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 Highfire

anchored on:urban fantasydragonsnorth americacontemporaryhumorlast of their kind+2 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 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 Captain Underpants
                  Captain Underpants

                  series · 15 books · 1989

                  similar byfunnycontemporarynorth americahumorfriendship+1 more

                  Captain Underpants is an American illustrated children's novel series and multimedia franchise created by author and illustrator Dav Pilkey. The series revolves around two fourth graders, George Beard and Harold Hutchins, living in Piqua, Ohio, and Captain Underpants, an aptly named superhero from one of the boys' homemade comic books, who accidentally becomes real when George and Harold hypnotize their cruel, bossy, and ill-tempered principal, Mr. Krupp.

                • Cover of Monster
                  Monster

                  A. Lee Martinez · standalone novel · 2009

                  similar byfunnycontemporaryurban fantasydragonshumornorth americafantasy+1 more

                  Meet Monster. Meet Judy. Two humans who don't like each other much, but together must fight dragons, fire-breathing felines, trolls, Inuit walrus dogs, and a crazy cat lady - for the future of the universe.Monster runs a pest control agency. He's overworked and has domestic troubles - like having the girlfriend from hell.Judy works the night shift at the local Food Plus Mart. Not the most glamorous life, but Judy is happy. No one bothers her and if she has to spell things out for the night-manager every now and again, so be it.But when Judy finds a Yeti in the freezer aisle eating all the Rocky Road, her life collides with Monster's in a rather alarming fashion. Because Monster doesn't catch raccoons; he catches the things that go bump in the night. Things like ogres, trolls, and dragons.Oh, and his girlfriend from Hell? She actually is from Hell.

                • Cover of The Good Fairies of New York
                  The Good Fairies of New York

                  Martin Millar · standalone novel · 1992

                  similar byfunnycontemporaryurban fantasyfriendshiphumornorth america+1 more

                  Finding themselves in the very unusual world of Manhattan, a pair of Scottish thimble fairies apply their folk wisdom to assist a pair of down-and-out humans, including Kerry, who struggles with a colostomy bag, and Dinnie, who exhibits anti-social behaviors.

                • Cover of Jeremy Leclerc
                  Jeremy Leclerc

                  series · 11 books · 2007

                  similar byfunnycontemporaryurban fantasynorth americahumor+1 more

                • Cover of Charlie Asher
                  Charlie Asher

                  series · 2 books · 2006

                  similar byfunnycontemporarynorth americaurban fantasyhumor+1 more

                • Cover of Zombie Baseball Beatdown
                  Zombie Baseball Beatdown

                  Paolo Bacigalupi · standalone novel · 2013

                  similar byfunnycontemporarynorth americafriendshiphumoradventurous

                  While practicing for their next baseball game, thirteen-year-old friends Rabi, Miguel, and Joe discover that the nefarious activities of the Delbe, Iowa, meatpacking plant have caused cows to turn into zombies.

                • Cover of Knight Life
                  Knight Life

                  series · 3 books · 1987

                  completed

                  similar byfunnycontemporaryurban fantasynorth america+2 more

                • Cover of The Shambling Guides
                  The Shambling Guides

                  series · 2 books · 2013

                  similar byfunnycontemporaryurban fantasynorth americahumor

                • Cover of Gil's All Fright Diner
                  Gil's All Fright Diner

                  A. Lee Martinez · standalone novel · 2005

                  similar byfunnycontemporaryurban fantasyhumornorth america+1 more

                  Gil's All Fright Diner is an urban fantasy novel by A. Lee Martinez first published in 2005.

                • Cover of Department of Peculiar Science / Another Coop Heist
                  Department of Peculiar Science / Another Coop Heist

                  series · 2 books · 2016

                  similar byfunnycontemporaryurban fantasyhumoradventurousnorth america

                • Cover of Black Dragon
                  Black Dragon

                  series · 2 books · 1983

                  similar bycontemporarydragonsnorth americaurban fantasyfriendshipfantasy

                  R. A. MacAvoy's Tea with the Black Dragon pairs Martha Macnamara, a folk musician searching for her missing daughter, with Mayland Long, a courtly stranger who reveals himself to be a dragon living in human form, as they investigate a computer-fraud scheme in 1980s San Francisco. Its low-key blend of contemporary mystery and gentle fantasy proved popular enough to spawn a sequel, Twisting the Rope, following the same pair into a new case years later.

                • Cover of Devilish
                  Devilish

                  Maureen Johnson · standalone novel · 2006

                  similar byfunnycontemporarynorth americafriendshipurban fantasyfantasy

                  Jane Jarvis, a senior at a Catholic girl's school in Providence, Rhode Island, tries to save her best friend by making a pact with a demon--in the form of a cupcake-eating, very friendly teenage girl.

                • Cover of Pine Cove
                  Pine Cove

                  series · 3 books · 1992

                  similar byfunnycontemporarynorth americahumorfantasy+1 more

                  Pine Cove gathers three loosely connected comic novels — Practical Demonkeeping, The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, The Stupidest Angel — that Christopher Moore set in the same fictional small town on the California coast, recycling some of the same eccentric residents even as each book follows its own standalone plot (the first centers on a drifter's demon and the reluctant wizard trying to control it). It's part of the larger shared world Moore uses across most of his comic novels, rather than a continuing story arc.

                • Cover of InCryptid
                  InCryptid

                  series · 53 books · 2012

                  similar bycontemporaryurban fantasyadventurousnorth america+1 more

                  InCryptid is a series of urban fantasy novels by American author Seanan McGuire, published by DAW Books. They follow multiple generations of a family of cryptozoologists who protect supernatural beings from discovery by humankind.

                • Cover of The Dresden Files
                  The Dresden Files

                  series · 56 books · 2000

                  similar bycontemporaryurban fantasynorth america+2 more

                  The Dresden Files is an urban fantasy series written by American author Jim Butcher. The novels are narrated from the first-person perspective of Harry Dresden, a private detective and wizard, as he investigates supernatural disturbances in contemporary Chicago. The first entry, Storm Front, was published in 2000 by Roc Books.

                • Cover of Flora & Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures
                  Flora & Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures

                  Kate DiCamillo · standalone novel · 2013

                  similar byfunnycontemporarynorth americafriendshiphumorfantasy

                  Flora & Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures is a children's novel by American author Kate DiCamillo and illustrated by K.G. Campbell, published in 2013 by Candlewick Press. It tells the story of Flora Belle Buckman and a squirrel named Ulysses. The illustrations include full-page and small pencil drawings, together with comic-book panels describing the gang's adventures.

                • Cover of Hellhole
                  Hellhole

                  Gina Damico · standalone novel · 2015

                  similar byfunnycontemporarynorth americafriendshipurban fantasyhumorfantasy

                  A devil is a bad influence... There was a time when geeky, squeaky-clean Max Kilgore would never lie or steal or even think about murder. Then he accidentally unearths a devil, and Max’s choices are no longer his own. The big red guy has a penchant for couch surfing and junk food—and you should never underestimate evil on a sugar high. With the help of Lore, a former goth girl who knows a thing or two about the dark side, Max is racing against the clock to get rid of the houseguest from hell before time, and all the Flamin’ Hot Cheetos this side of the fiery abyss, run out.

                • Cover of Pals in Peril / M. T. Anderson's Thrilling Tales
                  Pals in Peril / M. T. Anderson's Thrilling Tales

                  series · 6 books · 2005

                  similar byfunnycontemporarynorth americafriendship+2 more

                • Cover of The Rest of Us Just Live Here
                  The Rest of Us Just Live Here

                  Patrick Ness · standalone novel · 2015

                  similar byfunnycontemporaryfriendshipurban fantasynorth americafantasy

                  What if you aren't the Chosen One? The one who's supposed to fight the zombies, or the soul-eating ghosts, or whatever the heck this new thing is, with the blue lights and the death? What if you're like Mikey? Who just wants to graduate and go to prom and maybe finally work up the courage to ask Henna out before someone goes and blows up the high school. Again. Because sometimes there are problems bigger than this week's end of the world, and sometimes you just have to find the extraordinary in your ordinary life. Even if your best friend is worshipped by mountain lions.

                • Cover of The Misadventures of Grayson
                  The Misadventures of Grayson

                  series · 2 books · 2025

                  similar byfunnycontemporarynorth americafriendshiphumor+2 more

                • Cover of The Iron Druid Chronicles
                  The Iron Druid Chronicles

                  series · 70 books · 2011

                  similar bycontemporaryurban fantasy+4 more

                  The Iron Druid Chronicles is a series of urban fantasy novels, novellas, novelettes and short stories, written by Kevin Hearne and published by Del Rey Books. All the books, including short stories, have recorded audiobooks narrated by Luke Daniels and Christopher Ragland

                • Cover of Good Omens
                  Good Omens

                  series · 2 books · 1990

                  similar bycontemporaryfunnyhumorfantasy+1 more

                  Good Omens is Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's 1990 comic fantasy novel in which an angel and a demon, both grown fond of life on Earth, try to head off an apocalypse foretold in a seventeenth-century witch's uncannily accurate prophecies, complicated by the fact that no one can find the misplaced Antichrist. Paired with it here is The Quite Nice and Fairly Accurate Good Omens: Script Book, a companion volume collecting the screenplay for the television adaptation rather than a second novel.

                • Cover of Love Story
                  Love Story

                  series · 3 books · 1995

                  similar byfunnycontemporaryhumornorth america+2 more

                  Christopher Moore's Love Story trilogy opens with Bloodsucking Fiends, a comic horror-romance about a young San Francisco woman turned into a vampire. You Suck and Bite Me continue the story across the following two novels, keeping Moore's irreverent, comedic take on vampire fiction.

                • Cover of Gods Behaving Badly
                  Gods Behaving Badly

                  Marie Phillips · standalone novel · 2007

                  similar byfunnycontemporaryurban fantasyhumorfantasy

                  Gods Behaving Badly is a novel by the British author Marie Phillips. It was first published by Jonathan Cape in 2007. Set in London, it tells the tale of the twelve gods of Mount Olympus living in a rundown flat as their powers wane. It was selected for The Atlantic's 1book140 Twitter book club's book of the month for August 2011.