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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 Saucery

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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 centered on vampires — blood-drinking undead — whether as predators, love interests, or protagonists.
  • Stories centered on witches and the practice of witchcraft — covens, hedge magic, familiars, and the witch's place in her community.
  • Stories structured as a quest — a journey undertaken to find, deliver, or destroy something of great import.
  • Stories in which staying alive against nature, catastrophe, or scarcity is the central problem.
  • Stories of lovers kept apart by law, family, faith, or station, where the obstacle to love is the plot.
  • Stories in which a friendship — its making, testing, or loss — is the emotional center.
  • Stories of growing up — a young protagonist crossing from childhood into adult knowledge and responsibility.
  • Stories about who a character truly is — self-discovery, doubled lives, and the search for a self.
  • Stories about mental unraveling — descent into madness, delusion, and minds at war with themselves.
  • 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 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 The Mouse That Roared
                  The Mouse That Roared

                  series · 6 books · 1955

                  completed

                  similar bysatirehumor

                  The Mouse That Roared launches Leonard Wibberley's satirical series about the tiny fictional Duchy of Grand Fenwick, a European microstate whose leaders declare war on the United States purely to lose quickly and collect the postwar reconstruction aid given to defeated nations. The 1955 novel uses Fenwick's mismatched ambitions to poke fun at Cold War politics and the nuclear arms race, and Wibberley kept the joke going across four more novels into the 1970s. Later entries send the duchy into further absurd confrontations with the wider world, including a race to the Moon and a scheme on Wall Street.

                • Cover of Martians, Go Home
                  Martians, Go Home

                  Fredric Brown · standalone novel · 1955

                  similar bycontemporarysatirehumor

                  Martians, Go Home is a science fiction comic novel by American writer Fredric Brown, published in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction in September 1954 and later by E. P. Dutton in 1955. The novel concerns a writer who witnesses an alien invasion of Earth by boorish little green men from Mars.

                • Cover of Coyote Blue
                  Coyote Blue

                  Christopher Moore · standalone novel · 1994

                  similar bycontemporaryhumor+1 more

                  Coyote Blue is a novel by American writer Christopher Moore, published in 1994. It has been widely reviewed.

                • Cover of Bimbos of the Death Sun
                  Bimbos of the Death Sun

                  series · 2 books · 1987

                  similar by+3 more

                  Bimbos of the Death Sun is a satirical mystery set at a science-fiction convention, where an engineering professor moonlighting as a fantasy novelist gets entangled in a murder investigation amid costumed fans, gaming tournaments, and convention politics. Sharyn McCrumb's send-up of fandom culture won the Edgar Award and was followed by a loosely connected sequel, Zombies of the Gene Pool, set at a different fan gathering. Both novels were later republished together.

                • Cover of Falling Sideways
                  Falling Sideways

                  Tom Holt · standalone novel · 2002

                  similar bycontemporarysatirehumor

                  The hilarious new comic fantasy novel from the most inventive writer in the field.From the moment the first Homo Sapiens descended from the trees, possibly onto their heads, humanity has striven towards civilisation. Fire. The Wheel. Running Away from furry things with more teeth than one might reasonably expect - all are testament to man's ultimate ascendancy.It is a noble story, a triumph of intelligence over adversity and so, of course, complete and utter fiction.For one man has discovered the hideous truth: that humanity's ascent has been ruthlessly guided by a small gang of devious frogs.

                • Cover of Breathers
                  Breathers

                  series · 2 books · 2009

                  similar bycontemporaryhumor+1 more

                • Cover of Fat
                  Fat

                  Rob Grant · standalone novel · 2006

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                  Fat (2006) is a comedy novel by Red Dwarf co-creator Rob Grant, satirising attitudes towards dieting and obesity. During the course of the book, various other themes are also satirised, including health and safety regulations, manufactured pop and lawyers. The book follows the lives of three somewhat unusual individuals over a period spanning a few days, in which their stories eventually interact to varying extents.

                • Cover of The Management Style of the Supreme Beings
                  The Management Style of the Supreme Beings

                  Tom Holt · standalone novel · 2017

                  similar bycontemporarysatirehumor

                  When the Supreme Being and his son decide that being supreme isn't for them any more, it's inevitable that things get a bit of a shake-up.It soon becomes apparent that our new owners, the Venturi brothers, have a very different perspective on all sorts of things. Take Good and Evil, for example. For them, it's an outdated concept that never worked particularly well in the first place. Unfortunately, the sudden disappearance of right and wrong, while welcomed by some, raises certain concerns amongst those still attached to the previous team's management style.In particular, there's one of the old gods who didn't move out with the others. A reclusive chap, he lives somewhere up north, and only a handful even believe in him.But he's watching. And he really does need to know if you've been naughty or nice.

                • Cover of Welcome to Night Vale Episodes
                  Welcome to Night Vale Episodes

                  series · 4 books · 2016

                  part of Welcome to Night Vale Universe

                  similar bycontemporary+2 more

                • Cover of YouSpace
                  YouSpace

                  series · 4 books · 2013

                  similar byhumor+1 more

                • Cover of Good Omens
                  Good Omens

                  series · 2 books · 1990

                  similar bycontemporaryhumor

                  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 The Trilogy that Dare Not Speak Its Name Trilogy
                  The Trilogy that Dare Not Speak Its Name Trilogy

                  series · 3 books · 1997

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                • Cover of Jeff Lint
                  Jeff Lint

                  series · 2 books · 2005

                  similar bycontemporarysatirehumor

                • Cover of Godshome
                  Godshome

                  Robert Sheckley · standalone novel · 1999

                  similar bycontemporarysatirehumor

                  From the front flap of the Tor first edition: "Arthur Fenn is an ordinary young professor with an esoteric specialty, Comparative Mythology. He is in financial trouble and suddenly finds himself in possession of a magical spell that allows him access to the realm of the gods. He may be a professor, but he's got no common sense - so when he goes there, he makes the mistake of inviting a con-man god and his companions back to Earth. What develops is a fantastic mess full of rich opportunities for humor, satire, and surprise. Arthur's mistake unbalances his own life, life on Earth, and the lives of the gods in their realm... and universal darkness threatens to cover all. Chaos spreads on a greater and greater scale until all creation is threatened. It's a good thing that Arthur is able to find the courage and self-confidence to save the day, even if the universe has to die and be reborn."

                • Cover of Night Train
                  Night Train

                  Martin Amis · standalone novel · 1997

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                  Night Train (1997) is a comedic parody of American detective novels by the author Martin Amis, named after the song "Night Train", which features twice in the novel.

                • Cover of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater or Pearls Before Swine
                  God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater or Pearls Before Swine

                  Kurt Vonnegut & Jr. · standalone novel · 1965

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                  The Rosewater Foundation was built to shield the family fortune from taxes, but its current steward, war veteran and committed alcoholic Eliot Rosewater, has other ideas: he moves the foundation's offices to rural Rosewater County, Indiana, and starts handing out 'unlimited amounts of love and limited sums of money' to anyone who asks. His disgusted father, Senator Lister Rosewater, watches the family name become a punchline. Meanwhile a distant, downtrodden cousin, Fred Rosewater, is approached by an ambitious young lawyer with a scheme to have Eliot declared insane and the fortune redirected. A satire of American philanthropy, class and sanity from Kurt Vonnegut.

                • Cover of The Napoleon of Notting Hill
                  The Napoleon of Notting Hill

                  G. K. Chesterton · standalone novel · 1904

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                  The Napoleon of Notting Hill is a novel written by G. K. Chesterton in 1904, set in a nearly unchanged London in 1984.

                • Cover of Dirk Gently
                  Dirk Gently

                  series · 3 books · 1987

                  completed

                  part of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Universe

                  similar bycontemporaryhumor

                  Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987) introduces Douglas Adams's eccentric investigator, whose approach treats all events and objects as ultimately connected however implausibly, as a case involving time travel, a ghost, and a Cambridge murder tangles into one plot. Adams completed one further full novel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), before his death; The Salmon of Doubt (2002) later collected his unfinished notes toward a third book alongside essays and other writing, rather than completing the story.

                • Cover of The Dragon with the Girl Tattoo
                  The Dragon with the Girl Tattoo

                  Adam Roberts · standalone novel · 2010

                  similar bycontemporarysatirehumor

                  A parody (with dragons) of Stieg Larsson's global bestseller, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

                • Cover of Galactic Pool Satires
                  Galactic Pool Satires

                  series · 3 books · 2013

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                • Cover of Armageddon Trilogy
                  Armageddon Trilogy

                  series · 3 books · 1990

                  similar byhumor+1 more

                  The Armageddon Trilogy is Robert Rankin's early comic science-fiction/fantasy sequence: Armageddon: The Musical, They Came and Ate Us: Armageddon II: The B-Movie and The Suburban Book of the Dead: Armageddon III: The Remake. Written in Rankin's absurdist, very British comic style, it follows a chaotic future Earth through escalating, genre-parodying disasters and pop-culture pastiche rather than a straight continuing plot. Each volume's title signals its parody target as much as its place in the sequence.

                • Cover of Screwtape
                  Screwtape

                  series · 2 books · 1942

                  completed

                  similar bycontemporarysatire

                  C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters (1942) is a Christian satirical novel told as 31 letters from a senior devil, Screwtape, coaching his inexperienced nephew Wormwood on how to corrupt the soul of an ordinary British man known only as 'the Patient.' Lewis added a slim sequel, Screwtape Proposes a Toast (1959), an after-dinner speech in which Screwtape skewers trends in modern education and society; the two are usually published together.

                • Cover of Pym
                  Pym

                  series · 5 books · 1838

                  similar by+2 more

                  Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), his only complete novel, sends a young stowaway through shipwreck, mutiny, and cannibalism toward an increasingly strange voyage to the South Pole that breaks off on a mysterious, unexplained image. Jules Verne wrote an unauthorized 1897 sequel, An Antarctic Mystery, resolving Poe's cliffhanger in more rationalist terms, while Mat Johnson's 2011 novel Pym uses Poe's original as the springboard for a satirical modern story about race.

                • Cover of Breakfast of Champions
                  Breakfast of Champions

                  Kurt Vonnegut & Jr. · standalone novel · 1973

                  similar bycontemporarysatire

                  The author decides to liberate the characters he created, including an author who decides to try to help a mentally ill reader who was driven over the edge by the book's assertion that he was the only creature with free will in a universe of preprogrammed automatons.