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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 Glutton

anchored on:contemporaryour world

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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 Songs of the Seraphim
                  Songs of the Seraphim

                  series · 2 books · 2009

                  completed

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                  Angel Time introduces Toby O'Dare, a contract killer given a chance at redemption when an angel recruits him to intervene in a medieval crisis, sending him back through history rather than forward. Anne Rice's Songs of the Seraphim continues with a second book, Of Love and Evil, following the same reluctant assassin-turned-angelic-agent into another past errand; the series stayed short, with no further volumes.

                • Cover of Eden / Siders
                  Eden / Siders

                  series · 3 books · 2011

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                  Bobby Dollar

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                  Fallen Angels (J. R. Ward)

                  series · 6 books · 2009

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                • Cover of Tantalize / Quincie, Kieren and Zachary
                  Tantalize / Quincie, Kieren and Zachary

                  series · 4 books · 2007

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                • Cover of The Fallen (Cynthia Eden)
                  The Fallen (Cynthia Eden)

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                • Cover of Halo (Alexandra Adornetto)
                  Halo (Alexandra Adornetto)

                  series · 3 books · 2010

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                  Alexandra Adornetto's Halo trilogy follows three angels sent to a small American town to counter a rising darkness, centered on Bethany, the youngest of them, who falls in love with a mortal boy despite the assignment's rules. Hades and Heaven escalate the conflict between her human attachments and her angelic duties. The series belongs to the wave of angel-themed YA romance that followed the mid-2000s vampire boom.

                • Cover of Guild Hunter
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                  series · 23 books · 2009

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                • Cover of Butcher Bird
                  Butcher Bird

                  Richard Kadrey · standalone novel · 2007

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                  Spyder Lee owns a tattoo shop in San Francisco, has a favorite drinking buddy, Lulu Garou, and other friends all over town. One night a pissed-off demon tries to bite his head off and he's saved by a small blind woman with a sword. After that, Spyder's life is turned upside down. The demon infected Spyder and he can suddenly see the world as it really is: full of angels and demons and monsters and monster-hunters; a world full of black magic and mysteries. These are the Dominions, parallel worlds full of wonder, beatuy and horror. The Dominions never touch, or at least they're not supposed to. The Black Clerks, powerful beings whos job it is to keep the Dominions in balance, seem to have a new agenda. Sypder finds himself dropped into the middle of a conflict he doesn't fully understand. With the blind swordswoman who saved him, Spyder searches for a magic book.

                • Cover of Shadow Saga II (Christopher Golden)
                  Shadow Saga II (Christopher Golden)

                  series · 7 books · 1994

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                  Christopher Golden's Shadow Saga follows Peter Octavian, a centuries-old vampire working as a private investigator in a Boston where humans live alongside a hidden population of supernatural creatures, beginning with Of Saints and Shadows. Later volumes widen the cast and stakes across a war among vampires, angels, and demons that runs through the mid-1990s and returns with new entries into the 2010s.

                • Cover of Remy Chandler
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                • Cover of American Gods
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                  series · 10 books · 1999

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                  Neil Gaiman's American Gods (2001) follows Shadow Moon, an ex-convict who takes a job as bodyguard to a mysterious drifter who is secretly the Norse god Odin, and is drawn into a brewing conflict between the old immigrant gods of myth and the new gods of media, technology, and modern American life. Gaiman's 2005 novel Anansi Boys is set in the same mythological world and shares the trickster god Mr. Nancy, but follows a different protagonist and story, making it a loose companion rather than a direct sequel.

                • Cover of Fallen
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                  series · 7 books · 2009

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                  Lauren Kate's Fallen opens with Luce Price, sent to a reform school in Savannah after a fire she can't explain, where she meets Daniel, a boy she is certain she has met before. The series follows Luce's growing entanglement with fallen angels and a curse of repeated lifetimes across several sequels running through 2015.

                • Cover of Dark Redemption
                  Dark Redemption

                  series · 2 books · 2010

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                • Cover of The Fallen (Thomas E. Sniegoski)
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                  series · 7 books · 2003

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                • Cover of Sandman Slim
                  Sandman Slim

                  series · 15 books · 2009

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                • Cover of The Grigori Legacy
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                  series · 3 books · 2011

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                • Cover of Karou
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                  series · 4 books · 2011

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                  Daughter of Smoke and Bone is a young-adult fantasy book series written by Laini Taylor and published by Hachette Book Group, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company. It is a complete trilogy, Daughter of Smoke and Bone being published on 27 September 2011 in the United States; Days of Blood and Starlight on 6 November 2012 in the United States; and the third book Dreams of Gods and Monsters on April 1, 2014. The books have been published in a variety of different languages.

                • Cover of The Blood Lily Chronicles / The Redemption Chronicles
                  The Blood Lily Chronicles / The Redemption Chronicles

                  series · 3 books · 2009

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                • Cover of Resurrection Man universe
                  Resurrection Man universe

                  series · 3 books · 1995

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                • Cover of Jerusalem's Lot
                  Jerusalem's Lot

                  series · 3 books · 1975

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                  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 Angelus Trilogy
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                • Cover of Horns
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