anchored on:zombie horrorearly 20th centuryeurope
series4 books1933
completed
similar bytenseearly 20th century+3 more
The Duke de Richleau novels follow Dennis Wheatley's aristocratic adventurer and occultist across four decades of twentieth-century intrigue, moving from a 1930s rescue thriller in The Forbidden Territory into Satanist set-pieces such as The Devil Rides Out and Strange Conflict, then a later case in Gateway to Hell. Wheatley wrote the books out of order over nearly forty years, but their internal chronology matches the order they were published in.
H. G. Wellsstandalone novel1908
similar byearly 20th centurywareuropetense+1 more
The War in the Air: And Particularly How Mr. Bert Smallways Fared While It Lasted is a military science fiction novel written by H. G. Wells and published in 1908.
series6 books1982
similar byeuropetense+2 more
Connie Willis's Oxford Time Travel novels are set at a near-future Oxford University where historians travel into the past as observers, constrained by a version of history that resists any change large enough to alter real events. Doomsday Book sends a medieval historian to what should be 1320 but turns out to be the Black Death year of 1348, intercut with a present-day epidemic at Oxford; To Say Nothing of the Dog returns to the same time-travel program for a lighter, Victorian-set story with different characters. The two novels share their setting and rules rather than a directly continuing plot.
Richard Mathesonstandalone novel1960
similar byearly 20th centurywareuropedarkwar & military+1 more
The Beardless Warriors is a 1960 World War II novel by American writer Richard Matheson. It was based on his experiences as a young infantryman in the 87th Division in France and Germany.
series6 books2009
similar byearly 20th centurywareuropetensewar & military+1 more
The War That Came Early is a six-novel series by Harry Turtledove depicting an alternate history of World War II. As is typical of Turtledove's alternate histories, the narrative follows a large cast of both fictional and historical characters.
series8 books1989
similar byeuropetenseearly 20th centuryhorror+2 more
Robert R. McCammon's Michael Gallatin is a British intelligence agent working behind German lines in the Second World War who is secretly a werewolf, introduced in The Wolf's Hour on a mission to stop a Nazi superweapon. McCammon returned to the character decades later in The Hunter from the Woods, a set of interlinked stories filling in the years around the first book.
series8 books1988
similar by+5 more
The James Asher Chronicles opens with Those Who Hunt the Night, in which the vampire Don Simon Ysidro coerces a former British spy, Oxford professor James Asher, into finding out who is killing London's vampires in their sleep - forcing Asher and his physician wife Lydia into an uneasy alliance with the undead. Barbara Hambly's series follows the trio across eight books and three decades of settings as new supernatural and human threats draw Asher back into Ysidro's world.
series14 books1996
part of World of Ice and Fire
similar bywardark+1 more
A Song of Ice and Fire is a series of high fantasy novels by the American author George R. R. Martin. Martin began writing the first volume, A Game of Thrones, in 1991, and published it in 1996. Martin, who originally envisioned the series as a trilogy, has released five out of seven planned volumes. The most recent entry in the series, A Dance with Dragons, was published in 2011. Since then, Martin has been working on the sixth novel, titled The Winds of Winter. A seventh novel, A Dream of Spring, is planned to follow.
series20 books1999
part of Malazan
similar bywardark+2 more
The Malazan Book of the Fallen is a series of epic fantasy novels written by the Canadian author Steven Erikson. The series, published by Bantam Books in the U.K. and Tor Books in the U.S., consists of ten volumes, beginning with Gardens of the Moon (1999) and concluding with The Crippled God (2011). Erikson's series presents the narratives of a large cast of characters spanning thousands of years across multiple continents.
universe65 books1898
Start hereThe War of the Worlds · Start here
similar by+2 more
No one would have believed, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely from the timeless worlds of space. And then the cylinders fell. H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds opens in the quiet of the Surrey commons, where a falling star proves to be the first Martian craft — and from the pit rise the towering tripods, the Heat-Ray, the choking Black Smoke and the creeping red weed, wielded by minds that regard mankind much as we regard the creatures we boil for supper. This is invasion rendered as natural disaster: cold, methodical, and vast beyond argument. Wells' 1898 novel is the seed; everything else grows from that Martian soil. The catalogue gathers direct sequels and continuations alongside a wide field of other hands. In War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches the invasion is retold across the whole planet through the eyes of Twain, Verne, Tolstoy, Lowell and Kipling; in the Manly Wade and Wade Wellman crossover, Sherlock Holmes, Watson and Professor Challenger take the field against the machines; and Scott Washburn's Great Martian War stretches the fighting into a decades-long alternate history of steam, artillery and grinding attrition. It is a loose shared world — no single decreed sequence, many voices answering one calamity. What sets this world apart is its refusal of heroics: the invaders fall not to generals but to the smallest things of Earth, humbling and indifferent. Begin, always, with Wells' original novel — it is short, and it is the ground every later book stands upon. From there follow your appetite: Global Dispatches for the panorama, the Holmes campaign for adventure, Washburn for the long war.
series16 books2015
similar byeuropedarkearly 20th century+2 more
The House of Shattered Wings opens Aliette de Bodard's Dominion of the Fallen in a Paris devastated by a magical war between rival Houses of fallen angels, its streets and ruins still haunted by the fighting. The series follows uneasy alliances within House Silverspires as its members contend with old secrets and Annamese magic traditions colliding with European angelic power politics. It continues across further novels and a number of shorter linked stories.
universe36 books1999
Start hereMalazan Book of the Fallen · Start here
similar bywardark+1 more
Pity the historian who tries to map this world; pity more the god who thinks he rules it. The Malazan Empire marches across continents on the boots of its common soldiers, and above them move Ascendants — mortals grown into something like gods, and gods worn thin as old coin. Magic is drawn from Warrens, roads of power threaded through reality; the dead keep their grudges; and every empire, however vast, is a wager against time. This is epic fantasy told from the mud, where a sapper cracking a joke weighs as much as an immortal settling a feud older than the human race. The world began as a tabletop campaign two friends built in the 1980s, and it still moves by two hands. Steven Erikson's ten-volume Malazan Book of the Fallen is the spine — Gardens of the Moon, Deadhouse Gates, Memories of Ice, on through The Crippled God — each book a near-standalone campaign that only later reveals how it locks together. Ian C. Esslemont walks the same years from a different vantage in his Novels of the Malazan Empire (Night of Knives, Return of the Crimson Guard onward). Around them stand the prequels: Erikson's Kharkanas Trilogy, archaic and elegiac, chronicling a doomed elder people, and Esslemont's brisker Path to Ascendancy, following two adventurers before they became legends. Erikson's Witness sequence carries the tale forward, and novellas of the genial necromancers Bauchelain and Korbal Broach supply the gallows comedy. Nothing is explained to you; comprehension is earned, and that is the pleasure. The themes run deep — compassion set against cruelty, the toll empires charge, civilizations that fall and are mourned. Begin where the saga does, with Erikson's Gardens of the Moon, and read the ten in publication order; the prequels are for the already-initiated. Trust that confusion is the price of entry.
series26 books1982
completed
similar byundeaddarktensehorror
Brian Lumley's Necroscope opens an eighteen-book horror saga (1982-2017) centered on Harry Keogh, a man who can speak with the dead. Harry turns that gift against Thibor Ferenczy, a vampire buried since the Middle Ages, and against Ferenczy's agent Boris Dragosani, a Soviet spy who has learned to tear secrets from corpses in pursuit of world domination. Later volumes follow Harry's descendants and successors through further wars against the vampiric Wamphyri, across sequel trilogies and story collections.
Thomas Pynchonstandalone novel1973
similar byearly 20th centurywareuropedark
Gravity's Rainbow is a 1973 postmodern novel by Thomas Pynchon. The narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II and centers on the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military. In particular, it features the quest undertaken by several characters to uncover the secret of a mysterious device, the Schwarzgerät, which is slated to be installed in a rocket with the serial number "00000".
Guy Endorestandalone novel1933
similar bywareuropedarktensehorror
The Werewolf of Paris (1933) is a Gothic horror novel by American writer Guy Endore. The novel follows Bertrand Caillet, the eponymous werewolf, throughout the tumultuous events of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune of 1870–71. Some literature experts have compared this book with Dracula by Bram Stoker and they have identified it as the Dracula of werewolf fiction.