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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 Dreamside

anchored on:fantasyour worldcontemporaryidentitygrief and lossdreamworld+1 more

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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 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 mental unraveling — descent into madness, delusion, and minds at war with themselves.
  • 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 The Great Victorian Collection
                  The Great Victorian Collection

                  Brian Moore · standalone novel · 1975

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                  The Great Victorian Collection, published in 1975, is a fantasy novel by Northern Irish-Canadian writer Brian Moore.It tells the story of a man who dreams that the empty parking lot he can see from his hotel window has been transformed by the arrival of a collection of priceless Victoriana on display in a vast open-air market. When he awakes he finds that he can no longer distinguish the dream from reality.

                • Cover of A Monster Calls
                  A Monster Calls

                  series · 2 books · 2011

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                  A Monster Calls follows a boy struggling with his mother's terminal illness, who is visited each night by a tree-like monster demanding an honest story from him in exchange for the unsettling tales it tells. Patrick Ness wrote the novel from an idea left unfinished by Siobhan Dowd, who died of cancer before she could write it herself, with illustrations by Jim Kay integral to the original edition. It was later adapted for the stage.

                • Cover of The Halloween Tree
                  The Halloween Tree

                  Ray Bradbury · standalone novel · 1972

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                  Eight boys gather on Halloween night to trick-or-treat with their ninth friend, Pipkin, only Pipkin never shows, having vanished on some errand that may cost him his life. A strange, black-robed guide named Moundshroud appears to lead the boys after him, and the chase turns into a journey through the history of the holiday itself: ancient Egypt, druidic Britain, Rome, medieval Paris, and the Mexican Day of the Dead, each stop peeling back another layer of how humanity has faced death and the dark. Ray Bradbury's Halloween novel doubles as a compressed history of the holiday's origins.

                • Cover of The Time of the Ghost
                  The Time of the Ghost

                  Diana Wynne Jones · standalone novel · 1981

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                  The Time of the Ghost is a supernatural English-language children's novel by Diana Wynne Jones, published by Macmillan in 1981. Set in the English countryside, it features a teenage ghost who is one of four sisters, and observes the family, unable to remember which one she is. She is from seven years in the future, in the aftermath of her "accident", so it is a kind of a time slip story, but she has no memories of those seven years.

                • Cover of Dreams of Shreds and Tatters
                  Dreams of Shreds and Tatters

                  Amanda Downum · standalone novel · 2015

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                  "When Liz Drake's best friend vanishes, nothing can stop her nightmares. Driven by the certainty he needs her help, she crosses a continent to search for him. She finds Blake comatose in a Vancouver hospital, victim of a mysterious accident that claimed his lover's life -- in her dreams he drowns. Blake's new circle of artists and mystics draws her in, but all of them are lying or keeping dangerous secrets. Soon nightmare creatures stalk the waking city, and Liz can't fight a dream from the daylight world: to rescue Blake she must brave the darkest depths of the Dreamlands."--

                • Cover of The Ocean at the End of the Lane
                  The Ocean at the End of the Lane

                  Neil Gaiman · standalone novel · 2013

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                  A seven year old farm boy becomes friends with an eleven year old neighbor girl, who he discovers is ancient and powerful and intervenes when a nonhuman entity attempts to make a home in earthly reality.

                • Cover of The Land of Laughs
                  The Land of Laughs

                  Jonathan Carroll · standalone novel · 1980

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                  WorldCat: Schoolteacher Thomas Abbey, unsure son of a film star, doesn't know who he is or what he wants--in life, in love, or in his relationship with the strange and intense Saxony Gardner. What he knows is that in his whole life nothing has touched him so deeply as the novels of Marshall France, a reclusive author of fabulous children's tales who died at forty-four. Now Thomas and Saxony have come to France's hometown, the dreamy Midwestern town of Galen, Missouri, to write France's biography. Warned in advance that France's family may oppose them, they're surprised to find France's daughter warmly welcoming instead. But slowly they begin to see that something fantastic and horrible is happening. The magic of Marshall France has extended far beyond the printed page...leaving them with a terrifying task to undertake.

                • Cover of Into the Grey
                  Into the Grey

                  Celine Kiernan · standalone novel · 2013

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                  Fifteen-year-old Patrick Finnerty races to save his twin brother, Dom, who is being possessed by a ghost.

                • Cover of Fire and Hemlock
                  Fire and Hemlock

                  Diana Wynne Jones · standalone novel · 1984

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                  At nineteen, Polly has two sets of sometimes overlapping, sometimes conflicting memories, the real-life ones of school days and her parents' divorce, and the heroic adventure ones that began the day she accidentally gate-crashed a funeral and met the cellist Thomas Lynn.

                • Cover of Mrs. God
                  Mrs. God

                  Peter Straub · standalone novel · 1990

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                  Mrs. God is a fantasy novel by American writer Peter Straub. It was first published in 1990 by Donald M. Grant, Publisher, Inc. in an edition of 1,350 copies, of which 600 copies were signed by the author and the artist, bound in quarter leather and slipcased as a deluxe edition. The novel is expanded from the short novel of the same name that appeared in Straub's collection Houses Without Doors. A trade edition hardcover was issued later.

                • Cover of Too Bright to See
                  Too Bright to See

                  Kyle Lukoff · standalone novel · 2021

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                  Too Bright to See is a middle grade ghost novel written by Kyle Lukoff and published on April 20, 2021, by Dial Books. It tells the story of Bug, a transgender boy who lives in a haunted house, as he tries to understand a message a ghost is trying to send him.

                • Cover of Dead Lines
                  Dead Lines

                  Greg Bear · standalone novel · 2004

                  similar byeeriecontemporarygrief and lossour worldmadness+1 more

                  From the flaps of the Ballantine first edition: "For the last two years, Peter Russell has mourned the death of one of his twin daughters - who was just ten when she was murdered. Recent news of his best friend's fatal heart attack has now come as another devastating blow. Divorced, despondent, and going nowhere in his career, Peter fears his life is circling the drain. Then Trans comes along. The brainchild of an upstart telecom company, Trans is (as its name suggests) a transcendent marvel, a sleek, handheld interpersonal communication device capable of flawless operation anywhere in the world, at any time. "A cell phone, but not" - transmitting with crystal clarity across a newly discovered, never-utilized bandwidth... and poised to spark a new-technology revolution. When its creators offer Peter a position on their team, it should be a golden opportunity for him. If only he wasn't seemingly going mad. Everywhere Peter turns, inexplicable apparitions are walking before him or reaching out in torment. After a chilling encounter with his own lost child he begins to grasp the terrifying truth: Trans is a Pandora's box that has tapped into a frequency not of this world... but of the next. And now, via this open channel to oblivion, the dead have gained access to the living. For Peter, and for humankind, a long shadowy night of the soul has descended, bringing with it the stuff of a horrifying nightmare from which they may never awaken."

                • Cover of Her Fearful Symmetry
                  Her Fearful Symmetry

                  Audrey Niffenegger · standalone novel · 2009

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                  Her Fearful Symmetry is a horror novel by the American writer Audrey Niffenegger. The book was published on October 1, 2009 and is set in and around London's Highgate Cemetery where, after a year of research for the book, Niffenegger acted as a tour guide.

                • Cover of Bod Owens
                  Bod Owens

                  series · 3 books · 2007

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                  The Graveyard Book follows Nobody "Bod" Owens, a toddler who escapes the murder of his family and is raised among the ghosts of an old English graveyard, absorbing their otherworldly customs while a threat from his past waits beyond the gates. Neil Gaiman's 2008 novel won both the Newbery and Carnegie Medals, and illustrator P. Craig Russell later adapted it into a two-volume graphic novel. Bod's story spans the original novel and that graphic-novel retelling rather than continuing in a prose sequel.

                • Cover of The Replacement
                  The Replacement

                  Brenna Yovanoff · standalone novel · 2010

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                  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 Mythago Wood
                  Mythago Wood

                  series · 7 books · 1984

                  completed

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                  Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood is set around Ryhope Wood, a small patch of ancient British woodland that is somehow far larger on the inside, generating 'mythagos' -- physical embodiments of myth and legend drawn from visitors' own collective unconscious. The first novel follows Stephen Huxley investigating his family's obsession with the wood after his father's death; Holdstock continued the cycle across further novels and stories exploring different characters and eras. It blends fantasy with psychology and British folklore rather than a conventional quest structure.

                • Cover of Witch House
                  Witch House

                  Evangeline Walton · standalone novel · 1945

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                  Witch House is a fantasy novel by American writer Evangeline Walton. It was published in 1945 by Arkham House in an edition of 3,000 copies. It was the first full-length novel to be published by Arkham House and was listed as the initial book in the Library of Arkham House Novels of Fantasy and Terror. An expanded version, with a newly written 20,000-word prologue, was published in England in 1950. In 2013, Centipede Press issued the first American edition of this revised version, also including previously unpublished writings by Walton and several of her short stories.

                • Cover of Southern Reach Trilogy
                  Southern Reach Trilogy

                  series · 4 books · 2014

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                  The Southern Reach Series is a series of novels by the American author Jeff VanderMeer first published in 2014—Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance, and Absolution. The series takes its name from the secret agency that is central to the plot. In 2013, Paramount Pictures bought the movie rights for the series, and a film adaptation of Annihilation was made with Alex Garland as writer-director. The film was released in 2018. The most recent book in the series, Absolution, was released on 22 October 2024.

                • Cover of Fluke
                  Fluke

                  James Herbert · standalone novel · 1977

                  similar byfantasycontemporaryidentitygrief and lossour world

                  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 The Witches of Worm
                  The Witches of Worm

                  Zilpha Keatley Snyder · standalone novel · 1972

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                  A lonely twelve-year-old is convinced that the cat she finds is possessed by a witch and is responsible for her own strange behavior.

                • Cover of Mothtown
                  Mothtown

                  Caroline Hardaker · standalone novel · 2023

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                  Mothtown is a literary fantasy and horror novel by English poet and novelist Caroline Hardaker. It is her second novel and was first published in the United Kingdom and the United States in November 2023 by Angry Robot. The book was illustrated by English political cartoonist and illustrator Chris Riddell.

                • Cover of Vincent Ettrich
                  Vincent Ettrich

                  series · 4 books · 1999

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                • Cover of Dhalgren
                  Dhalgren

                  Samuel R. Delany · standalone novel · 1975

                  similar byeeriecontemporaryidentitystream of consciousnessmadness

                  Dhalgren is a 1975 science fiction novel by American writer Samuel R. Delany. It features an extended trip to and through Bellona, a fictional city in the American Midwest cut off from the rest of the world by an unknown catastrophe. It is number 33 on the 20th Century's Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction list.

                • Cover of Alderley
                  Alderley

                  series · 4 books · 1960

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                  Alan Garner's Alderley books begin with The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) and The Moon of Gomrath (1963), children's fantasies set around the real Cheshire hill of Alderley Edge and drawn from its local legends. Garner returned to the same setting and characters decades later in Boneland (2012), a far darker novel for adults in which the now-grown Colin, afflicted with amnesia covering his entire childhood, tries to piece together what really happened to him and his sister. The three books span most of Garner's writing life rather than forming one continuous trilogy.