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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 Dorian

anchored on:our worldparanormal romance

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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 Psy-Changelings
                  Psy-Changelings

                  series · 38 books · 2006

                  similar byparanormal romanceour world+5 more

                  Nalini Singh's long-running paranormal romance series imagines a future where the emotion-suppressing Psy, animal-shifting Changelings, and ordinary humans share an uneasy world. It opens with Slave to Sensation, pairing a Psy telepath and a Changeling leopard alpha as a string of murders pushes their two peoples toward war, while a slower arc across the books tracks the Psy's emotional-control system fraying. The series has grown across two decades into more than twenty novels plus spin-off novellas.

                • Cover of Patternist
                  Patternist

                  series · 6 books · 1976

                  completed

                  similar by+3 more

                  The Patternist series is a group of science fiction novels by Octavia E. Butler that detail a secret history continuing from the Ancient Egyptian period to the far future that involves telepathic mind control and an extraterrestrial plague. A profile of Butler in Black Women in America notes that the themes of the series include "racial and gender-based animosity, the ethical implications of biological engineering, the question of what it means to be human, ethical and unethical uses of power, and how the assumption of power changes people."

                • Cover of Dirk & Steele
                  Dirk & Steele

                  series · 12 books · 2005

                  similar byparanormal romanceour worldshapeshiftersemotional+2 more

                  Marjorie M. Liu's Dirk & Steele series opens with Tiger Eye: in Beijing, a young psychic acquires an antique riddle box and discovers she can free the shapeshifting warrior trapped inside it, setting off a perilous adventure and an unlikely romance. Liu continues the series across many further novels and novellas, including The Red Heart of Jade, Shadow Touch, Soul Song and The Wild Road, each following different agents connected to the same world of hidden paranormal gifts.

                • Cover of The Lathe of Heaven
                  The Lathe of Heaven

                  Ursula K. Le Guin · standalone novel · 1971

                  similar bypsychic powerstenseour worldnear future

                  The Lathe of Heaven is a 1971 science fiction novel by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin, first serialized in the American science fiction magazine Amazing Stories. It won the 1972 Locus Award for Best Novel and was a finalist for the 1971 Nebula Award for Best Novel and 1972 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Two television film adaptations were released: the PBS production, The Lathe of Heaven (1980), and Lathe of Heaven (2002), a remake produced by the A&E Network.

                • Cover of GhostWalkers
                  GhostWalkers

                  series · 20 books · 2003

                  similar bypsychic powersparanormal romancetenseour world+1 more

                  Christine Feehan's GhostWalkers novels follow soldiers subjected to a covert military program that enhanced them with psychic and physical abilities, then follow them as they go rogue from the program that made them and pair off in romance-driven, danger-filled storylines. Each book generally centers a different GhostWalker couple while advancing an ongoing conspiracy plot about the program's origins and enemies. The series began with Shadow Game in 2003 and has continued for two decades as one of Feehan's longest-running paranormal romance lines.

                • Cover of The Night Prince
                  The Night Prince

                  series · 5 books · 2011

                  part of Night Huntress

                  similar byparanormal romancetenseour worldemotional+1 more

                • Cover of The Mind Cage
                  The Mind Cage

                  A. E. van Vogt · standalone novel · 1957

                  similar bypsychic powerstenseour worldnear future

                  The Mind Cage is a 1957 science fiction novel by American writer A. E. van Vogt, adapted from the short story "The Great Judge" (1948).

                • Cover of Time Is the Simplest Thing
                  Time Is the Simplest Thing

                  Clifford D. Simak · standalone novel · 1961

                  similar bypsychic powersour worldnear future+1 more

                  Time Is the Simplest Thing is a science fiction novel by American writer Clifford D. Simak, first published in 1961. The story combines paranormal abilities with themes of space and time travel. The underlying theme is intolerance of ordinary people towards those with unusual abilities.

                • Cover of Aden Stone
                  Aden Stone

                  series · 3 books · 2009

                  similar byparanormal romanceour world+2 more

                • Cover of Para-Ops
                  Para-Ops

                  series · 4 books · 2011

                  similar byparanormal romance+4 more

                • Cover of Greg Mandel
                  Greg Mandel

                  series · 5 books · 1993

                  similar bypsychic powerstensenear futureour world

                  Greg Mandel is a former special-forces soldier with a psychic 'gland' implant for reading emotions, working as a private investigator in a near-future Britain recovering from an authoritarian climate-crisis government. Peter F. Hamilton's original trilogy - Mindstar Rising, A Quantum Murder, The Nano Flower - follows his cases as ordinary detective work keeps sliding into conspiracies with much bigger stakes; The Suspect Genome revisits an older Mandel decades later. It was Hamilton's first fiction, blending noir detective plotting with hard SF.

                • Cover of Clone
                  Clone

                  Richard Cowper · standalone novel · 1972

                  similar bypsychic powerstenseour worldnear future

                  History's first clones: Alvin, Bruce, Colin, and Desmond - Spawned in a dangerous 21st century experiment, there were brought into a world where educated apes did manual labor and the government encouraged suicide as a method of population control. Their existence as clones was unknown to anyone - even to each other - known only to their creator. But then came the strange, haunting visions, the peculiar psychic sensations that drew them closer and closer together - revealing one and for all the mysterious secret they shared that would change the world! (from the back cover of the Pocket Books edition)

                • Cover of Meena Harper
                  Meena Harper

                  series · 2 books · 2010

                  similar byparanormal romancepsychic powers+2 more

                • Cover of Alpha Pack
                  Alpha Pack

                  series · 9 books · 2011

                  similar byparanormal romanceour world+4 more

                • Cover of Night Watch
                  Night Watch

                  series · 4 books · 2010

                  similar byparanormal romancetenseour world+1 more

                • Cover of Back to Life
                  Back to Life

                  Linda O. Johnston · standalone novel · 2009

                  similar byparanormal romancepsychic powerstenseour worldemotional

                  From the second she reaches for his hand, Skye Rydell feels compelled to save the SWAT officer from the brink of death. Skye senses Trevor has something more to accomplish in life. Something disquieting. Important. Something involving her. Skye makes a split-second decision and, with her choice to use her Valkyrie powers to bring Trevor back to life, everything changes. For her act causes her to accidentally impart her deadly powers to Trevor.... And now, with a murderer hot on their heels, Trevor must grapple with his new gift, his fierce desire for Skye-and a monumental decision that will put all that he holds most dear on the line!

                • Cover of Galactic Milieu
                  Galactic Milieu

                  series · 10 books · 1981

                  completed

                  similar bypsychic powerstense+1 more

                  Galactic Milieu is a series of science fiction novels by Julian May. It is linked to her previously published series, the Saga of Pliocene Exile; and through the fantastical device of time-travel, acts as both a prequel and a sequel to this earlier series. The "Galactic Milieu" of the title is an interplanetary federation, and Earth's membership of it is a central plot concern.

                • Cover of Primal Instinct
                  Primal Instinct

                  series · 9 books · 2009

                  similar byparanormal romanceour worldshapeshifters+2 more

                • Cover of The Zap Gun
                  The Zap Gun

                  Philip K. Dick · standalone novel · 1967

                  similar byour worldnear future+2 more

                  The Zap Gun is a 1967 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. It was first published as the two-part serial Project Plowshare in Worlds of Tomorrow in 1965 and 1966, before Pyramid Books issued it in paperback under its present title. The novel originated in a title-first commission devised by Pyramid editor Don Bensen and was written in 1964 during a period of rapid production in Dick's career.

                • Cover of The Pritcher Mass
                  The Pritcher Mass

                  Gordon R. Dickson · standalone novel · 1972

                  similar bypsychic powerstenseour worldnear future

                  The only hope for mankind's survival after the contamination of the Earth lay in the Pritcher Mass, a psychic forcefield construction out beyond the orbit of Pluto. Created by the efforts of individuals with extraordinary paranormal powers, the Mass was designed to search the universe for a new habitable planet. Chaz Sant knew he had the kind of special ability to contribute effectively to the building of the Mass, but somehow the qualifying tests were stacked against him. Then he learned that he had become the special target of an insidious organization that fattened on the fears of the last cities of the world. His confrontation with this organization, their real motives and his unexpected reactions, were to touch off the final showdown for mankind's last enterprise. (from the back cover of the DAW Books first printing)

                • Cover of Shifters' Captive
                  Shifters' Captive

                  Bonnie Dee · standalone novel · 2009

                  similar byparanormal romanceour worldshapeshifters+3 more

                  "Animal attraction is the essence of their power... Waitress Sherrie Stolz never thought she'd need her chatting-up skills to play along with a hot, sexy kidnapper who rants about were-animals and psychic possession. Then he proves his story by changing into a wolf before her eyes. Human contact never interested John Walker, but his mission is desperate. The pack seer insists Sherrie is the only one who can save his people from a rash of mysterious comas. His connection with Sherrie is instant, powerful and beyond rational explanation. And then a third piece of the puzzle enters the picture. Grant Perron follows his instincts only to find his prize in the hands of his rival. He's poised for battle—until he learns his panther shifter clan suffers the same fate as John's pack. But there's more. When the three of them touch, the primal, erotic power surge swells like the waves of an earthquake. Sherrie's hands—and bed—are suddenly full, figuring out how to manage two snarling alpha males without giving in to the urge to knock their heads together. And channel her new-found power before a villain uses it to destroy them all..." — from this book's product page on Samhain's website as of 2016-11-14.

                • Cover of Juliette / Shatter Me
                  Juliette / Shatter Me

                  series · 16 books · 2011

                  similar bynear future+4 more

                  Tahereh Mafi's Shatter Me series follows Juliette, a teenager whose touch is lethally dangerous, in a dystopian future. The debut novel, Shatter Me (2011), is written in a fragmented, diary-like style with crossed-out lines reflecting its narrator's state of mind; the series has since grown to seven novels plus five companion novellas.

                • Cover of Black Magic
                  Black Magic

                  Cherry Adair · standalone novel · 2010

                  similar byparanormal romancepsychic powerstenseour worldemotional

                  SHE HATES USING MAGIC . . . Ever since the death of her parents, Sara Temple has rejected her magical gifts. Then, in a moment of extreme danger, she unknowingly sends out a telepathic cry for help—to the one man she is convinced she never wants to see again. HE’S A POWERFUL WIZARD . . . Jackson Slater thought he was done forever with his ex-fiancée, but when he hears her desperate plea, he teleports halfway around the world to aid her in a situation where magic has gone suddenly, brutally wrong. THEY’VE BEEN CHOSEN TO SAVE THE WORLD . . . But while Sara and Jack remain convinced they are completely mismatched, the Wizard Council feels otherwise. A dark force is killing some of the world’s most influential wizards, and the ex-lovers have just proved their abilities are mysteriously amplified when they work together. But with the fate of the world at stake, will the violent emotions still simmering between them drive them farther apart . . . or bring them back into each other’s arms?

                • VA
                  Vampire Academy Universe

                  series · 19 books · 2007

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