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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 Faceless

anchored on:our worldcontemporaryyoung adult

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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 The Vampire Chronicles
                  The Vampire Chronicles

                  series · 15 books · 1976

                  completed

                  similar bydarkour worldcontemporary+2 more

                  The Vampire Chronicles is a series of Gothic vampire novels and a media franchise, created by American author Anne Rice, that revolves around the fictional character Lestat de Lioncourt, a French nobleman turned into a vampire in the 18th century.

                • Cover of Star Shards
                  Star Shards

                  series · 3 books · 1995

                  similar byfantasycontemporaryour worldyoung adult+4 more

                • Cover of The Fury
                  The Fury

                  series · 4 books · 1976

                  similar bypsychic powerscontemporary+4 more

                  John Farris's The Fury centers on a teenage girl and boy with escalating psychic and telekinetic powers who become targets of a covert government program trying to weaponize them. The 1976 novel, adapted into Brian De Palma's 1978 film, gave rise to a string of later sequels following the same family's psychic bloodline across decades. Farris writes it as paranoid conspiracy thriller as much as horror, with the powers themselves treated as a violent, destabilizing force.

                • Cover of The Bone Clocks
                  The Bone Clocks

                  David Mitchell · standalone novel · 2014

                  similar byfantasypsychic powersour worldcontemporary+2 more

                  The Bone Clocks is a 2014 novel by British writer David Mitchell. It was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and described as one of the best novels of the year by Stephen King. The novel won the 2015 World Fantasy Award.

                • Cover of Another / Marlowe School
                  Another / Marlowe School

                  series · 3 books · 2009

                  similar bydarkcontemporaryour worldyoung adult+3 more

                • Cover of Modern Tale of Faerie
                  Modern Tale of Faerie

                  series · 4 books · 2002

                  similar byfantasycontemporaryour worldyoung adult+2 more

                  Tithe opens Holly Black's Modern Faerie Tales with Kaye Fierch, a teenage drifter who discovers she's a changeling with real faerie blood after returning to her childhood home on the Jersey Shore, and gets pulled into the political violence of the local faerie courts. The trilogy, continuing through Valiant and Ironside, keeps its "suburban fantasy" grounded in ordinary New Jersey settings rather than a storybook otherworld.

                • Cover of Fledgling
                  Fledgling

                  Octavia E. Butler · standalone novel · 2005

                  similar bydarkfantasyidentitycontemporaryour worldscience fiction

                  Fledgling is a science fiction vampire novel by American writer Octavia E. Butler, published in 2005. It was the author's final book published before her death in 2006.

                • Cover of The Radleys
                  The Radleys

                  Matt Haig · standalone novel · 2010

                  similar bydarkfantasyour worldcontemporaryyoung adult+1 more

                  The Radleys is a paranormal fantasy novel for young adults by Matt Haig, published 1 July 2010 by Canongate Books.

                • MD
                  Mara Dyer Universe

                  series · 5 books · 2011

                  similar bycontemporaryyoung adult+5 more

                • Cover of The World of Skulduggery Pleasant
                  The World of Skulduggery Pleasant

                  series · 38 books · 2007

                  similar bycontemporaryour worldyoung adult+3 more

                  These are standalone companion stories set in Derek Landy's Skulduggery Pleasant world, rather than a numbered sequence of their own. Hell Breaks Loose is a one-off prequel following the skeleton detective Skulduggery on a solo hunt years before the main series begins; The Haunted House on Hollow Hill and A Small Matter of Impending Catastrophe are novellas slotted between the main series' sixteenth and seventeenth books, the former adapted from an audio drama. None require following a separate ongoing plot of their own.

                • Cover of Firestarter
                  Firestarter

                  Stephen King · standalone novel · 1980

                  similar bydarkpsychic powerscontemporaryscience fiction+1 more

                  WorldCat: Innocence and beauty ignite with evil and terror... First, a man and a woman are subjects of a top-secret government experiment designed to produce extraordinary psychic powers. Then, they are married and have a child. A daughter. Early on the daughter shows signs of a wild and horrifying force growing within her. Desperately, her parents try to train her to keep that force in check, to 'act normal'. Now the government wants its brainchild back for its own insane ends.

                • Cover of Aden Stone
                  Aden Stone

                  series · 3 books · 2009

                  similar bycontemporaryour world+4 more

                • Cover of Messenger of Fear
                  Messenger of Fear

                  series · 3 books · 2014

                  similar bydarkfantasyour worldcontemporaryyoung adult

                • Cover of The Last Vampire (Christopher Pike)
                  The Last Vampire (Christopher Pike)

                  series · 9 books · 1994

                  similar bycontemporaryour worldyoung adult+3 more

                  The Last Vampire series consists of books written by Christopher Pike and chronicles the life of Sita, a 5,000-year-old vampire.

                • Cover of Conjured
                  Conjured

                  Sarah Beth Durst · standalone novel · 2013

                  similar bydarkpsychic powersidentityour worldcontemporaryyoung adult+1 more

                  Haunted by disturbing dreams and terrifying visions, a teenaged girl in a paranormal witness protection program must remember her past and why she has strange abilities before a magic-wielding serial killer hunts her down. Haunted by disturbing dreams and visions, a teenage girl in a paranormal witness protection program must remember her past and why she has strange abilities before a magic-wielding serial killer hunts her down. The plot contains graphic violence.

                • Cover of The Black Tattoo
                  The Black Tattoo

                  Sam Enthoven · standalone novel · 2006

                  similar bydarkfantasyidentityour worldcontemporaryyoung adult

                  The Black Tattoo is a 2006 young adult fantasy novel by Sam Enthoven. It deals with a boy, Charlie, becoming possessed by a demon that manifests itself in the form of a black tattoo on his body.

                • Cover of The Eyes of Kid Midas
                  The Eyes of Kid Midas

                  Neal Shusterman · standalone novel · 1992

                  similar byfantasyidentityour worldcontemporaryyoung adult+1 more

                  Kevin is entranced when he finds a pair of sunglasses that turn his desires into reality, but then things start to get out of control.

                • Cover of Chaos Walking
                  Chaos Walking

                  series · 5 books · 2008

                  similar bydarkyoung adultscience fiction+2 more

                  Chaos Walking is a young adult science fiction series written by American-British novelist Patrick Ness. It is set in a dystopian world where all living creatures can hear each other's thoughts in a stream of images, words, and sounds called Noise. The series is named after a line in the first book: "The Noise is a man unfiltered, and without a filter, a man is just chaos walking." The series consists of a trilogy of novels and three short stories.

                • Cover of The Night Walkers
                  The Night Walkers

                  series · 3 books · 2013

                  similar byfantasypsychic powersour worldcontemporaryyoung adult+1 more

                • Cover of Wicked Lovely
                  Wicked Lovely

                  series · 17 books · 2007

                  similar bycontemporaryour worldyoung adult+2 more

                  Melissa Marr's Wicked Lovely opens a YA urban-fantasy series about Aislinn, a teenage girl who has always been able to see faeries and has spent her life following her grandmother's rules to avoid their notice - until Keenan, the Summer King, decides she is meant to be his queen. Later books widen out to other faerie courts and other narrators drawn into the same modern-day faerie politics layered invisibly over ordinary life. It helped kick off the mid-2000s wave of YA faerie romance.

                • Cover of In the Night Room
                  In the Night Room

                  Peter Straub · standalone novel · 2004

                  similar bydarkidentityour worldcontemporary+2 more

                  In the Night Room is a 2004 horror-thriller novel by American author Peter Straub, a sequel to his 2003 book Lost Boy, Lost Girl. The work was first published in hardback on October 26, 2004, through Random House and it won the 2004 Bram Stoker Award for Novel. Straub encountered some difficulties while writing In the Night Room and had written several different passages for the work before growing bored with each version before writing it using the same technique he used for its predecessor in which he "reached down inside the book and turned it inside out."

                • Cover of What Big Teeth
                  What Big Teeth

                  Rose Szabo · standalone novel · 2021

                  similar bydarkfantasyidentityour worldcontemporaryyoung adult

                  What Big Teeth is a 2021 young adult gothic dark fantasy novel by Rose Szabo and marks their debut novel.

                • Cover of Patternist
                  Patternist

                  series · 6 books · 1976

                  completed

                  similar bydarkscience fiction+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 Her Fearful Symmetry
                  Her Fearful Symmetry

                  Audrey Niffenegger · standalone novel · 2009

                  similar byour worldcontemporary+3 more

                  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.