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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 Pentacle

anchored on:horrorcontemporarydarkdark fantasyundeadour world+2 more

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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 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 Jerusalem's Lot
                  Jerusalem's Lot

                  series · 3 books · 1975

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryhorrordarktense+1 more

                  Stephen King's 1975 novel 'Salem's Lot follows writer Ben Mears as he returns to his childhood town of Jerusalem's Lot, Maine, only to discover that its residents are being turned into vampires by a newly arrived stranger. It transplants Gothic vampire horror into a small New England community, tracking that community's collapse under a supernatural siege. It is a single, self-contained novel.

                • Cover of The Damnation Game
                  The Damnation Game

                  Clive Barker · standalone novel · 1985

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryhorrordarkdark fantasytense

                  Marty Strauss is a compulsive gambler fresh out of prison when he's hired as bodyguard for Joseph Whitehead, a reclusive tycoon whose fortune and continued existence trace back to a bargain struck decades earlier, during World War II, with a man named Mamoulian. That bargain is coming due: Mamoulian, who commands powers reaching well past death, wants what he's owed, and Whitehead's household -- his wife, his daughter Carys, his previous bodyguard -- is caught in the middle of a decades-old debt finally being called in. Marty, out of his depth from the start, finds himself the only one willing to stand against Mamoulian. Clive Barker's first novel.

                • Cover of The Dark
                  The Dark

                  James Herbert · standalone novel · 1980

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryhorrordarkdark fantasytense

                  WorldCat: It came like a malignant shadow with seductive promises of power. And somewhere in the night, a small girl smiled as her mother burned. Asylum inmates slaughtered their attendants. In slimy tunnels, once-human creatures gathered. Madness raged as the lights began to fade and humanity was attacked by an ancient, unstoppable evil.

                • Cover of Necroscope
                  Necroscope

                  series · 26 books · 1982

                  completed

                  similar byhorrordarkundeadcontemporarytense+2 more

                  Brian Lumley's Necroscope opens an eighteen-book horror saga (1982-2017) centered on Harry Keogh, a man who can speak with the dead. Harry turns that gift against Thibor Ferenczy, a vampire buried since the Middle Ages, and against Ferenczy's agent Boris Dragosani, a Soviet spy who has learned to tear secrets from corpses in pursuit of world domination. Later volumes follow Harry's descendants and successors through further wars against the vampiric Wamphyri, across sequel trilogies and story collections.

                • Cover of Horns
                  Horns

                  Joe Hill · standalone novel · 2010

                  similar byour worldcontemporarydarkdark fantasyhorrordemons

                  WorldCat: After his childhood sweetheart is brutally killed and suspicion falls on him, Ig Parrish goes on a drinking binge and wakes up with horns on his head, hate in his heart, and an incredible new power which he uses in the name of vengeance.

                • Cover of Cell
                  Cell

                  Stephen King · standalone novel · 2006

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryhorrordarktense

                  In Cell, King taps into readers fears of technological warfare and terrorism. Mobile phones deliver the apocalypse to millions of unsuspecting humans by wiping their brains of any humanity, leaving only aggressive and destructive impulses behind. Those without cell phones, like illustrator Clayton Riddell and his small band of "normies," must fight for survival, and their journey to find Clayton's estranged wife and young son rockets the book toward resolution.

                • Cover of Carrion
                  Carrion

                  Gary Brandner · standalone novel · 1986

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryundeadhorrordarktense

                  Synopsis - He is the nation’s new hero. For he possesses the most awesome sill any man can master – he can reach beyond the grave and reawaken the dear departed. He can bring the dead back to life! But their souls no longer inhabit their resurrected bodies. The creatures that now walk the earth are carrion – dead flesh! They are mindless things that only know he is responsible for their agony… As their bodies decay into hideous travesties of what they once were, they have only one mission left – To destroy their savior.

                • Cover of Ghost Monster
                  Ghost Monster

                  Simon Clark · standalone novel · 2009

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryundeadhorrordarktensecurses

                  The local children call it "ghost monster," a disturbing mosaic on a mausoleum wall in the old cemetery. For centuries the grim portrait has imprisoned the spirits of the notorious Justice Murrain and his vicious gang of misfits. But now somone has taken the portrait, and the spirits of the sadists are free to enjoy the darkest of pleasures.

                • Cover of Michael
                  Michael

                  Andrea Dean Van Scoyoc · standalone novel · 2006

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryundeadhorrordarkdark fantasytense

                  "Taylor Carrington has no friends. Very athletic and a member of his college's La Crosse team, no one cares about him. Taylor spends his time in an ancient and abandoned cemetery, called The Lands Down Cemetery. No one buried in the Lands Down Cemetery until Hanson Blakely's interment. Taylor meets a strange young man in the cemetery named Michael Paxton. But what Taylor doesn't know is that Michael is not quite what he...or rather...it...pretended to be the night they met. Michael is not dead, he is not undead...he is more than dead...and he has set his sights on Taylor. Taylor Carrington is in for the battle of his life against a being as old as time itself for his life...his soul...and his body. Can Taylor escape the clutches of the malevolent spirit? How can he defeat an evil that seemingly can't be stopped?" — quoted from this book's ebook product page on Amazon as of 2018-01-30.

                • Cover of The Cold One
                  The Cold One

                  Christopher Pike · standalone novel · 1995

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryhorrordarkdark fantasytensedemons

                  Existing only to destroy humankind, a demonic force, disguised as a beautiful woman, ravages the lives of several people, including former street gang member Jerry Washington and journalist Peter James.

                • Cover of The Night Boat
                  The Night Boat

                  Robert R. McCammon · standalone novel · 1980

                  similar bycontemporaryundeadhorrordarktensecurses

                  WorldCat: The story begins with a vividly written prologue in which a German U-boat--sometimes known as an "Iron Coffin"--Attacks an unsuspecting merchant vessel, and is itself attacked by a pair of Allied sub chasers. The action then shifts to the present day and to the idyllic Caribbean island of Coquina, where life is about to change in unimaginable ways. David Moore, a young man with a tragic and haunted past, is skin-diving in the waters off Coquina, searching for the salvageable remnants of shipwrecks. He accidentally detonates a long-unexploded depth charge, uncovering and releasing a submarine that has lain beneath those waters, virtually intact, for decades. The battered vessel that rises to the surface contains a bizarre and terrifying cargo that will transform a once peaceful island into a landscape of unrelenting nightmare. The Night Boat is a story of cannibalism, ancient voodoo curses, and shambling, undead entities filled with a bottomless rage and an equally bottomless hunger. But it is also the story of a past that refuses to die, that lies in wait just beneath the surface of the unsuspecting present.

                • Cover of Rose Madder
                  Rose Madder

                  Stephen King · standalone novel · 1995

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryhorrordarktense

                  Rose Madder is a horror/fantasy novel by American writer Stephen King, published in 1995. It deals with the effects of domestic violence and, unusually for a King novel, relies for its fantastic element on Greek mythology. In his memoir, On Writing, King states that Rose Madder and Insomnia are "stiff, trying-too-hard novels."

                • Cover of Demonata
                  Demonata

                  series · 10 books · 2005

                  similar bydarkhorrorcontemporarydark fantasytensedemons+1 more

                  The Demonata is a young adult horror/fantasy series by author Darren Shan.

                • Cover of Mirror
                  Mirror

                  Graham Masterton · standalone novel · 1988

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryhorrordarkdark fantasydemons

                  The antique mirror witnesses the gruesome murder of an eight-year-old child-star on the cusp of fame. Now the mirror hangs in the home of Martin Williams, washed-up Hollywood screenwriter and the dead child's biggest fan. But blood never forgets, and the mirror has been transformed into a doorway between the land of the living and a realm of demonic horror.

                • Cover of Lights Out
                  Lights Out

                  Nate Southard · standalone novel · 2012

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryhorrordarkdark fantasytense

                  ● "Burnham State Maximum Security Penitentiary holds the worst criminals humanity has to offer. Murderers, rapists, and others who have preyed upon humanity populate the prison, creating a food chain of violence and fear. But something new has come to Burnham, something ancient and powerful. It is deadly and merciless, a force of pure evil. And it is hungry. Now, those who call Burnham home must band together if they hope to survive. After years of being called monsters, they will face something much worse, and they will know how it feels to be prey." ― quoted from this book's Amazon product page as of 2025-02-22.

                • Cover of Fiend
                  Fiend

                  Alma Katsu · standalone novel · 2025

                  similar byour worldcontemporarydarkdark fantasytensedemonscurses

                  Imagine if the Sackler family had a demon at their beck and call. The Berisha family runs one of the largest import-export companies in the world, and they’ve always been lucky. Their rivals suffer strokes. Inconvenient buildings catch on fire. Earthquakes swallow up manufacturing plants, destroying harmful evidence. Things always seem to work out for the Berishas. They’re blessed. At least that is what Zef, the patriarch, has always told his three children. And each of them knows their place in the family—Dardan, as the only male heir, must prepare to take over as keeper of the Berisha secrets, Maris’s most powerful contribution, much to her dismay, will be to marry strategically, and Nora’s job, as the youngest, is to just stay out of the way. But when things stop going as planned, and the family blessing starts looking more like a curse, the Berishas begin to splinter, each hatching their own secret scheme. They didn’t get to be one of the richest families in the world without spilling a little blood, but this time, it might be their own.

                • Cover of The Library at Mount Char
                  The Library at Mount Char

                  Scott Hawkins · standalone novel · 2015

                  similar byour worldcontemporarydarkdark fantasyhorrortense

                  The Library at Mount Char is a contemporary fantasy/horror novel written by Scott Hawkins. It is his first novel.

                • Cover of The Lost
                  The Lost

                  Jonathan Aycliffe · standalone novel · 1996

                  similar bycontemporaryundeadhorrordarkdark fantasy+1 more

                  From the dust jacket flaps of the US HarperPrism first edition: "It all started when the gypsy fortune-teller looked him in the eye - and ran away screaming. Michael was a teacher at a prep school in Cambridge. Barely thirty, he felt immensely old. He was tired of his life, tired of his job, tired of dreary England. An though he didn't know it yet - tired of Sophie and her safe undemanding love. So Michael took a sabbatical and went to Romania, hoping to claim the property his grandparents had abandoned after World War II. He found he was a titled lord, and more - the owner of an ancient stronghold in the Transylvanian Alps, Castel Vlaicu. Thus, Michael Feraru became Count Mihai Vlahuta. It was all a lark; or at most, an adventure. Until the gypsy recognized him - or something about him - in the streets of Bucharest. Until he picked up the doll. And of course, the girl - the unexpected, unexplainable, irresistible dark-eyed girl. At Castel Vlaicu, Michael was to learn of an evil older than time, an evil that reached back to the very origins of his shattered family - and into his own dark future. He was to learn the secret of the strigoï. The undead. Not vampires. Something far, far worse. And far more seductive... The Lost is a novel of dark discoveries, of a man who loses his soul, and more, in the search for his secret destiny. It is a story of passion and horror, and of the doomed love that links the two."

                • Cover of The Devouring
                  The Devouring

                  series · 3 books · 2008

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryhorrordarktense+2 more

                • Cover of Death Spell
                  Death Spell

                  David Sodergren · standalone novel · 2025

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryhorrordarkdark fantasytensedemons

                  ● "25 years ago, young businessman Ron Jarvis made a sinister deal that changed his life forever. The cost was high...but who can put a price on power? Now, Ron is the CEO of a global media empire, and one of the richest men in the world. And yet, to help his daughter, Ron will once more seek out the architect of that hideous pact, bringing death, despair, and total destruction to all around him in a jaw-dropping frenzy of outrageous, bloody carnage." ― quoted from this book's Amazon product page as 2025-09-28.

                • Cover of The Fog
                  The Fog

                  James Herbert · standalone novel · 1975

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryhorrordarktense

                  The Fog is a horror novel by English writer James Herbert, published in 1975. It is about a deadly fog that drives its victims insane when they come into contact with it.

                • Cover of Charlie Manx / Christmasland
                  Charlie Manx / Christmasland

                  series · 3 books · 2013

                  similar bycontemporaryour worldhorrordark fantasy+2 more

                  Joe Hill's NOS4A2 introduces Charlie Manx, a supernatural predator who abducts children in his Rolls-Royce Wraith and carries them to Christmasland, a frozen otherworld reached along roads that exist only in the minds of the gifted. Victoria McQueen, who has a similar power to find impossible roads, spends the novel and the companion story Wraith trying to stop him — a linked pursuit across decades rather than a conventional numbered series.

                • Cover of Hexes
                  Hexes

                  Tom Piccirilli · standalone novel · 1999

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryhorrordarkdark fantasytense

                  "Matthew Galen came back home to Summerfell for a reason. Not to visit his family. Not to relive childhood memories. No, he came back because his best friend was in a hospital for the criminally insane — for crimes too unspeakable to believe. But Matthew knows the terrifying truth. The ultimate evil doesn't reside in his friend's twisted soul. It comes from a far darker place, a place only Matthew knows. And only Matthew can stop the evil — if he dares." — quoted from this book's Kindle page on Amazon as of 2018-04-26.

                • Cover of The Wicked Heart
                  The Wicked Heart

                  Christopher Pike · standalone novel · 1993

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryhorrordarktense+1 more

                  He did not want to kill. Dusty Shame was a high school senior, and a serial killer. Already he has murdered three young women, and he has more planned. Yet Dusty did not want to hurt anybody. There was something inside him, or perhaps outside him, that compelled him to kill. Sheila Hardolt has lost her best friend to Dusty's insane attacks. It will be her task to probe the clues Dusty has left at the site of each of his murders. Clues that will point her into the past -- to a time when a large portion of mankind lost all sense of decency. There she will find the seed of Dusty's evil compulsion, the Wicked Heart, and the reason why it did not die the first time it was destroyed.