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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 Evil Spirits

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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 Necroscope
                  Necroscope

                  series · 26 books · 1982

                  completed

                  similar byundeadhorrortensecontemporarydark

                  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.

                • Cover of Jerusalem's Lot
                  Jerusalem's Lot

                  series · 3 books · 1975

                  similar byhorrortensecontemporarydark+1 more

                  Stephen King's 1975 novel 'Salem's Lot follows writer Ben Mears as he returns to his childhood town of Jerusalem's Lot, Maine, only to discover that its residents are being turned into vampires by a newly arrived stranger. It transplants Gothic vampire horror into a small New England community, tracking that community's collapse under a supernatural siege. It is a single, self-contained novel.

                • Cover of The Night Boat
                  The Night Boat

                  Robert R. McCammon · standalone novel · 1980

                  similar byundeadhorrortensecontemporarydark

                  WorldCat: The story begins with a vividly written prologue in which a German U-boat--sometimes known as an "Iron Coffin"--Attacks an unsuspecting merchant vessel, and is itself attacked by a pair of Allied sub chasers. The action then shifts to the present day and to the idyllic Caribbean island of Coquina, where life is about to change in unimaginable ways. David Moore, a young man with a tragic and haunted past, is skin-diving in the waters off Coquina, searching for the salvageable remnants of shipwrecks. He accidentally detonates a long-unexploded depth charge, uncovering and releasing a submarine that has lain beneath those waters, virtually intact, for decades. The battered vessel that rises to the surface contains a bizarre and terrifying cargo that will transform a once peaceful island into a landscape of unrelenting nightmare. The Night Boat is a story of cannibalism, ancient voodoo curses, and shambling, undead entities filled with a bottomless rage and an equally bottomless hunger. But it is also the story of a past that refuses to die, that lies in wait just beneath the surface of the unsuspecting present.

                • Cover of The Loveliest Dead
                  The Loveliest Dead

                  Ray Garton · standalone novel · 2006

                  similar byundeadhorrortensecontemporarydark

                  The Kellar family finds their illusions of starting over shattered when they discover that their new home harbors an unimaginable evil as the dead, determined to destroy the living, come to life.

                • Cover of Felix Castor
                  Felix Castor

                  series · 7 books · 2006

                  similar bytensecontemporarydark+2 more

                  Mike Carey's Felix Castor novels follow a freelance exorcist working London's supernatural underside, taking paying jobs to banish ghosts and bind demons in a city where the dead don't always stay quiet. The opener, The Devil You Know, sends Castor into a museum haunting that spirals into a hunt by rival ghosts and demons all keen to be the one that finally kills him. Across six books the series mixes hardboiled detective plotting with occult horror.

                • Cover of The Resurgam Trilogy
                  The Resurgam Trilogy

                  series · 3 books · 2010

                  similar byundeaddark+3 more

                • Cover of Johnny Dixon and the Professor
                  Johnny Dixon and the Professor

                  series · 13 books · 1983

                  similar byhorrorcontemporary+2 more

                  Johnny Dixon is a fictional American boy featured in a series of twelve children's gothic horror novels, 1983 to 1999, written by John Bellairs or his successor Brad Strickland. In each book, 12-year-old Johnny and his group of friends face and overcome evil forces usually bent on ending the world. Alternatively, Johnny Dixon is the book series.

                • Cover of Carrion
                  Carrion

                  Gary Brandner · standalone novel · 1986

                  similar byundeadhorrortensecontemporarydark

                  Synopsis - He is the nation’s new hero. For he possesses the most awesome sill any man can master – he can reach beyond the grave and reawaken the dear departed. He can bring the dead back to life! But their souls no longer inhabit their resurrected bodies. The creatures that now walk the earth are carrion – dead flesh! They are mindless things that only know he is responsible for their agony… As their bodies decay into hideous travesties of what they once were, they have only one mission left – To destroy their savior.

                • Cover of Anita Blake
                  Anita Blake

                  series · 42 books · 1993

                  similar bytensecontemporarydark+1 more

                  Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter is a series of urban fantasy novels, short stories, and comic books by Laurell K. Hamilton. The books have sold more than six million copies; many have made The New York Times Best Seller list.

                • Cover of Dead City
                  Dead City

                  series · 3 books · 2012

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                • Cover of Deadlands (Joe McKinney)
                  Deadlands (Joe McKinney)

                  series · 2 books · 2014

                  completed

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                • Cover of Soulless
                  Soulless

                  Christopher Golden · standalone novel · 2008

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                  The attempt of three powerful mediums to open up communication between the living and the dead has disastrous consequences when every corpse within a three-hundred-mile radius of New York City is animated and begins to prey on the living.

                • Cover of Three Quarters Dead
                  Three Quarters Dead

                  Richard Peck · standalone novel · 2010

                  similar byundeadhorrortensecontemporarydark

                  Sophomore loner Kerry is overjoyed when three popular senior girls pick her to be in their clique until the seniors die in a car crash, return from the dead, and insist that Kerry help them exact revenge on a disloyal classmate.

                • Cover of Carrie
                  Carrie

                  Stephen King · standalone novel · 1974

                  similar byhorrortensecontemporarydark

                  In one way or another, everybody abused Carrie. This sixteen-year-old misfit was forbidden everything that was young and fun by her fanatical mother. She was teased and taunted by her classmates, misunderstood by her teachers, and given up as hopeless by almost everyone. But Carrie had a secret: She possessed terrifying telekinetic powers that could make inanimate objects move, a lighted candle fall, or a door lock. Carrie could make all kinds of startling bizarre, and malevolent things happen. (WorldCat)

                • Cover of Forest of Hands and Teeth
                  Forest of Hands and Teeth

                  series · 9 books · 2009

                  similar bytensedark+2 more

                  Carrie Ryan's debut trilogy is set generations after an apocalypse turned much of humanity into the mindless, cannibalistic "Unconsecrated," following young women in a small walled village whose protective fence keeps the undead out and its residents locked into a repressive, secretive society. The Forest of Hands and Teeth follows the first heroine's break from that village into the wider, undead-infested world; The Dead-Tossed Waves and The Dark and Hollow Places carry the aftermath forward through new narrators. It is YA horror more concerned with the fear and control inside the fences than with survivalist action.

                • Cover of Blood Feast of the Ghoul God
                  Blood Feast of the Ghoul God

                  Brian G. Berry · standalone novel · 2024

                  similar byundeadhorrortensecontemporarydark

                  ● "Encased in stone, the Ghoul God awaits resurrection from its servitors' hands. During a raid on a seemingly innocent abbey, a mercenary team acquires the 'Relic'. Unknown to the team sent to retrieve this object of antiquity, it possesses a latent power of domination over weak and vulnerable minds. Now, on their way back to the US, an event onboard the plane sends it plunging into the backwater swamps of Brackenville, a pinpoint, no-nothing town on the map. As the days pass, bodies are turning up in appalling numbers for the small town." ― paraphrased from this book's product page on Amazon.com as of 2024-09-24.

                • Cover of Monster Island
                  Monster Island

                  series · 3 books · 2006

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                • Cover of The Haunting of Derek Stone
                  The Haunting of Derek Stone

                  series · 4 books · 2009

                  similar byundeadcontemporary+2 more

                • Cover of The Andromeda Strain
                  The Andromeda Strain

                  series · 2 books · 1969

                  similar bytensecontemporary+2 more

                  Michael Crichton's 1969 novel The Andromeda Strain follows a team of scientists racing to contain a lethal extraterrestrial microorganism that crash-lands in Arizona, told in the clinical, document-driven style that helped establish the techno-thriller genre. Daniel H. Wilson's authorized 2019 sequel The Andromeda Evolution revisits the same threat five decades later. Together the two books form a two-part outbreak story separated by a fifty-year gap in publication.

                • Cover of The Shining
                  The Shining

                  series · 5 books · 1977

                  similar byhorrortensecontemporarydark

                  Stephen King's 1977 novel The Shining follows the Torrance family as winter caretakers of the isolated, malevolent Overlook Hotel, where father Jack is gradually consumed by the hotel's influence while his young son Danny's psychic "shining" draws its attention. Doctor Sleep (2013) picks up the story decades later, following Danny as an adult still marked by that childhood ordeal. Together the two form a horror duology spanning nearly forty years of real-world publication.

                • Cover of Toxic Shadows
                  Toxic Shadows

                  Tim Curran · standalone novel · 2004

                  similar byhorrortensecontemporarydark+1 more

                  "Cut River, Michigan. Population: 0. The town the Devil built. Once it was a sleepy backwater town and once there were people in it. Then a lurking pestilence ate the flesh from its bones. A pestilence born in the smoldering graveyards of nameless, forgotten battlefields. And now there is only a shifting darkness in Cut River, a darkness populated by hideous shadows that pretend to be people. Seven strangers will arrive. If they can stay alive until dawn, they'll survive. But to do that will mean engaging in a bloody war of attrition against the things that crawl and hunt in the night. Things that wear the faces of men, women, and children. Toxic Shadows. Welcome to Cut River. Welcome to the graveyard. War is Hell." — quoted from this book's product page on Amazon and its Severed Press printing's back cover.

                • Cover of Ghost Monster
                  Ghost Monster

                  Simon Clark · standalone novel · 2009

                  similar byundeadhorrortensecontemporarydark

                  The local children call it "ghost monster," a disturbing mosaic on a mausoleum wall in the old cemetery. For centuries the grim portrait has imprisoned the spirits of the notorious Justice Murrain and his vicious gang of misfits. But now somone has taken the portrait, and the spirits of the sadists are free to enjoy the darkest of pleasures.

                • Cover of Night Things
                  Night Things

                  Thomas F. Monteleone · standalone novel · 1980

                  similar byundeadhorrortensecontemporarydark

                  Amazon: One could hardly expect the residents Conora, New Mexico, to be too disturbed when a nearby construction crew unearthed a Native American burial ground; after all, Sheriff Miguel Lopez, newspaperman Tony Cavella, shopkeeper Lori Danek, and the entire bustling community had their own lives to think about. Unfortunately, sometimes a bulldozer does more than move the earth ... it opens a wound. And the people of Conora had no idea about, nor any way to prepare for, the ancient terror that was loosed upon their small town.

                • Cover of Pit (Guy N. Smith)
                  Pit (Guy N. Smith)

                  series · 2 books · 1975

                  completed

                  similar byhorrorcontemporarydark+2 more