Loreful
HomeDiscover
Search series, authors…⌘K
Loreful

Reading orders for SF/F series and shared universes — with your place kept in every one.

Explore

UniversesSeriesWorksAuthorsAtlas

Help

FAQAboutSite map

Account & legal

Sign inCreate accountPrivacyTerms

Data

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's Gate

anchored on:fantasyafterlife & underworldrebellion and revolution

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 centered on witches and the practice of witchcraft — covens, hedge magic, familiars, and the witch's place in her community.
  • Stories in which gods and deities act as characters — walking the world, meddling in mortal lives, or dying.
  • 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 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 about rising against rulers — uprisings, resistance movements, and revolutions and their aftermaths.
  • Stories in which war itself is the subject — combat, occupation, and what warfare does to soldiers and civilians.

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 To Reign in Hell
                  To Reign in Hell

                  Steven Brust · standalone novel · 1984

                  similar byrebellion and revolutionfantasyafterlife & underworld

                  To Reign in Hell is a 1984 fantasy novel by American writer Steven Brust. It deals with the revolt of angels in Heaven from a point of view that casts Satan as a sympathetic protagonist. The novel appears to be heavily influenced by John Milton's Paradise Lost.

                • Cover of Tigana
                  Tigana

                  Guy Gavriel Kay · standalone novel · 1990

                  similar byrebellion and revolutionfantasy

                  Tigana is a 1990 fantasy novel by Canadian writer Guy Gavriel Kay. The novel is set in a region called the Peninsula of the Palm, which somewhat resembles Renaissance Italy as well as the Peloponnese in shape.

                • Cover of Red Queen
                  Red Queen

                  series · 14 books · 2015

                  similar byrebellion and revolutionfantasy

                  Red Queen is set in a world split between Reds, an oppressed servant class, and Silvers, a ruling class with superhuman abilities, where a Red girl discovers she has Silver-like powers of her own and is forced into the royal court to hide what she is. Victoria Aveyard's debut novel opens a four-book main sequence - Red Queen, Glass Sword, King's Cage, War Storm - plus the interstitial novella Cruel Crown and the epilogue novella Broken Throne. It's YA dystopian fantasy built around a class-based magic system and a slow-burn political rebellion.

                • Cover of The Tainted Blood Duology
                  The Tainted Blood Duology

                  series · 2 books · 2023

                  similar byrebellion and revolutionfantasy

                • Cover of The Lotus War
                  The Lotus War

                  series · 4 books · 2012

                  similar byrebellion and revolutionfantasy

                  The Lotus War is Jay Kristoff's steampunk fantasy trilogy set in a pollution-choked, Japanese-inspired empire: Stormdancer (2012), Kinslayer and Endsinger, with the novella The Last Stormdancer as a coda. It follows a young woman who tames a griffin-like beast thought extinct, drawing her into a rebellion against the empire's oppressive Shogunate. It is a complete trilogy plus novella.

                • Cover of Westmark
                  Westmark

                  series · 3 books · 1981

                  completed

                  similar byrebellion and revolutionfantasy

                • Cover of An Ember in the Ashes
                  An Ember in the Ashes

                  series · 4 books · 2015

                  similar byrebellion and revolutionfantasy

                  An Ember in the Ashes, set in a fantasy world modeled on ancient Rome, alternates between Laia, who spies on a brutal military academy for rebels in exchange for help freeing her imprisoned brother, and Elias, one of that academy's most skilled soldiers trying to break free of the empire he's been raised to serve. Sabaa Tahir's quartet, continuing through A Torch Against the Night, A Reaper at the Gates, and A Sky Beyond the Storm, follows the two toward a reckoning with the empire that trained one of them to enforce it.

                • Cover of Cinderella Is Dead
                  Cinderella Is Dead

                  Kalynn Bayron · standalone novel · 2020

                  similar byrebellion and revolutionfantasy

                  "Queer black girls team up to overthrow the patriarchy in the former kingdom of Cinderella"- (from OCLC, initially provided by the publisher)

                • Cover of Blood Scion
                  Blood Scion

                  Deborah Falaye · standalone novel · 2022

                  similar byrebellion and revolutionfantasy

                  Blood Scion is a 2022 young adult fantasy novel by Nigerian Canadian writer Deborah Falaye. Falaye's debut novel, inspired by Nigerian and Yoruba mythology, was published on 8 March 2022 by HarperTeen, an imprint of HarperCollins as the first book in a planned series.

                • Cover of Villains by Necessity
                  Villains by Necessity

                  Eve Forward · standalone novel · 1995

                  similar byrebellion and revolutionfantasy

                  A story of what happens when some of the bad guys left over from the ultimate triumph of Good and Light decide to do something about it.

                • Cover of Rebel of the Sands
                  Rebel of the Sands

                  series · 3 books · 2016

                  similar byrebellion and revolutionfantasy

                • Cover of Legacy of Orisha
                  Legacy of Orisha

                  series · 3 books · 2018

                  similar byrebellion and revolutionfantasy

                  Tomi Adeyemi's Legacy of Orïsha trilogy opens with Children of Blood and Bone, following Zélie, a girl from a persecuted caste of former magic-users, on a quest to restore magic to a kingdom that outlawed and hunted her people. Children of Virtue and Vengeance and Children of Anguish and Anarchy continue the fallout of that restoration as new factions fight over who gets to wield the returned power. The series draws on West African mythology and languages for its magic system and setting.

                • Cover of Shadowfell
                  Shadowfell

                  series · 3 books · 2012

                  similar byrebellion and revolutionfantasy

                • Cover of Inferno
                  Inferno

                  series · 2 books · 1976

                  similar byfantasyafterlife & underworld

                  In Inferno, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle send a science fiction writer to his death and drop him into a modern-dress version of Dante's nine circles of Hell, where he must reason his way toward understanding why he has been damned. The 1976 novel was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and the authors returned to the same character decades later in a sequel, Escape from Hell. Together the two books form a self-contained pair rather than an open-ended series.

                • Cover of The Crimson Moth
                  The Crimson Moth

                  series · 2 books · 2024

                  similar byrebellion and revolutionfantasy

                • Cover of Daughters of the Empty Throne
                  Daughters of the Empty Throne

                  series · 1 book · 2024

                  similar byrebellion and revolutionfantasy

                • Cover of The Gilded Ones / Deathless
                  The Gilded Ones / Deathless

                  series · 3 books · 2021

                  similar byrebellion and revolutionfantasy

                • Cover of A Wish in the Dark
                  A Wish in the Dark

                  Christina Soontornvat · standalone novel · 2020

                  similar byrebellion and revolutionfantasy

                  A Wish in the Dark is a 2020 children's fantasy novel by American author Christina Soontornvat. It is a retelling of the 1862 novel Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, and contains elements inspired by Thai culture. The book received positive reviews from critics and won a Newbery Honor and a Jane Addams Children's Book Award.

                • Cover of The Steel Seraglio
                  The Steel Seraglio

                  Mike Carey, Linda Carey & Louise Carey · standalone novel · 2012

                  similar byrebellion and revolutionfantasy

                  Once, in a city known as Bessa, there was a sultan named Bokhari Al-Bokhari, who was thrown down by the zealots of the ascetic Hakkim Mehdad. The sultan, his wives and children were put to the sword, while his 365 concubines were sent to a neighbouring caliph as tribute, Hakkim having no use for the pleasures of the flesh. But a day after the caravan had departed from Bessa, Hakkim discovered the terrible secret that the concubines had hidden from him. His reaction was swift and cruel. Kill the women of the harem forthwith, along with their children and maidservants. Let not one survive. This, then, is the tale - or tales - of how a remarkable group of women fight together to survive both the fury of Hakkim and the rigours of the desert. This is the tale of the forging of a rabble of concubines, children, camel-herds and thieves into an army of silk and steel. It is the tale of the redemption and rise of Bessa, fabled City of Women. And it is the tale of an act of kindness that carries the seed of death, and will return to bring darkness and the end of a dream...

                • Cover of Raybearer
                  Raybearer

                  series · 3 books · 2020

                  similar byfantasy+1 more

                  Jordan Ifueko's Raybearer follows Tarisai, raised in isolation and sent to compete for a spot among the emperor's council of magically bonded companions, only to discover she's been trained since childhood to kill the prince she's meant to protect. Redemptor continues her reign as empress, dealing with the political and spiritual fallout of the choices she made, while The Maid and the Crocodile follows a different protagonist in the same world. The trilogy draws on West African-inspired myth and court politics rather than the medieval-European default of much YA fantasy.

                • Cover of We Set the Dark on Fire
                  We Set the Dark on Fire

                  series · 2 books · 2019

                  similar byfantasyrebellion and revolution

                • Cover of Winter, White and Wicked
                  Winter, White and Wicked

                  series · 2 books · 2020

                  similar byfantasyrebellion and revolution

                • Cover of Geniuses (DiMartino)
                  Geniuses (DiMartino)

                  series · 2 books · 2016

                  similar byrebellion and revolutionfantasy

                • Cover of Ash Princess
                  Ash Princess

                  series · 3 books · 2018

                  similar byrebellion and revolutionfantasy