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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 Devil's Keep

anchored on:19th century

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 centered on vampires — blood-drinking undead — whether as predators, love interests, or protagonists.
  • Stories driven by a curse laid on a person, family, or place, and the struggle to live under it or break it.
  • 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 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 Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
                  Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)

                  series · 26 books · 1991

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                  Outlander is a series of historical fantasy novels by American author Diana Gabaldon. Gabaldon began the first volume of the series, Outlander, in the late 1980s; it was published in 1991. She has published nine out of a planned ten volumes. The ninth novel in the series, Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone, was released on November 23, 2021.

                • Cover of The Artifact Hunters
                  The Artifact Hunters

                  series · 8 books · 2013

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                • Cover of The Scarletti Curse
                  The Scarletti Curse

                  Christine Feehan · standalone novel · 2001

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                  The Beast Strange, twisted carvings and hideous gargoyles adorned the palazzo of the great Scarletti family. But a still more fearful secret lurked within its storm-tossed turrets. For every bride who entered its forbidding walls was doomed to leave in a casket. The Bride Mystical and unfettered, Nicoletta had no terror of ancient curses and no fear of marriage...until she looked into the dark, mesmerizing eyes of Don Scarletti. She had sworn no man would command her, had thought her gift of healing set her apart, but his was the right to choose a bride from among his people. And he had chosen her. The Bargain Compelled by duty, drawn by desire, she gave her body into his keeping, and prayed the powerful, tormented don would be her heart's destiny, and not her soul's demise.

                • Cover of Five Children Universe
                  Five Children Universe

                  series · 27 books · 1902

                  completed

                  Two separate modern continuations of E. Nesbit's Psammead stories were written decades apart by different authors: Helen Cresswell's The Return of the Psammead (1992) brings the wish-granting sand fairy back for a new set of children, while Kate Saunders's Five Children on the Western Front (2014) follows the now-grown Lamb and his siblings as the First World War arrives, in a more somber sequel to Nesbit's original trilogy. Neither book is by Nesbit herself, and the two have no direct connection to each other beyond both drawing on her creation. Later writers have kept returning to Nesbit's premise long after her own trilogy ended.

                • Cover of Silent Wings
                  Silent Wings

                  series · 3 books · 2018

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                • Cover of The Island of Dr. Moreau
                  The Island of Dr. Moreau

                  series · 12 books · 1896

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                  H. G. Wells's 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau follows a shipwrecked man stranded on a remote island where a reclusive scientist creates human-animal hybrids through vivisection, using the scenario to probe questions of cruelty, control, and what separates humanity from the beasts it experiments on. The premise has drawn later reimaginings gathered alongside it here, including Brian Aldiss's Moreau's Other Island and Silvia Moreno-Garcia's The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, each transplanting Wells's central idea into a new setting and voice. Taken together, the group traces one unsettling premise across more than a century of speculative fiction rather than forming a single ongoing story.

                • K
                  Kairos

                  series · 11 books · 1962

                  completed

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                  The Time Quintet is a science fantasy series of five young adult novels written by American author Madeleine L'Engle and made up of A Wrinkle in Time (1962), A Wind in the Door (1973), A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978), Many Waters (1986), and An Acceptable Time (1989).

                • Cover of Dangerous
                  Dangerous

                  Monica Burns · standalone novel · 2009

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                  "His love could be the death of her. When Constance Athelson, Viscountess Westbury, hides her face to attend the Black Widows Ball, she never expected to find erotic passion in a masked stranger's arms. The torrent of lust isn't enough to drown out her dubious "gift" for seeing visions and talking to the dead. Terrified of being found out, she secures a position cataloguing archaeological artifacts for the Earl of Wyndham—where she encounters a ghost begging her to break a curse plaguing his family. Before his mysterious lover disappeared, Lucien Blakemore was tempted to throw caution aside. Yet he knows one taste of love will unleash the curse that drove his father and brother to murder their wives. When he returns home empty handed and empty hearted, he's shocked to discover his new assistant is the goddess who fled into the night. But could her presence be part of a murderous plot to unearth the location of a secret Egyptian tomb? The answer—or his doom—lies behind the desire shining in his seductress's eyes." – from this book's product page on Samhain's website as of 2016-11-06.

                • Cover of Felix
                  Felix

                  series · 3 books · 1977

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                • Cover of The Chattan Curse
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                • Cover of The Romancist and Novelist's Library
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                • Cover of Gothic Love Stories
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                • Cover of Haunted Hearts Legacy
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                • 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 Secret Swan
                  The Secret Swan

                  Shana Abé · standalone novel · 2001

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                  At fifteen Lady Amiranth St. Clare became the bride of Tristan Geraint. She thought all of her dreams had come true — until she learned on her wedding day that Tristan had married her only for her bloodline. A week later Tristan deserted her for the glories of battle. Heartbroken, Amiranth felt she'd been abandoned, not knowing that Tristan had become a prisoner of war — nor that he would one day return to the life he didn't know he wanted until it was taken away. Eight long years pass before Tristan finally comes home. A beautiful woman greets him in the garden, claiming to be Amiranth's cousin. Yet somehow she seems hauntingly familiar, with an ethereal radiance that stirs him deep within his heart. Is she really his wife, grown into a lady of breathtaking beauty — or another woman who has awakened within him a passion he has never known? To discover the truth, Tristan must reveal the secrets of what happened those years he was away — and find the love that was closer than he ever imagined....

                • Cover of The Reincarnationist
                  The Reincarnationist

                  series · 6 books · 2007

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                • Cover of Kindred
                  Kindred

                  Octavia E. Butler · standalone novel · 1979

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                  Kindred (1979) is a novel by American writer Octavia E. Butler that incorporates time travel and is modeled on slave narratives. Widely popular, it has frequently been chosen as a text by community-wide reading programs and book organizations, and for high school and college courses.

                • Cover of All Souls
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                  series · 5 books · 2011

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                  A Discovery of Witches is a 2011 historical-fantasy novel and the debut novel by American scholar Deborah Harkness. It follows Diana Bishop, a history of science professor at Yale University, as she embraces her magical blood after finding a long-thought-lost manuscript and engages in a forbidden romance with a charming vampire, Matthew Clairmont.

                • Cover of Immortal Rogues
                  Immortal Rogues

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                • Cover of The Daughters of La Lune
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                • Cover of Todd Family
                  Todd Family

                  series · 2 books · 2013

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                  Kate Atkinson's Life After Life gives Ursula Todd, born on a snowy night in 1910, a strange gift: whenever she dies, she's born again into a slightly altered version of the same life, gradually piecing together enough intuition across her many deaths to try to change the course of the twentieth century's worst events. The companion novel A God in Ruins turns to Ursula's brother Teddy, a bomber pilot, following his one, single life forward from the war through old age. The two books share a family and a set of preoccupations -- memory, war, chance -- without forming a conventional sequential series.

                • Cover of Dracula
                  Dracula

                  universe · 144 books · 1897

                  Start hereDracula · Start here

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                  "Come freely. Go safely. And leave something of the happiness you bring" — so the Count greets his guest at the threshold of the Carpathians, and the great door shuts behind. Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) is the wellspring of the modern vampire: the account of a centuries-old Transylvanian nobleman who quits his crumbling castle for the crowded lodging-houses of London, and the handful of ordinary people — a young solicitor, a doctor of the mad, a professor of stranger learning — who must piece together what he is before he makes the whole city his fold. It is told wholly in fragments: journal entries, letters, telegrams, ships' logs, phonograph cylinders, each hand recording only its own sliver of the dark. Around that single novel a whole crypt of continuations has grown, raised by many writers across a century. Fred Saberhagen's Dracula Sequence hands the Count the microphone, retelling the old events from his own wry, aggrieved lips and following him into later intrigues. Robert Lory's brisk 1970s Dracula Horror Series revives him as a reluctant weapon turned against fouler things; Peter Tremayne's trilogy reaches back along his bloodline; and further sequels, a Quincey Morris spin-off, and Dracula's Children carry the shadow onward. This is a loose shared world built upon a public-domain figure, not one governed continuity — each author remakes him as villain, antihero, or sympathetic narrator. Begin, always, with Stoker's original; the letters and the mounting dread stand entirely on their own. From there follow whichever door tempts you — Saberhagen's The Dracula Tape for the monster's own confession, Lory or Tremayne for tales that never glance back at the Borgo Pass again.

                • Cover of The Infernal Devices
                  The Infernal Devices

                  series · 5 books · 2010

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                • Cover of Bitter Greens
                  Bitter Greens

                  Kate Forsyth · standalone novel · 2012

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                  "After Margherita's father steals parsley from the walled garden of the courtesan Selena Leonelli, he is threatened with having both hands cut off, unless he and his wife relinquish their precious little girl. Selena is the famous red-haired muse of the artist Tiziano, first painted by him in 1512 and still inspiring him at the time of his death. She is at the center of Renaissance life in Venice, a world of beauty and danger, seduction and betrayal, love and superstition. Locked away in a tower, Margherita sings in the hope that someone will hear her. One day, a young man does"--Amazon.com.