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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 Speak Evil

anchored on:contemporaryyoung adult

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 The Road of the Dead
                  The Road of the Dead

                  Kevin Brooks · standalone novel · 2006

                  similar bypsychic powerstensebritish islescontemporaryyoung adult

                  Two brothers, one with second sight, investigate their sister's murder.

                • Cover of Carrie
                  Carrie

                  Stephen King · standalone novel · 1974

                  similar bypsychic powerstensecontemporary

                  In one way or another, everybody abused Carrie. This sixteen-year-old misfit was forbidden everything that was young and fun by her fanatical mother. She was teased and taunted by her classmates, misunderstood by her teachers, and given up as hopeless by almost everyone. But Carrie had a secret: She possessed terrifying telekinetic powers that could make inanimate objects move, a lighted candle fall, or a door lock. Carrie could make all kinds of startling bizarre, and malevolent things happen. (WorldCat)

                • Cover of Shades of London
                  Shades of London

                  series · 4 books · 2011

                  similar bybritish islescontemporaryyoung adult+2 more

                • Cover of Alex Verus
                  Alex Verus

                  series · 14 books · 2012

                  similar bycontemporary+3 more

                  Benedict Jacka's urban fantasy series follows Alex Verus, a diviner - a mage who can see probable futures - running a small magic shop in London while trying to stay independent of the Light and Dark mage councils that both distrust him for his past as apprentice to a dark mage. Starting with Fated, the series escalates from small jobs and favors into open conflict with the Council structure and Alex's own former master, as his precognitive gift proves more dangerous to wield than it first appears. It is a long-running, tightly serialized series rather than standalone urban-fantasy cases.

                • Cover of The Midwich Cuckoos
                  The Midwich Cuckoos

                  John Wyndham · standalone novel · 1957

                  similar bytensebritish isles+1 more

                  The Midwich Cuckoos is a 1957 science fiction novel written by the English author John Wyndham. It tells the tale of an English village in which the women become pregnant by brood parasitic aliens. The book has been praised by many critics, including the dramatist Dan Rebellato, who called it "a searching novel of moral ambiguities", and the novelist Margaret Atwood, who called the book Wyndham's "chef d'œuvre". The book has been adapted for film, radio, and television.

                • Cover of Pentagram (original) / The Gatekeepers (US) / The Power of Five
                  Pentagram (original) / The Gatekeepers (US) / The Power of Five

                  series · 5 books · 1983

                  similar bytensecontemporaryyoung adult+1 more

                  The Power of Five is a series of five fantasy and suspense novels, written by English author Anthony Horowitz. Published between 2005 and 2012, it is an updated re-imagining of Horowitz's Pentagram series, which the author had left unfinished in the 1980s after he only wrote four of the five planned books in the series.

                • Cover of Savannah Grey
                  Savannah Grey

                  Cliff McNish · standalone novel · 2010

                  similar bypsychic powerstensebritish islescontemporaryyoung adult

                  As nature seems to be exerting an overpowering force on the world, a fifteen-year-old English girl learns that she has supernatural powers and discovers her true purpose.

                • Cover of The Lynburn Legacy
                  The Lynburn Legacy

                  series · 3 books · 2012

                  similar bybritish islescontemporaryyoung adult+2 more

                • Cover of Otherworld (Kelley Armstrong)
                  Otherworld (Kelley Armstrong)

                  series · 100 books · 1996

                  similar bycontemporary+2 more

                  Women of the Otherworld is Kelley Armstrong's long-running urban fantasy series about werewolves, witches, sorcerers, and other supernatural beings trying to pass as ordinary people in the contemporary world, told across thirteen novels plus assorted novellas published between 2001 and 2012. Each book tends to follow a different member of this hidden community while slowly building a shared, continuing world.

                • Cover of The Shining
                  The Shining

                  series · 5 books · 1977

                  similar bypsychic powerstensecontemporary

                  Stephen King's 1977 novel The Shining follows the Torrance family as winter caretakers of the isolated, malevolent Overlook Hotel, where father Jack is gradually consumed by the hotel's influence while his young son Danny's psychic "shining" draws its attention. Doctor Sleep (2013) picks up the story decades later, following Danny as an adult still marked by that childhood ordeal. Together the two form a horror duology spanning nearly forty years of real-world publication.

                • Cover of Montgomery / Taggert
                  Montgomery / Taggert

                  series · 10 books · 1988

                  similar bycontemporary

                  These Jude Deveraux romances are linked less by one continuing plot than by recurring family surnames — Montgomery and Taggert — that Deveraux threads through much of her historical and contemporary romance writing. A Knight in Shining Armor, her best-known novel, is a standalone time-travel romance whose heroine, Dougless Montgomery, falls for a sixteenth-century English lord pulled forward into her present; The Maiden instead belongs to her more tightly connected medieval Montgomery-brothers sequence. Readers should expect a loose family of stories connected by name and world rather than one continuous saga.

                • VA
                  Vampire Academy Universe

                  series · 19 books · 2007

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                • Cover of Firestarter
                  Firestarter

                  Stephen King · standalone novel · 1980

                  similar bypsychic powerstensecontemporary

                  WorldCat: Innocence and beauty ignite with evil and terror... First, a man and a woman are subjects of a top-secret government experiment designed to produce extraordinary psychic powers. Then, they are married and have a child. A daughter. Early on the daughter shows signs of a wild and horrifying force growing within her. Desperately, her parents try to train her to keep that force in check, to 'act normal'. Now the government wants its brainchild back for its own insane ends.

                • Cover of Checquy Files
                  Checquy Files

                  series · 4 books · 2012

                  similar bybritish islescontemporary+2 more

                  The Rook opens Daniel O'Malley's Checquy Files with Myfanwy Thomas waking up with no memory, surrounded by dead bodies and a letter from her former self explaining that she runs a secretive British agency defending the country from supernatural threats. She has to reconstruct her identity and hunt a traitor inside the organization while keeping up appearances at a job she can no longer remember how to do. The premise of paranormal bureaucracy and espionage continues across the rest of the Checquy novels.

                • Cover of The Power of Stars
                  The Power of Stars

                  Louise Lawrence · standalone novel · 1972

                  similar bypsychic powerstensebritish islescontemporaryyoung adult

                  In the writer's second science fiction novel, "an Extraterrestrial force transfixes human teenagers". --SFE3, biographical entry by John Clute "Jane is bitten by a strangely ferocious dying rabbit, and instead of rabies as you might expect she's infected with neurons from outer space ... Thus possessed, Jane zaps in turn a washing machine, the telly", and so on. --KirkusReviews.com (contemporary review, undated online, negative)

                • Cover of Shadow Police / Detective Inspector James Quill
                  Shadow Police / Detective Inspector James Quill

                  series · 3 books · 2012

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                • TG
                  The Ghost Series

                  series · 12 books · 2003

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                • Cover of Wake
                  Wake

                  series · 3 books · 2008

                  similar bypsychic powerscontemporaryyoung adult+1 more

                  Lisa McMann's Wake trilogy follows seventeen-year-old Janie Hannagan, who is uncontrollably pulled into the dreams of people around her — including, in the opening novel, a nightmare far darker than the embarrassing ones she's used to witnessing. Fade and Gone continue Janie's story as she learns to understand and use her ability.

                • Cover of Becca King
                  Becca King

                  series · 4 books · 2012

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                • Cover of Midget
                  Midget

                  Tim Bowler · standalone novel · 1994

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                  Midget is the first novel by British author Tim Bowler, first published in 1994. It is a psychic and psychological thriller. It is set in Leigh-on-Sea.

                • Cover of Dreamcatcher
                  Dreamcatcher

                  Stephen King · standalone novel · 2001

                  similar bytensecontemporary+1 more

                  Dreamcatcher is a 2001 science fiction horror novel by American writer Stephen King, featuring elements of body horror, suspense and alien invasion. The book, written in longhand, helped the author recuperate from a 1999 car crash, and was completed in half a year. According to the author in his afterword, the working title was Cancer. His wife, Tabitha King, persuaded him to change the title. A film adaptation was released in 2003.

                • Cover of Paige Mahoney / The Bone Season
                  Paige Mahoney / The Bone Season

                  series · 6 books · 2013

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                  Samantha Shannon's Bone Season series is set in a 2059 dystopian Britain ruled by the authoritarian Scion regime, which persecutes clairvoyants as 'unnaturals.' Paige Mahoney, a rare and powerful clairvoyant working in London's criminal underworld, is captured and drawn into the secrets of Scion's own founders, setting off a fight against the regime across the planned seven-book series. The books mix supernatural world-building with dystopian political-thriller plotting as Paige's understanding of the wider world, and what created it, expands.

                • Cover of The Light Key Trilogy
                  The Light Key Trilogy

                  series · 3 books · 2014

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                • Cover of Infinity Cycle
                  Infinity Cycle

                  series · 3 books · 2020

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                  Adam Silvera's Infinity Cycle is a young-adult fantasy trilogy blending paranormal and supernatural elements with themes of family, siblinghood, and LGBTQ+ identity. It opens with Infinity Son and continues across Infinity Reaper and Infinity Kings.