+1 more

                • OG
                  Otherworld (Yasmine Galenorn)

                  series · 50 books · 2006

                  similar byurban fantasyour worldcontemporary+1 more

                • Cover of The Dresden Files
                  The Dresden Files

                  series · 56 books · 2000

                  similar byurban fantasycontemporary+1 more

                  The Dresden Files is an urban fantasy series written by American author Jim Butcher. The novels are narrated from the first-person perspective of Harry Dresden, a private detective and wizard, as he investigates supernatural disturbances in contemporary Chicago. The first entry, Storm Front, was published in 2000 by Roc Books.

                • Cover of Spellcrackers.com
                  Spellcrackers.com

                  series · 7 books · 2008

                  similar byurban fantasyour worldcontemporary+1 more

                • Cover of The Ironbridge Chronicles / The Iron Witch
                  The Ironbridge Chronicles / The Iron Witch

                  series · 3 books · 2011

                  similar byurban fantasycontemporaryyoung adult+2 more

                • Cover of Seven Black Diamonds
                  Seven Black Diamonds

                  series · 2 books · 2016

                  similar byfaeurban fantasycontemporaryyoung adult+2 more

                • Cover of Myrtlewood Mysteries
                  Myrtlewood Mysteries

                  series · 8 books · 2022

                  similar byurban fantasyour worldcontemporary+2 more

                • Cover of Bailey Morgan
                  Bailey Morgan

                  series · 2 books · 2007

                  similar byurban fantasyour worldcontemporaryyoung adult+1 more

                • Cover of The Last Hot Time
                  The Last Hot Time

                  John M. Ford · standalone novel · 2000

                  similar byfaeurban fantasymysteriousour worldcontemporarydark

                  From the front flap: When Danny Holman leaves the cornfields of Iowa for the bright lights of the City, he expects his life to change. He just can't guess who much and how fast. A violent incident on the road brings Danny the favor of a man known only as Mr. Patrise, who gives Danny a job, a home, and a new identity. The City is a different world from the one Danny (now called Doc) knew, and literally so. The long-vanished lands of the Elves have again opened doors into our reality. Humans cannot cross these thresholds, but the Elves can. Mr. Patrise is a power in the Levee, the shadowy, lawless region between the two worlds, where elf and human gangsters skirmish with sorcery and submachine guns and where anything can be sold, smuggled, or stolen. But the nature of that power--over his people, the City, and the unpredictable new forces of magic--is a mystery. The more Doc learns about the City and his responsibilities in it, the more he wonders if he's in over his head...

                • Cover of The War of the Flowers
                  The War of the Flowers

                  Tad Williams · standalone novel · 2002

                  similar byfaeurban fantasycontemporarydark+1 more

                  Robert Paul "Tad" Williams is an American fantasy and science fiction writer. He is the author of the multivolume Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series, Otherland series, Shadowmarch series, and The Bobby Dollar series, as well as the standalone novels Tailchaser's Song and The War of the Flowers. Most recently, Williams published The Last King of Osten Ard series, with its final novel The Navigator's Children being published in 2024. More than 17 million copies of Williams' works have been sold.

                • Cover of The Replacement
                  The Replacement

                  Brenna Yovanoff · standalone novel · 2010

                  similar byfaeurban fantasyour worldcontemporaryyoung adultdark

                  Mackie Doyle is not one of us. Though he lives in the small town of Gentry, he comes from a world of tunnels and black murky water, a world of living dead girls ruled by a little tattooed princess. He is a Replacement—left in the crib of a human baby sixteen years ago. Now, he's slowly dying in the human world. Mackie would give anything to live a normal life, play his bass, and find out more about an oddly intriguing girl named Tate. But when Tate's baby sister goes missing, Mackie is drawn into the underworld of Gentry, known as Mayhem. He must face the dark creatures of the Slag Heaps and find his rightful place, in our world—or theirs.

                • Cover of The Arcana Familia / Finn Fancy
                  The Arcana Familia / Finn Fancy

                  series · 3 books · 2015

                  similar byurban fantasyour worldcontemporary+2 more

                • Cover of The Iron Druid Chronicles
                  The Iron Druid Chronicles

                  series · 70 books · 2011

                  similar byurban fantasycontemporary+1 more

                  The Iron Druid Chronicles is a series of urban fantasy novels, novellas, novelettes and short stories, written by Kevin Hearne and published by Del Rey Books. All the books, including short stories, have recorded audiobooks narrated by Luke Daniels and Christopher Ragland