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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 Perception

anchored on:psychic powersnorth americacontemporarymysteriousyoung adultparanormal+4 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 Clare Fern
                  Clare Fern

                  series · 2 books · 2011

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                • Cover of The Body Finder
                  The Body Finder

                  series · 5 books · 2010

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                • Cover of Sleep No More
                  Sleep No More

                  Aprilynne Pike · standalone novel · 2014

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                  "Charlotte is a sixteen-year-old Oracle who is not supposed to interfere with her visions of the future, but when she foresees a classmate's murder, she realizes she must break the rules to stop the killer"-- Charlotte is a 16-yr-old Oracle who is not supposed to interfere with her visions of the future, but when she foresees a classmate's murder, she realizes she must break the rules to stop the killer. The plot contains profanity and graphic violence.

                • Cover of The Disappearance of Emily H.
                  The Disappearance of Emily H.

                  Barrie Summy · standalone novel · 2015

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                  Eighth-grader Raine, a new girl at Yielding Middle Schooi, uses her supernatural ability to see other people's memories to solve the disappearance of a teenaged girl.

                • Cover of Spirit and Dust
                  Spirit and Dust

                  Rosemary Clement-Moore · standalone novel · 2013

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                  Raised in a family of psychics and witches, teen Daisy Goodnight is happy to help local police solve cold cases but when the FBI seeks her talents, she becomes involved in a mess that even has the spirits terrified.

                • Cover of Blue Is for Nightmares
                  Blue Is for Nightmares

                  series · 5 books · 2003

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                  Blue Is for Nightmares is a young adult mystery novel and subsequent eponymous series by Laurie Faria Stolarz. The first book in the series, Blue is for Nightmares, was made an "ALA’s Young Adult Library Services Association as a Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers in 2005 and as a Popular Paperback for Young Adults in 2007."

                • Cover of Touch (Laurie Faria Stolarz)
                  Touch (Laurie Faria Stolarz)

                  series · 5 books · 2008

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                • Cover of Carolina Moon
                  Carolina Moon

                  Nora Roberts · standalone novel · 2000

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                  Tory Bodeen endured a difficult childhood shaped by her father's religious views and her special gift — the paranormal ability to see events about to happen or happening. Her world is devastated when her best friend, Hope Lavelle, is murdered and she feels that it was her fault. Now an adult, Tory returns to Progress, South Carolina to start her own business and face her past. She runs into old friends including her cousin Wade and Hope's family. When several people are killed, Tory has to use her paranormal ability to locate the killer.

                • Cover of After Obsession
                  After Obsession

                  Steven E. Wedel & Carrie Jones · standalone novel · 2011

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                  When Alan, a half-Navajo in touch with the spiritual mysticism of his ancestors, meets Aimee, a gifted psychic in his new high school, they realize they've had precognitive dreams of each other and that they must confront an evil spirit that has been responsible for mysterious deaths in the river in their small Maine town for hundreds of years and which is now haunting Alan's cousin Courtney.

                • Cover of Darkness Within
                  Darkness Within

                  Steven Pajak · standalone novel · 2008

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                  ● " Reluctant psychic Susan Moore witnessed the brutal slaying of a young boy in a vision. Despite her psychic gifts, she is unable to save the boy from a brutal ending. In a small Texas town, Sheriff Steven Ames is desperate to catch a killer before tragedy strikes again. When fate brings Ames and Moore together, the two join forces to stop the killer before tragedy strikes again. In the midst of chaos and danger Susan must come to terms with the limitations of her psychic abilities while Ames must battle his own feelings of inadequacy and deal with a town that no longer has faith in his abilities as a peace officer." ― paraphrased from this book's product page on Amazon.com as of 2022-08-02.

                • Cover of Distant Dreams
                  Distant Dreams

                  Alicia Rades · standalone novel · 2016

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                  "Kai Watson is only 16, but she's never had a real dream in her life. Each night, her spirit leaves her body and travels to a new location. After witnessing the brutal murder of upperclassman Darla Baxter while astral traveling, Kai is determined to stay out of it. She never saw the murderer's face, and who would believe her anyway? When her travels are replaced with nightmares, Kai must take the mystery into her own hands to find closure. On her search for answers, she continues to bump into Darla's brother, Collin. If they can't catch the killer, Kai may never learn to open her heart to him, and she may lose her gift forever"--Amazon.com

                • Cover of The Missing
                  The Missing

                  Lisa McMann · standalone novel · 2011

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                  Seventeen-year-old Kendall, who suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder, lives with her parents on a potato farm in a tiny community in Montana, where two teenagers go missing within months of each other, with no explanation. A paranormal mystery.

                • Cover of Master of Murder
                  Master of Murder

                  Christopher Pike · standalone novel · 1992

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                  Marvin was an eighteen-year old senior in high school. He was also America's bestselling author of teenage fiction, writing under a pen name. One day he opened a fan letter postmarked from his local town which said, "I know who you are." More letters arrive, and soon Marvin is caught up in a web of mystery more complex and frightening than his own books.

                • Cover of Forensic Mystery
                  Forensic Mystery

                  series · 2 books · 2006

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                • Cover of The Colorado Kid
                  The Colorado Kid

                  Stephen King · standalone novel · 2005

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                  The Colorado Kid is a mystery novel by American writer Stephen King, published by the Hard Case Crime imprint in 2005. The book was initially issued in one paperback-only edition by the specialty crime and mystery publishing house. King's next novel for Hard Case Crime was Joyland, which was published in June 2013. Hard Case Crime reissued The Colorado Kid in an illustrated paperback edition in May 2019.

                • Cover of Grim Reaper mysteries
                  Grim Reaper mysteries

                  series · 5 books · 2009

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                  After a bad car accident, Casey Maldonado hits the road and finds herself unable to shake an unwelcome companion: Death itself, which won't take her but won't leave her alone either. Judy Clemens's Grim Reaper mysteries follow Casey as her wandering keeps landing her in small towns hiding real crimes, starting with a struggling Ohio farm community where a supposed suicide looks more like a cover-up. It's amateur-sleuth mystery with a wry supernatural conceit rather than straight horror.

                • Cover of The Astrologer's Daughter
                  The Astrologer's Daughter

                  Rebecca Lim · standalone novel · 2014

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                  Avicenna Crowe's mother, Joanne, is an astrologer with uncanny predictive powers and a history of being stalked. Now she is missing. The police are called, but they're not asking the right questions. Like why Joanne lied about her past, and what she saw in her stars that made her so afraid. But Avicenna has inherited her mother's gift. Finding an unlikely ally in the brooding Simon Thorn, she begins to piece together the mystery.

                • Cover of The Third Eye
                  The Third Eye

                  Lois Duncan · standalone novel · 1984

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                  The Third Eye is a 1984 novel for young adults by Lois Duncan. It is a supernatural/suspense novel which tells the story of a girl with a psychic gift.

                • Cover of Don't Tell a Soul
                  Don't Tell a Soul

                  Kirsten Miller · standalone novel · 2021

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                  Summary: "Bram moves to the small town of Louth in order to help her uncle start his new inn, but when she discovers a legacy of silenced women tied to her new home, she sets out to investigate the truth behind the town's 'Dead Girl' myths"--Provided by publisher. [end quotation of CIP data]

                • Cover of Blind
                  Blind

                  series · 3 books · 2007

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                • Cover of Nela Farley
                  Nela Farley

                  series · 1 book · 2012

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                • Cover of Bone Gap
                  Bone Gap

                  Laura Ruby · standalone novel · 2015

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                  Eighteen-year-old Finn, an outsider in his quiet Midwestern town, is the only witness to the abduction of town favorite Roza, but his inability to distinguish between faces makes it difficult for him to help with the investigation, and subjects him to even more ridicule and bullying.

                • Cover of Seventh Born
                  Seventh Born

                  Rob MacGregor · standalone novel · 2014

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                  ● "When a suspicious barn fire claims the life of her aging pony, Merlina Lund inadvertently triggers her inherited psychic talents to track the arsonist. The deeper she digs, the more dangerous the quest turns as she closes in on the truth about the Cosa Caballo, a mysterious horse mafia centered in her pristine equestrian village." ― quoted from this book's Amazon product page as of 2025-01-20.

                • Cover of Elizabeth Chase
                  Elizabeth Chase

                  series · 6 books · 1995

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