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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

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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 centered on witches and the practice of witchcraft — covens, hedge magic, familiars, and the witch's place in her community.
  • 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 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 Lily Bound
                  Lily Bound

                  series · 1 book · 2017

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                • Cover of Otherworld (Kelley Armstrong)
                  Otherworld (Kelley Armstrong)

                  series · 100 books · 1996

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                  Women of the Otherworld is Kelley Armstrong's long-running urban fantasy series about werewolves, witches, sorcerers, and other supernatural beings trying to pass as ordinary people in the contemporary world, told across thirteen novels plus assorted novellas published between 2001 and 2012. Each book tends to follow a different member of this hidden community while slowly building a shared, continuing world.

                • Cover of Jinx
                  Jinx

                  Meg Cabot · standalone novel · 2007

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                  Jinx is a 2007 young adult novel.

                • Cover of Witch
                  Witch

                  Christopher Pike · standalone novel · 1990

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                  From Publishers Weekly In this hokey, meandering novel, Julia is a girl gifted with a healing touch and the power to glimpse the future. When she sees a vision of her best friend's boyfriend, Jim, shot and bleeding to death, she does her best to keep him out of danger. But then another friend is shot while witnessing a gas station holdup, and Julia and Jim set out to wreak revenge on the gunman. Meanwhile, Julia's best friend discovers that the gunman just happens to be the deranged former boyfriend of Kary, the recently deceased half-sister Julia never knew. Julia's mother--also a healer--had died in an attempt to save Kary's life. In another part of town, a carload of good witches is hot on Julia's trail, determined to keep her from abusing her powers. Typically, Pike's writing is peppy enough to animate his most tangled plots; here, however, his style becomes choppy and unconvincing--unable to sustain the coincidence-riddled story. In addition, the text is littered with sexist one-liners which, along with a humorless running "joke," are as irritating as they are offensive. Ages 13-up. Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

                • Cover of Damask Circle
                  Damask Circle

                  series · 3 books · 2001

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                • Cover of Gale Family
                  Gale Family

                  series · 3 books · 2009

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                  Tanya Huff's urban fantasy trilogy follows Alysha Gale, a member of a Canadian family whose charms can reshape reality, after she inherits her grandmother's junk shop in Calgary and discovers it doubles as a gateway into the fae world. Across The Enchantment Emporium, The Wild Ways, and The Future Falls, different Gale women take the lead as the family is repeatedly called on to contain magical trouble the ordinary world can't handle.

                • Cover of Wicked (Nancy Holder and Debbie Viguié)
                  Wicked (Nancy Holder and Debbie Viguié)

                  series · 5 books · 2002

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                • OG
                  Otherworld (Yasmine Galenorn)

                  series · 50 books · 2006

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                  Supernatural Suburbia

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                • Cover of The Secret Circle
                  The Secret Circle

                  series · 8 books · 1992

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                  The Secret Circle is a supernatural, young-adult series of books created by L. J. Smith. The narrative follows the character of Cassie Blake as she is initiated into a "Circle" of eleven other teenage witches and the danger that ensues when they accidentally unleash a dark force upon their town. Matters are further complicated when Cassie finds herself in a love triangle that threatens to tear the Circle apart.

                • Cover of The Hollows
                  The Hollows

                  series · 39 books · 2004

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                • Cover of Seriously Wicked
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                  series · 3 books · 2015

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                • Cover of Collars and Curses
                  Collars and Curses

                  Sharon Skinner · standalone novel · 2017

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                  Think being a High School sophomore is hard? Try doing it when your messed up genetic code turns you into a wolf every full moon. Not only does Merissa have to deal with high school divas, bullies and pop quizzes, she also has to hide the awkward truth that once a month she really does get bitchy. And just when she thinks she's found someone she to whom she can actually relate, her new classmate Bree turns out to be an arrogant witch. Literally. If they weren't the only non-Norms in the entire town of Fair Glen—aside from the annoying half-Elf, Jeryd, who shows up and complicates things—Merissa might not give Bree the time of day. But when Bree is drawn into a curse that causes chaos at school and threatens the town, Merissa must find a way to vanquish the dark power behind the curse and keep her parents from finding out about it. All without failing biology.

                • Cover of Dark Swan
                  Dark Swan

                  series · 4 books · 2008

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                • Cover of Sweep / Wicca (UK)
                  Sweep / Wicca (UK)

                  series · 15 books · 2001

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                • Cover of The Phoenix Chronicles
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                • Cover of Shadows of Evil
                  Shadows of Evil

                  Cheryel Hutton · standalone novel · 2008

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                  "Kia must learn to trust—before the evil in her house destroys them all. For Kia Wolfe, moving to an isolated mountaintop is an act of independence from her demanding family and ex-fiancé. She's literally dreamed about the regal old house for years, and for the first time in her life she feels at home. She's here to stay, even though the house's history of violent deaths is enough to scare off most people. Garrett McKnight, owner of the contracting firm Kia has hired to renovate her house, is wary of the new resident. Emotionally bruised and battered by a self-centered ex-wife, he can't get around the fact that there's something about Kia that both attracts him and sets him on edge. And when Kia dabbles in a bit of Wicca, accidentally unleashing a hidden evil, it's tempting to walk away and leave her to her to her fate. But he can't. Not when four people have died in that house." – from this book's product page on Samhain's website as of 2016-11-03.

                • Cover of Bewitching Hour
                  Bewitching Hour

                  Anne Stuart · standalone novel · 1986

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                  She believes in tarot cards, white magic and premonitions - he doesn't. She believes in reincarnation and past-life regressions - he doesn't. Bur he's not a skeptic where love at first sight is concerned - she is! That why he's learning to mix love potions.

                • Cover of 666 Park Avenue
                  666 Park Avenue

                  series · 3 books · 2011

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                • Cover of Rosie O'Grady's Paranormal Bar and Grill
                  Rosie O'Grady's Paranormal Bar and Grill

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                • Cover of Paranormalcy
                  Paranormalcy

                  series · 3 books · 2010

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                  Paranormalcy is a series of young adult urban fantasy novels by American author Kiersten White, beginning with the entry of the same name. The story focuses on a girl named Evie, a member of a special international police force assigned to paranormal cases. As the tale progresses, Evie's professional duties begin to conflict with her growing desire for a normal life.

                • Cover of The Blood Journals
                  The Blood Journals

                  series · 2 books · 2011

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                • Cover of Colin McLaren / Claire Moffat
                  Colin McLaren / Claire Moffat

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