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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 Hell Screen

anchored on:literary & generalart and artistseast asiaearly 20th centurydarkmadness+1 more

but

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 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 driven by the pursuit of vengeance for a wrong, and what the pursuit costs the avenger.
  • 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 We Have Always Lived in the Castle
                  We Have Always Lived in the Castle

                  Shirley Jackson · standalone novel · 1962

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                  A young woman lives with her older sister and sickly uncle in their old family house, after a mysterious tragedy turns the townsfolk against them.

                • Cover of The Other
                  The Other

                  Thomas Tryon · standalone novel · 1971

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                  On a rural New England farm in 1935, thirteen-year-old identical twins Niles and Holland Perry share an unnervingly close bond, finishing each other's thoughts the way twins in family lore are supposed to. But the boys are not alike underneath: one is gentle and well-liked, the other carries something cold and cruel that the adults around them keep failing to notice. As a string of unsettling accidents and small cruelties start happening around the family's property, the people who love the twins begin, too slowly, to wonder whether both of them are really still there to blame. Thomas Tryon's debut novel, a work of quiet, Gothic-inflected horror.

                • Cover of Diary
                  Diary

                  Chuck Palahniuk · standalone novel · 2003

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                  Diary is a 2003 novel by Chuck Palahniuk. The book is written like a diary. Its protagonist is Misty Wilmot, a once-promising young artist who works as a waitress in a hotel. Her husband, a contractor, is in a coma after a suicide attempt. According to the description on the back of Diary, Misty "soon finds herself a pawn in a larger conspiracy that threatens to cost hundreds of lives."

                • Cover of The Edge of Running Water
                  The Edge of Running Water

                  William Sloane · standalone novel · 1939

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                  After the death of his beloved wife, a physicist tries to build a machine that will enable him to communicate with the dead, with horrible consequences.

                • Cover of It Happened in Boston?
                  It Happened in Boston?

                  Russell H. Greenan · standalone novel · 1968

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                  It Happened in Boston? (1968) is a novel by Russell H. Greenan. It tells the story of an unreliable narrator, who is a disillusioned, paranoid painter, whose goal in life is to someday meet God and destroy him. He decided he wanted to hold God accountable for the evils in the world. The book follows a bizarre series of events in the lives of him and his painter friends and effectively documents his descent into paranoid delusions as he becomes more and more unreliable as a narrator leaving the reader to become more and more unsure about what exactly is happening in Boston.

                • Cover of Consumed
                  Consumed

                  David Cronenberg · standalone novel · 2014

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                  Consumed is the first novel by the Canadian filmmaker, screenwriter and actor David Cronenberg.

                • Cover of Ice
                  Ice

                  Anna Kavan · standalone novel · 1967

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                  Ice is a novel by British writer Anna Kavan, published in 1967. Ice was Kavan's last work to be published before her death, the first to land her mainstream success, and remains her best-known work. Generally regarded as genre-defying, it has been labelled a work of science fiction, Nouveau roman, and slipstream fiction.

                • Cover of The Magician
                  The Magician

                  W. Somerset Maugham · standalone novel · 1908

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                  A magician tries to create life.

                • Cover of The Sundial
                  The Sundial

                  Shirley Jackson · standalone novel · 1958

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                  The Sundial is a 1958 novel by American writer Shirley Jackson.

                • Cover of Time's Arrow
                  Time's Arrow

                  Martin Amis · standalone novel · 1991

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                  From Amazon description: In this icy, knife's-edge story of a life that progresses backward through time, unfolding into one of the darkest episodes of the 20th century, Amis ("at his intriguing, heedful, and powerful best" —Time Out), finds a chillingly original approach to the Holocaust in fiction • From the acclaimed author of Zone of Interest "The narrative moves with irresistible momentum.... [Amis is] a daring, exacting writer willing to defy the odds in pursuit of his art." —Newsday Tod. T. Friendly is living his life in reverse. Doctor Friendly has just died, but he moves "out of blackest sleep" to find himself surrounded by doctors and on the deathbed of a man in whose body he is imprisoned. After weeks of improving in the hospital, he is sent home to his affable, melting-pot, primary-colors existence in suburban America. As Friendly breaks up with his lovers in a prelude to seducing them and mangles his patients before he sends them home, his life races backward toward the one appalling moment in modern history when such reversals make sense. From the fresh-cut lawns of his retirement to the hustle of New York, and then back to the boat which reverses his course to the war-torn Europe Friendly came from, Amis brings the steeliest nerve to the job of realizing the novel's inevitable logic. Trapped in his body from grave to cradle, Friendly's consciousness can only watch as he struggles to make sense of the good doctor's most ambitious project yet—the final solution.

                • Cover of Shadow Dance
                  Shadow Dance

                  Angela Carter · standalone novel · 1966

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                  Shadow Dance was Angela Carter's first novel, published in England by Heinemann in 1966. It was published under the name Honeybuzzard in the United States. Upon publication it was acclaimed by Anthony Burgess, who wrote that he "read this book with admiration, horror and other relevant emotions... Angela Carter has remarkable descriptive gifts, a powerful imagination, and... a capacity for looking at the mess of contemporary life without flinching."

                • Cover of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
                  The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

                  James Hogg · standalone novel · 1824

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                  The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: Written by Himself: With a detail of curious traditionary facts and other evidence by the editor is a novel by the Scottish author James Hogg, published anonymously in 1824.

                • Cover of Penguin Classics Lovecraft
                  Penguin Classics Lovecraft

                  series · 3 books · 1999

                  completed

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                • Cover of Annotated H. P. Lovecraft
                  Annotated H. P. Lovecraft

                  series · 2 books · 1997

                  completed

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                • Cover of Claimed
                  Claimed

                  Francis Stevens · standalone novel · 1966

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                  From the flaps of the Avalon edition: "It was in the first decade of the twentieth century that the British merchant sailing ship, Portsmouth Belle, was thrown off her course by undersea volcanic convulsions, and entered an area of floating scoria and ashes. For three days the vessel plowed through this area, her best speed being three knots despite a fair breeze, with all canvas set; and on the second day, an island was sighted. The Portsmouth Belle's instruments had been affected in some way by the seismic disturbances; it was not possible to estimate her location by other than dead reckoning. If this was correct, there should be no island here. And all the appearances, as the ship approached, were of an area of land thrown up recently by volcanic action. It was, in fact, a mass of dark, chocolate-colored rock, striated with metallic red, all coated with ashes. Some of the ash had been washed away by rain since the upheaval, and the rock, in the distance, gave the appearance of ruins. Indeed, the captain of the Portsmouth Belle thought, these might be the remains of some ancient city. They were too far away to investigate under the circumstances. A landing indicated many hot, ill-smelling fissures, from which poisonous vapors might be coming. Captain Charles Jessamy and Seaman James Blair were the only ones to set foot, briefly, on the island; and Blair asked the skipper's permission to carry away a keepsake. Scattered about the surface were many irregular blocks and ball-shaped masses of greenish-black lava. One of the smaller blocks had a very regular rectangular shape; the lava was deep-green in color, flecked with brilliant scales of matallic scarlet. Jessamy gave Seaman Blair permission to take it away and keep it. The Portsmouth Belle was lost before returning to port, but Blair and the others aboard were saved. By that time, in attempting to saw the block open, Blair discovered a great casket inside. He concealed it from the others. And the events which followed were such that, in terror, he sold the casket to a curio-shop dealer. Thus it passed into the hands of the fabulously wealthy Jesse Robinson, whose creed was, "What I want, I get - and what I get, I keep." And with Robinson's keeping of the box, despite Blair's attempt to warn him and urge him to sell it back, the terror passed to the Robinson household, to his niece, Leilah, and to young John Vanaman, M.D., whom Leilah summoned to look after her uncle. For some being, some thing, claimed this box; and whatever the being was, it had tremendous powers of illusion. Night after night, sitting beside old Robinson, Dr. Vanaman heard the surge of the sea, saw the waves emerge under closed doors and flood the room, and soon found that this was only the beginning of the manifestation. What was the secret of the box, of a substance which no one could identify? What was the writing on the box, the symbols which seemed to be on whatever side one turned it, then to sink down into the middle of the box? Why did the owner of the curio ship, who had had the box for a short time, suddenly disappear with a large sum of money, then reappear, obviously insane, leading a blooded white horse, which he had purchased for several thousand dollars? What did he mean by his ravings about the "archangel"?"

                • Cover of Lunar Park
                  Lunar Park

                  Bret Easton Ellis · standalone novel · 2005

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                  Lunar Park is a metafictional novel by American writer Bret Easton Ellis, presented as a mock memoir. It was released by Knopf in 2005. It was the first book written by Ellis to use past tense narrative.

                • Cover of The House on the Borderland
                  The House on the Borderland

                  William Hope Hodgson · standalone novel · 1908

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                  The House on the Borderland (1908) is a supernatural horror novel by British fantasist William Hope Hodgson. The novel is a hallucinatory account of a recluse's stay at a remote house, and his experiences of supernatural creatures and otherworldly dimensions.

                • Cover of Perfume
                  Perfume

                  Patrick Süskind · standalone novel · 1985

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                  Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is a 1985 literary historical fantasy novel by German writer Patrick Süskind. The novel explores the sense of smell and its relationship with the emotional meanings that scents may have.

                • Cover of Tours of the Black Clock
                  Tours of the Black Clock

                  Steve Erickson · standalone novel · 1989

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                  Tours of the Black Clock is the third novel by Steve Erickson, published in 1989. It has been translated into French, Spanish, Dutch and Japanese among other languages. The narrative concerns itself with two of the most influential figures of the 20th century, as Adolf Hitler appears as an important character, and allusions are made to Albert Einstein and the theory of relativity. The novel was cited as one of the year's best by the Village Voice and the New York Times Book Review and is included on Larry McCaffery's list of the 20th Century’s Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction.

                • Cover of The Grin of the Dark
                  The Grin of the Dark

                  series · 2 books · 2007

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                • Cover of Fungi from Yuggoth
                  Fungi from Yuggoth

                  series · 1 book · 1943

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                  Fungi from Yuggoth is a sequence of 36 sonnets by cosmic horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Most of the sonnets were written between 27 December 1929 – 4 January 1930; thereafter individual sonnets appeared in Weird Tales and other genre magazines. The sequence was published complete in Beyond the Wall of Sleep and The Ancient Track: The Complete Poetical Works of H. P. Lovecraft. Ballantine Books' mass paperback edition, Fungi From Yuggoth & Other Poems included other poetic works.

                • Cover of Coldheart Canyon
                  Coldheart Canyon

                  Clive Barker · standalone novel · 2001

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                  Coldheart Canyon is a novel by Clive Barker, published in 2001 by HarperCollins. The story centers on Todd Pickett, a failing movie star, and Tammy Lauper, Todd's obsessive fan.

                • Cover of Crash
                  Crash

                  J. G. Ballard · standalone novel · 1973

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                  Crash is a novel by J. G. Ballard, first published in 1973 with a cover designed by Bill Botten. It follows a group of car-crash fetishists who, inspired by the famous crashes of celebrities, become sexually aroused by staging and participating in car accidents.

                • Cover of The Love Child
                  The Love Child

                  Edith Olivier · standalone novel · 1927

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                  Amazon: At thirty-two, her mother dead, Agatha Bodenham finds herself quite alone. She summons back to life the only friend she ever knew, Clarissa, the dream companion of her childhood. At first Clarissa comes by night, and then by day, gathering substance in the warmth of Agatha's obsessive love until it seems that others too can see her. See, but not touch, for Agatha has made her love child for herself alone. No man may approach her elfin creation of perfect beauty. If he does, the love which summoned her can spirit her away