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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 Seraphim

anchored on:fantasyangelseuropemedievaldarkdark fantasy+3 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 mental unraveling — descent into madness, delusion, and minds at war with themselves.
  • 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 Between Two Fires
                  Between Two Fires

                  Christopher Buehlman · standalone novel · 2012

                  similar byeuropemedievaldarkdark fantasytensedemonsangels

                  Between Two Fires is a 2012 historical fiction horror novel by Christopher Buehlman. Set during the Black Death, it follows a disgraced knight and a mysterious young girl who travel across France, as Lucifer and other fallen angels start another war with Heaven.

                • Cover of The Roses of Roazon
                  The Roses of Roazon

                  Cherith Baldry · standalone novel · 2004

                  similar bymedievalfantasyeuropedark fantasydarktensedemons

                  The story is set within the peaceful land of Arvorig which is governed by the newly appointed Joscelin, Duke of Roazon. Behind the throne of the dukedom, dark forces are at work that will attempt to strip Joscelin of his title and have him banished for heresy. Those who threaten to overthrow Joscelin have forgotten the ancient tale that says if a true Duke or true member of the Roazon bloodline does not hold power in Roazon, then the long banished, mysterious, demon-infested island of Autrys will once again rise and threaten all of humanity. The novel is set within a medieval French-styled society of political courtly intrigue, religious fervor, knightly chivalry, unrequited romance and generous doses of dark machinations.

                • Cover of Damiano
                  Damiano

                  series · 3 books · 1984

                  similar byeuropefantasyangelsdemons+2 more

                  Damiano follows a young alchemist and lute player in Renaissance-flavored Italy who sets out, with the help of the archangel Raphael, to bring peace to his war-torn home city, only to find that stopping a war takes more violence than his gentle magic is suited for. R. A. MacAvoy's trilogy continues through Damiano's Lute and Raphael, later collected as A Trio for Lute, and was praised for its light touch with small-scale magic set against real cruelty.

                • Cover of Grendel
                  Grendel

                  John Gardner · standalone novel · 1971

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                  Between bouts of his war on the king of the Danish Norsemen, the monster philosophizes about life and fate.

                • Cover of Flaming Dove
                  Flaming Dove

                  Daniel Arenson · standalone novel · 2010

                  similar byfantasydarkangelsdark fantasytensedemons

                  The battle of Armageddon was finally fought... and ended with no clear victor. Upon the mountain, the armies of Hell and Heaven beat each other into a bloody, uneasy standstill, leaving the Earth in ruins. Armageddon should have ended with Heaven winning, ushering in an era of peace. That's what the prophecies said. Instead, the two armies--one of angels, one of demons--hunker down in the scorched planet, lick their wounds, and gear up for a prolonged war with no end in sight. In this chaos of warring armies and ruined landscapes, Laila doesn't want to take sides. Her mother was an angel, her father a demon; she is outcast from both camps. And yet both armies need her, for with her mixed blood, Laila can become the ultimate spy... or ultimate soldier. As the armies of Heaven and Hell pursue her, Laila's only war is within her heart--a struggle between her demonic and heavenly blood.

                • Cover of The Devil's Diadem
                  The Devil's Diadem

                  Sara Douglass · standalone novel · 2011

                  similar byeuropemedievaldark fantasydarktense

                  While attending to Lady Adelie, wife to the Earl of Pengraic, as a terrible plague sweeps across Europe, young noblewoman Maeb Langtofte discovers that the walls of Pengraic castle are no longer safe after stumbling upon the Earl's dark secret.

                • Cover of Ludis Kristaps
                  Ludis Kristaps

                  series · 3 books · 2011

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                • Cover of The Damnation Game
                  The Damnation Game

                  Clive Barker · standalone novel · 1985

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                  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 Library at Mount Char
                  The Library at Mount Char

                  Scott Hawkins · standalone novel · 2015

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

                • Cover of A Mortal Glamour
                  A Mortal Glamour

                  Chelsea Quinn Yarbro · standalone novel · 1985

                  similar byeuropemedievaldarkdark fantasydemons

                  One of the most perverse stories you have ever written, A Mortal Glamour is among the best revelations of the difference between good and evil in fiction,” said Douglas Clegg to Chelsea Quinn Yarbro when the novel first came out. Set in southern France at the end of the three pandemics of Black Plague that ravaged Europe in the second half of the fourteenth century, the convent at Saunt-Vitre-lo-Sur shows in miniature the collapse of medieval society, and the chaos an incubus/succubus demon brings to nuns and courtiers alike.

                • Cover of Vampire Armageddon
                  Vampire Armageddon

                  series · 1 book · 2011

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                • Cover of The Monk
                  The Monk

                  Matthew Gregory Lewis · standalone novel · 1796

                  similar byeuropedarktensedemons+1 more

                  The Monk: A Romance is a Gothic novel by Matthew Gregory Lewis, published in 1796 across three volumes. Written early in Lewis's career, it was published anonymously when he was 20. It tells the story of a virtuous Catholic monk who gives in to his violent and lustful urges, setting off a chain of events that leave him damned. It is a prime example of the type of Gothic that specializes in horror.

                • Cover of Eaters of the Dead
                  Eaters of the Dead

                  Michael Crichton · standalone novel · 1976

                  similar byeuropemedievaltense+2 more

                  Eaters of the Dead: The Manuscript of Ibn Fadlan Relating His Experiences with the Northmen in AD 922 is a 1976 novel by Michael Crichton, the fourth novel under his own name and his 14th overall. The story is about a 10th-century Muslim Arab who travels with a group of Vikings to their settlement.

                • Cover of The Sorceress of Rome
                  The Sorceress of Rome

                  Nathan Gallizier · standalone novel · 1907

                  similar byeuropemedievaldarktense+1 more

                  "Following his death, the Roman people suggested that Stefania, the widow of Crescentius II, had made Otto III fall in love with her and then poisoned him." --Wikipedia, "Otto III, Holy Roman Emperor" (980–1002) (as of 2018-02-09) The Sorceress of Rome opens in the year 999 and concludes with the deaths of both Otto and Stephania.

                • Cover of Fiend
                  Fiend

                  Alma Katsu · standalone novel · 2025

                  similar byfantasydarkdark fantasytensedemons

                  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 Black Tattoo
                  The Black Tattoo

                  Sam Enthoven · standalone novel · 2006

                  similar byfantasydark fantasydarktensedemons

                  The Black Tattoo is a 2006 young adult fantasy novel by Sam Enthoven. It deals with a boy, Charlie, becoming possessed by a demon that manifests itself in the form of a black tattoo on his body.

                • Cover of To the Devil - a Daughter
                  To the Devil - a Daughter

                  Dennis Wheatley · standalone novel · 1953

                  similar byeuropedarktensedemons

                  Beneath the azure sky of the French Riviera, Christina Mordant looks and behaves like any other attractive girl. But each night as darkness falls, the demon within her betrays its presence. A thousand miles away, deep in the Essex marshes, a priest of Satan is about to achieve his life's ambition: Canon Copely-Syle of Bentford Priory prepares for the virgin sacrifice which will give breath to the foul abomination he has created...

                • Cover of The Heretic's Tomb
                  The Heretic's Tomb

                  Simon Rose · standalone novel · 2008

                  similar byeuropemedievalfantasydarktense

                  Annie discovers the tomb of Lady Isabella Devereaux, who was executed as a heretic, and is transported back in time to the Middle Ages, where she is caught in a web of sorcery, treachery, treason, and the horrors of the Black Death.

                • Cover of Dominion of the Fallen
                  Dominion of the Fallen

                  series · 16 books · 2015

                  similar bydark fantasyeuropedarkangels+2 more

                  The House of Shattered Wings opens Aliette de Bodard's Dominion of the Fallen in a Paris devastated by a magical war between rival Houses of fallen angels, its streets and ruins still haunted by the fighting. The series follows uneasy alliances within House Silverspires as its members contend with old secrets and Annamese magic traditions colliding with European angelic power politics. It continues across further novels and a number of shorter linked stories.

                • Cover of All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes by
                  All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes by

                  John Farris · standalone novel · 1977

                  similar bydarkdark fantasytensedemonsrevenge

                  The affair is a military wedding. The groom's parents are the Bradwins, one of the oldest and most distinguished families in Virginia. The family head, General "Boss" Bradwin, is a famous army officer. Of all his prized sons, his youngest, "Clipper" Bradwin, is the most promising. First in his class at Blue Ridge Military Academy, graduate with all honors, he is now entering into holy matrimony and then into wartime service of his country. What will begin, however, with the solemnity of his marriage vows will end in the echoing screams of the damned-an ungodly spectacle of spilled blood and sobbing, throat-aching terror. For this distinguished family is like no other on earth. There is a curse on their blood. Their family history is rooted not in magnolia and honeysuckle, but in darkness and demonism, in frightening forces beyond their knowledge and control. Their august history begins not in antebellum mansions, but with supernatural sorcery in the ancient rites and rituals of dark African jungles. There is a curse that grips the Bradwins from generation to generation, from horror to bloody horror, and that climaxes in a spine-chilling nightmare of black occultism and blood vengeance.

                • Cover of The Broken Sword
                  The Broken Sword

                  Poul Anderson · standalone novel · 1954

                  similar bymedievalfantasydark

                  The Broken Sword is a fantasy novel by American writer Poul Anderson, originally published on 5 November 1954. A revised edition was issued by Ballantine Books in January 1971 as the twenty-fourth volume of their Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. The original text was reissued by Gollancz in 2002. Set during the Viking Age, the novel features numerous references to Norse mythology.

                • Cover of Playing Devil's Advocate
                  Playing Devil's Advocate

                  Andrea Dean Van Scoyoc · standalone novel · 2008

                  similar byfantasydarkdark fantasytensedemonsrevenge

                  "Blayre Tabers has the perfect life or so it seems. That is until the day he comes home from school to find his parent's disgustingly mutilated corpses. Losing all sanity he runs away. Failed by the child welfare system designed to protect him, he spends the next ten years of his life in a downward spiral, sickeningly abused, twistedly tortured and finally—as an adult—homeless. Hating God he makes a deal with the devil to serve him. But what he doesn't realize is that the devil owns more than Blayre's soul. Blayre is furious to discover the devil's treachery and plots to not only pay the devil back for his deceit but regain the object the Dark One stole from him. With the help of a kind cop and a renegade demon he sets out to do what no man has ever done before and lived...double cross and defeat Satan himself!" — quoted from this book's ebook product page on Amazon as of 2018-01-30.

                • Cover of The Witches
                  The Witches

                  Roald Dahl · standalone novel · 1983

                  similar byfantasydark fantasydarktense

                  The Witches is a 1983 children's novel by British author Roald Dahl. A dark fantasy, the story is set partly in Norway and partly in England, and features the experiences of a young English boy and his Norwegian grandmother in a world where child-hating societies of witches secretly exist in every country. The witches are ruled by the vicious and powerful Grand High Witch, who arrives in England to organise her plan to turn all of the children there into mice.

                • Cover of NecroSeam Chronicles
                  NecroSeam Chronicles

                  series · 1 book · 2016

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