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 Lexia

anchored on:our worldcontemporary

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 Atlas (Olivie Blake)
                  Atlas (Olivie Blake)

                  series · 3 books · 2020

                  similar byour worldcontemporary+4 more

                  Olivie Blake's Atlas trilogy follows six magical scholars recruited into a secretive society that grants near-limitless magical resources in exchange for a mortal cost only revealed after they've already committed. The Atlas Paradox and The Atlas Complex escalate the group's rivalries and the price of the power they've been given. The series began as a self-published web serial before its traditional re-release.

                • Cover of Dorina Basarab, Dhampir
                  Dorina Basarab, Dhampir

                  series · 12 books · 2007

                  part of Cassandra Palmer

                  similar bycontemporaryour worldurban fantasy+1 more

                  Karen Chance's Dorina Basarab novellas spin off her Cassandra Palmer urban-fantasy universe to follow Dory, a dhampir - half-vampire, half-human - who hunts rogue vampires and other supernatural threats through a modern world of vampire senates and old-world power politics. Starting with Midnight's Daughter, the stories lean on Dory's short temper and violent competence, and her fraught relationship with her vampire father, rather than the longer per-book plots of the parent series. Several entries were released as shorter novellas and ebook-first stories rather than full novels.

                • Cover of Anita Blake
                  Anita Blake

                  series · 42 books · 1993

                  similar bycontemporaryurban fantasydarktensevampires+1 more

                  Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter is a series of urban fantasy novels, short stories, and comic books by Laurell K. Hamilton. The books have sold more than six million copies; many have made The New York Times Best Seller list.

                • Cover of Dark-Hunter
                  Dark-Hunter

                  series · 65 books · 2000

                  similar bycontemporaryparanormal romanceour world+3 more

                  Dark-Hunter is a term from a paranormal romance and fantasy series by Sherrilyn Kenyon. Kenyon began writing the series in 1986 in horror, fantasy and science fiction magazines.

                • Cover of Red Letter Days
                  Red Letter Days

                  series · 2 books · 2005

                  completed

                  similar byour worldcontemporarytense+2 more

                • Cover of Five Moons Rising
                  Five Moons Rising

                  Lise MacTague · standalone novel · 2017

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryurban fantasyparanormal romancedarktensevampires+1 more

                  Unknown to regular citizens, nightmarish creatures lurk in the dark underbelly of human civilization. The presence of these supranormals (“supras”)—werewolves, vampires, demons—is a closely guarded government secret, as is the existence of a cadre of specially engineered Hunters charged with exterminating them. Code-named Malice, Hunter Mary Alice Nolan was genetically modified and rigorously trained to use her great strength, heightened senses, and killer instincts to track and eliminate supras who prey on the innocent. A loner by choice, her only real link to the human world is her close connection to her mother and sister—until the unthinkable happens… Ruri Samson has been a werewolf for more than a century and is comfortably situated as the Beta of her peaceful pack. Until she is betrayed by the woman she loves and an evil outsider massacres her Alpha and his most loyal followers. Barely escaping with her life, Ruri is forced to tread the perilous path of a lone wolf while vowing vengeance against the usurper and his minions. Although these two powerful women should rightfully despise each other, fate will soon compel them to join forces on a dangerous quest to avenge their loved ones—and will ignite a forbidden passion that neither of them ever imagined.

                • Cover of Thrall
                  Thrall

                  series · 3 books · 2006

                  similar bycontemporaryurban fantasyparanormal romanceour world+4 more

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

                  series · 100 books · 1996

                  similar bycontemporaryurban fantasyour world+1 more

                  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 Meredith Gentry
                  Meredith Gentry

                  series · 10 books · 2000

                  similar bycontemporaryurban fantasyparanormal romanceour world+2 more

                  The Merry Gentry series is a series of urban fantasy novels by New York Times bestselling author Laurell K. Hamilton. The series is told through the lens of the titular character Meredith "Merry" Gentry, a faerie princess turned private investigator in a world where faeries exist and are known to the general public. The first book in the series, A Kiss of Shadows, was released by Del Rey on October 3, 2000. There are currently nine books in the series.

                • Cover of Guild Hunter
                  Guild Hunter

                  series · 23 books · 2009

                  similar bycontemporaryparanormal romanceour world+3 more

                  Guild Hunter is set in a world where angels rule openly over human society, served by vampires bound to them for a century of servitude and policed in part by hunters who track down vampires who break their bonds. Nalini Singh's series follows Guild Hunter Elena Deveraux after she is drawn into the orbit of Raphael, the archangel who governs New York, in a saga that widens to follow the broader archangel-run world across many further novels.

                • GU
                  Guardians Universe

                  series · 17 books · 2006

                  similar bycontemporaryurban fantasytensevampires+3 more

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

                  series · 4 books · 2011

                  similar bycontemporaryour worldparanormal romance+1 more

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

                  series · 7 books · 1994

                  similar bycontemporaryour world+4 more

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

                • Cover of Black Dagger Brotherhood
                  Black Dagger Brotherhood

                  series · 40 books · 2005

                  part of Black Dagger

                  similar bycontemporaryparanormal romancevampires+2 more

                  The Black Dagger Brotherhood is an ongoing series of paranormal romance books by author J. R. Ward. The series focuses on a society of vampire warriors who live together and defend their race against de-souled humans called lessers. The first book in the series was published in 2005.

                • Cover of Shifters / Werecats
                  Shifters / Werecats

                  series · 7 books · 2007

                  similar bycontemporaryour worldurban fantasytense

                • Cover of The Midnight Breed
                  The Midnight Breed

                  series · 29 books · 2007

                  similar bycontemporaryparanormal romanceour worldvampires+2 more

                  The Midnight Breed follows a secret species of vampire warriors descended from an ancient alien bloodline, sworn to protect humanity from rogue vampires who have succumbed to bloodlust while contending with a prophecy tied to their own survival. Lara Adrian's long-running paranormal romance series, beginning with Kiss of Midnight, follows different Breed warriors and their human partners across twenty-five novels.

                • Cover of Darkness (Stacey Marie Brown)
                  Darkness (Stacey Marie Brown)

                  series · 6 books · 2013

                  similar bycontemporary+4 more

                  Stacey Marie Brown's Darkness series follows Ember Brycin, who begins seeing monstrous creatures that shouldn't exist after witnessing her mother's murder and is committed to a facility for troubled teens, where a mysterious biker named Eli Dragen draws her into a hidden supernatural underworld hunting her as prey. The four core novels follow Ember's fight to survive that world, with a fifth book, West, extending the story further.

                • Cover of Vampire Huntress Legend
                  Vampire Huntress Legend

                  series · 15 books · 2003

                  completed

                  similar bycontemporaryurban fantasyvampires+3 more

                  L. A. Banks's Vampire Huntress Legend opens with Minion, introducing Damali Richards, a spoken-word artist and martial artist who moonlights as a vampire hunter. The urban fantasy series follows Damali across thirteen novels as she confronts escalating supernatural threats.

                • Cover of Night Huntress World
                  Night Huntress World

                  series · 2 books · 2010

                  part of Night Huntress

                  similar bycontemporaryparanormal romancevampires+3 more

                • Cover of Henry Fitzroy
                  Henry Fitzroy

                  series · 29 books · 1991

                  similar bycontemporaryurban fantasyvampires+2 more

                  These short-fiction collections gather stories built around Henry Fitzroy, the illegitimate son of Henry VIII turned centuries-old vampire and romance novelist, a recurring character from Tanya Huff's Blood Books urban-fantasy series. Rather than continuing that series' novel-length plots, the collections give Henry shorter, self-contained cases and encounters set in the same "Blood 'Verse." They function as a minor spinoff for readers already invested in the character from the main Blood Books.

                • Cover of Jill Conrad
                  Jill Conrad

                  series · 3 books · 2011

                  similar byour worldcontemporarytensevampires+3 more

                • Cover of House of Night
                  House of Night

                  series · 20 books · 2007

                  similar bycontemporaryvampires+3 more

                  House of Night is a series of young adult vampire-themed fantasy novels by American author P. C. Cast and her daughter Kristin Cast. It follows the adventures of Zoey Redbird, a 16-year-old girl who is "marked", becomes a fledgling vampyre and is required to attend the House of Night boarding school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Books in the series have been on the New York Times Best Seller list for 63 weeks and have sold over seven million copies in North America, and more than ten million books worldwide, in 39 countries.

                • Cover of Primal Instinct
                  Primal Instinct

                  series · 9 books · 2009

                  similar bycontemporaryparanormal romanceour world+1 more

                • Cover of Mystwalker
                  Mystwalker

                  series · 4 books · 2012

                  similar bycontemporaryparanormal romanceour world+1 more