Loreful
HomeDiscover
Search series, authors…⌘K
Loreful

Reading orders for SF/F series and shared universes — with your place kept in every one.

Explore

UniversesSeriesWorksAuthorsAtlas

Help

FAQAboutSite map

Account & legal

Sign inCreate accountPrivacyTerms

Data

Built on ISFDB, Wikipedia, Wikidata and Open Library. Curated reading orders carry their reasoning on the page; the rest follow publication order. Data sources & licenses

© Loreful · data: ISFDB · CC BY

More like Skyfall

anchored on:fantasycontemporaryadventurousmiddle gradeadventuremonster hunting+3 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 Watership Down
                  Watership Down

                  series · 21 books · 1972

                  completed

                  similar bysurvivalfantasyadventurouscontemporary+2 more

                  Watership Down is Richard Adams's 1972 novel following a group of rabbits who flee the destruction of their warren and cross the English countryside of Hampshire in search of a new home, developing over the journey a full rabbit culture of language, proverbs, and mythology. Adams returned to the same world in 1996 with Tales from Watership Down, a collection of nineteen short stories mixing rabbit folklore with further adventures of characters from the novel.

                • Cover of Trollhunters
                  Trollhunters

                  Guillermo Del Toro & Daniel Kraus · standalone novel · 2015

                  similar bymonster huntingsmall towncontemporaryfantasyadventuroustense

                  Everything changes for San Bernardino teenage suburbanite Jim Sturges when a 45-year old mystery resurfaces, threatening the lives of everyone in his seemingly sleepy town. Soon Jim has to team up with a band of unlikely (and some un-human) heroes to battle the monsters he never knew existed.

                • Cover of Darkmouth
                  Darkmouth

                  series · 4 books · 2015

                  similar bymonster huntingcontemporaryfantasyadventurousmiddle grade+1 more

                • Cover of The Paradise Trap
                  The Paradise Trap

                  Catherine Jinks · standalone novel · 2011

                  similar bysurvivalcontemporaryfantasyadventuroustensemiddle grade

                  Eleven-year-old Marcus is spending a week at the beach with his mother in a tiny old travel trailer, but boredom turns to terror when a new friend discovers a cellar that has magical doors through which people keep disappearing.

                • Cover of Watchers
                  Watchers

                  Dean R. Koontz · standalone novel · 1987

                  similar bysurvivalcontemporaryadventurousadventuretense

                  This probably qualifies as a science-based adventure rather than a science fiction novel. The premise, and only speculative fiction element, is that a U.S. government funded laboratory creates a golden retriever that's as intelligent as a human for use in intelligence gathering and also creates a monkey hybrid that's intended for a military police dog role and as a killing machine on battlefields. The animals escape and the story plays out as a straight adventure novel with a good chunk of romance thrown in.

                • RS
                  Roland Smith's Cryptid Series

                  series · 5 books · 1998

                  similar bycontemporaryadventurousadventuretensemiddle grade+2 more

                • Cover of Desperation/Regulators
                  Desperation/Regulators

                  series · 2 books · 1996

                  similar bysurvivalsmall towncontemporarytense+1 more

                  Stephen King published Desperation and The Regulators simultaneously in 1996, the first under his own name and the second under his Richard Bachman pseudonym. The two novels are mirror-universe companions: largely the same cast of characters appears in both, recast into different roles and circumstances, with each book's story driven by the same malevolent supernatural entity, Tak.

                • Cover of Jerusalem's Lot
                  Jerusalem's Lot

                  series · 3 books · 1975

                  similar bysmall towncontemporarytense+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 Hobbit
                  The Hobbit

                  series · 2 books · 1937

                  completed

                  part of Tolkien's legendarium

                  similar byfantasyadventurousadventuremiddle grade

                  The Hobbit (1937) is J. R. R. Tolkien's children's fantasy novel following the reluctant burglar Bilbo Baggins, who joins a company of dwarves and the wizard Gandalf on a journey to reclaim treasure guarded by the dragon Smaug. It stands as a complete adventure on its own, but shares its setting with the rest of Tolkien's legendarium and leads into the events of The Lord of the Rings.

                • Cover of Northwood
                  Northwood

                  Brian Falkner · standalone novel · 2011

                  similar bysurvivalfantasyadventurousadventuremiddle grade+1 more

                  "Cecilia Undergarment likes a challenge. So when she discovers a sad and neglected dog, she is determined to rescue him. But here daring dog rescue lands her lost and alone in the dark forest of Northwood. A forest where ferocious black lions roam. A forest where those who enter never return. But then, Northwood has never seen the likes of Cecilia Undergarment before ..."--Page 4 of cover. Suggested level: primary, intermediate.

                • Cover of Rats of NIMH
                  Rats of NIMH

                  series · 3 books · 1971

                  similar bysurvivalcontemporaryfantasyadventurousmiddle grade

                  Robert C. O'Brien's Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH follows a widowed mouse seeking help to save her sick son and her home from a farmer's plow, turning to a colony of rats who escaped laboratory experiments at the National Institute of Mental Health with enhanced intelligence and a literate, technological society of their own. After O'Brien's death, his daughter Jane Leslie Conly continued the story in Racso and the Rats of NIMH, in which a city rat joins the colony ahead of a flood, and R-T, Margaret, and the Rats of NIMH, in which the rats rescue and are helped by lost human children. All three carry forward the original's interest in community, responsibility, and the costs of intelligence.

                • Cover of Tunnels / Circle in the Spiral
                  Tunnels / Circle in the Spiral

                  series · 6 books · 2005

                  similar bycontemporaryfantasyadventurousadventure+3 more

                • Cover of Bromeliad
                  Bromeliad

                  series · 3 books · 1989

                  completed

                  similar bysurvivalcontemporaryfantasyadventurous

                  The Nome Trilogy, also known as The Bromeliad, is a trilogy of children's books by British writer Terry Pratchett, consisting of the books Truckers (1989), Diggers (1990) and Wings (1990). The trilogy tells the story of the Nomes, a race of tiny people from another world who now live hidden among humans. Through the books they struggle to survive in the human world and, once they learn of their history from an artefact known as "The Thing", make plans to return home.

                • Cover of The People of the Mist
                  The People of the Mist

                  H. Rider Haggard · standalone novel · 1894

                  similar bysurvivalfantasyadventurousadventure

                  The People of the Mist is a classic lost world fantasy novel written by H. Rider Haggard. It was first published serially in the weekly magazine Tit-Bits, between December 1893 and August 1894; the first edition in book form was published in London by Longman in October, 1894. It was reprinted in December, 1973 by Ballantine Books as the sixty-third paperback volume of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series.

                • Cover of The Witches
                  The Witches

                  Roald Dahl · standalone novel · 1983

                  similar bysurvivalcontemporaryfantasytense

                  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 Billy Clikk
                  Billy Clikk

                  series · 2 books · 2004

                  similar bymonster huntingcontemporaryadventurousfantasymiddle grade+1 more

                • Cover of Troll Hunters
                  Troll Hunters

                  series · 5 books · 2012

                  similar byfantasyadventurouscontemporarytensemiddle grade+2 more

                • Cover of Varjak Paw
                  Varjak Paw

                  series · 2 books · 2003

                  similar bycontemporaryfantasyadventurousmiddle grade+2 more

                • Cover of Under the Dome
                  Under the Dome

                  Stephen King · standalone novel · 2009

                  similar bysurvivalsmall towncontemporarytense

                  A small town in Maine finds itself suddenly cut off from the outside world by an impenetrable barrier, and the clash of personalities of the trapped people takes its inexorable devastating course.

                • Cover of Order of the Stones
                  Order of the Stones

                  series · 1 book · 2023

                  similar bycontemporaryfantasyadventureadventuroustensemiddle grade

                • Cover of Fuzzy Mud
                  Fuzzy Mud

                  Louis Sachar · standalone novel · 2015

                  similar bysurvivalsmall towncontemporarytensemiddle grade

                  Fuzzy Mud is a 2015 novel written by children's author Louis Sachar. Originally written in English, it was translated to French by Jean-François Ménard, under the title Chemins toxiques.

                • Cover of Henry Hunter
                  Henry Hunter

                  series · 2 books · 2014

                  similar bycontemporaryadventurousfantasymonster huntingadventuremiddle grade

                • Cover of Race to the Sun
                  Race to the Sun

                  Rebecca Roanhorse · standalone novel · 2020

                  similar bymonster huntingcontemporaryfantasyadventurousmiddle grade

                  Race to the Sun is a novel written by Rebecca Roanhorse and was published on January 14, 2020. It is one of many books in the Rick Riordan Presents imprint, and focuses on Navajo mythology. The book follows Nizhoni Begay, who has the self-proclaimed power of detecting monsters, as she adventures with her brother, Mac, and her best friend, Davery Descheny, through a series of trials to the House of the Sun to find her father, who was taken by the mysterious Mr. Charles.

                • Cover of The Lost Ark
                  The Lost Ark

                  J. R. Rain · standalone novel · 2010

                  similar bysurvivalcontemporaryadventurousadventuretense

                  In a lonely bar in eastern Turkey, ex-National Geographic photojournalist Sam Ward is hired to find an eccentric professor who disappeared high atop Mount Ararat, fabled resting spot of Noah's Ark. Accompanied by the professor's beautiful daughter, archaeologist Faye Roberts, Sam soon stumbles upon a secret stronghold—a base of operation for unleashing hell on earth. Now running for their lives, Sam and company are about to come face-to-face with the greatest archaeological discovery of all tiime...