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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 Splintered

anchored on:fantasyportal fantasyfairylandcontemporaryyoung adultfairy tale retelling+4 more

but

Mood

The mood the book leaves you in.

  • The reading experience is propelled by journeys, exploration, and physical risk; excitement and forward momentum dominate over dread or introspection.
  • Joy and loss are deliberately mixed; the resolution grants characters something real while taking something else away, leaving warmth and sorrow together.
  • The book demands work from the reader — dense prose, difficult structure, unfamiliar ideas, or morally uncomfortable material — as part of its intended effect.
  • Grim events, cruelty, or despair dominate the atmosphere, and the book does not soften them with comfort or comic relief.
  • The atmosphere is quietly unsettling — wrongness, unease, and the uncanny pervade the book without necessarily escalating into overt horror.
  • The book is built to move the reader; character feeling is foregrounded and major scenes aim at a strong emotional response.
  • Humor is a primary aim and the prose plays for laughs — comic situations, wit, or dialogue produce sustained comedy, not occasional levity.
  • The book insists that things can improve; effort and decency are shown to matter, and the arc bends toward better outcomes even through hardship.
  • The book teaches as it goes — real facts, history, science, or craft are conveyed in enough depth that learning is part of the reading experience.
  • The book is designed to uplift and motivate, presenting perseverance or achievement in a way that invites the reader to aspire or act.
  • The overall register is cheerful and easygoing; stakes are kept gentle and the book avoids dwelling on pain or dread.
  • Withheld information drives the experience; the book sustains enigmas and secrets the reader wants resolved, whatever its genre.
  • The book is contemplative and inward-looking, giving more weight to thought, memory, and meaning than to external events.
  • The book works as comfort reading — low tension, a soothing pace, and an atmosphere the reader can unwind in.
  • Grief, loss, or melancholy set the dominant register, and the book lets sorrow stand rather than resolving it into comfort.
  • Sustained suspense is the point; the book keeps the reader braced for what happens next through danger, pressure, or impending revelation.
  • Playful invention and charm define the register — fanciful conceits, light absurdity, and a narration that delights in its own oddity.

About

What the story runs on.

  • Stories 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 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 Owl Service
                  The Owl Service

                  Alan Garner · standalone novel · 1967

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                  During a summer vacation in a secluded Welsh valley, three young people find themselves driven by the spirits of three mythical lovers to reenact an ancient tragedy.

                • Cover of Coraline
                  Coraline

                  series · 2 books · 2002

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                • Cover of Splintered
                  Splintered

                  series · 7 books · 2013

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                  Splintered is a novel series titled after its first novel, Splintered, written by A.G. Howard or Anita Grace Howard. The second novel is titled Unhinged, while the third novel is titled Ensnared. The series is inspired on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass novels, with the protagonist being a teenage girl named Alyssa Gardner, presented in the series as a descendant of Alice Liddell. The story is thus considered as a modern-day adaptation of Carroll's books. The Italian translation was Il mio splendido migliore amico.

                • Cover of Elidor
                  Elidor

                  Alan Garner · standalone novel · 1965

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                  Elidor is a children's fantasy novel by the British author Alan Garner, published by Collins in 1965. Set primarily in modern Manchester, it features four English children who enter a fantasy world, fulfill a quest there, and return to find that the enemy has followed them into our world. Translations have been published in nine languages and it has been adapted for television and radio.

                • Cover of Fire and Hemlock
                  Fire and Hemlock

                  Diana Wynne Jones · standalone novel · 1984

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                  At nineteen, Polly has two sets of sometimes overlapping, sometimes conflicting memories, the real-life ones of school days and her parents' divorce, and the heroic adventure ones that began the day she accidentally gate-crashed a funeral and met the cellist Thomas Lynn.

                • Cover of Nightbird
                  Nightbird

                  Alice Hoffman · standalone novel · 2015

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                  Twig lives in a remote area of town with her mysterious brother and her mother, baker of irresistible apple pies. A new girl in town might just be Twig's first true friend, and ally in vanquishing an ancient family curse. A spellbinding tale of modern folklore set in the Berkshires, where rumours of a winged beast draw in as much tourism as the town's famed apple orchards.

                • Cover of Verdigris Deep
                  Verdigris Deep

                  Frances Hardinge · standalone novel · 2007

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                  Verdigris Deep is a children's fantasy novel by Frances Hardinge. It concerns three children who fall into the power of a "well witch" after stealing coins from a wishing well. They are given various powers to grant the wishes of others. While many of the wishes seem harmless they all eventually lead to perilous fates. It was originally published by Macmillan in the UK in 2007 and released in the United States a year later under the title Well Witched.

                • Cover of The Beginning Place
                  The Beginning Place

                  Ursula K. Le Guin · standalone novel · 1980

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                  WorldCat: Hugh and Irena assumed that they had just stumbled upon Tembraebrezi, a beginning place, but Tembraebrezi has a secret dark fear that is threatening the kingdom and Hugh and Irena were led to the beginning place for a purpose.

                • Cover of The Darkest Part of the Forest
                  The Darkest Part of the Forest

                  Holly Black · standalone novel · 2015

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                  The Darkest Part of the Forest is a 2015 young adult fantasy novel written by Holly Black. The book is a standalone but makes mention of characters from Black's Modern Tale of Faerie trilogy, establishing a shared continuity between that trilogy as well as the Folk of the Air series of books.

                • Cover of A Monster Calls
                  A Monster Calls

                  series · 2 books · 2011

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                  A Monster Calls follows a boy struggling with his mother's terminal illness, who is visited each night by a tree-like monster demanding an honest story from him in exchange for the unsettling tales it tells. Patrick Ness wrote the novel from an idea left unfinished by Siobhan Dowd, who died of cancer before she could write it herself, with illustrations by Jim Kay integral to the original edition. It was later adapted for the stage.

                • Cover of The Haunting
                  The Haunting

                  Margaret Mahy · standalone novel · 1982

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                  After a shy and rather withdrawn eight-year-old begins receiving frightening supernatural images and messages, he learns about a family legacy which could be considered a curse or a rare gift.

                • Cover of Skellig
                  Skellig

                  David Almond · standalone novel · 1998

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                  Skellig is a children's novel by the British author David Almond, published by Hodder in 1998. It was the Whitbread Children's Book of the Year and it won the Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's outstanding children's book by a British author. In 2007, it placed third in the "Carnegie of Carnegies", after Northern Lights and Tom's Midnight Garden. In the U.S., it was a runner up for the Michael L. Printz Award, which recognises one work of young adult fiction annually. Since publication, it has also been adapted into a play, an opera, and a film. In December of 2011, a prequel, My Name is Mina was published. William Blake's poems feature in the book, the play and the film.

                • Cover of The Ocean at the End of the Lane
                  The Ocean at the End of the Lane

                  Neil Gaiman · standalone novel · 2013

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                  A seven year old farm boy becomes friends with an eleven year old neighbor girl, who he discovers is ancient and powerful and intervenes when a nonhuman entity attempts to make a home in earthly reality.

                • Cover of Weaveworld
                  Weaveworld

                  Clive Barker · standalone novel · 1987

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                  Weaveworld is a 1987 dark fantasy novel by English writer Clive Barker. It is about a magical world, known as the Fugue, which has been hidden inside a carpet to safeguard it from both inquisitive humans and hostile supernatural foes. Two humans become embroiled in the fate of the Fugue, attempting to save it from those who seek to destroy it. The book was nominated in 1988 for the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel.

                • Cover of Pet Sematary
                  Pet Sematary

                  Stephen King · standalone novel · 1983

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                  Pet Sematary is a 1983 horror novel by American writer Stephen King. It tells the story of a family moving to Maine and settling closer to a pet cemetery in the woods, which is home to a terrifying force that brings death and sorrow. The novel was nominated for a World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1984, and adapted into two films: one in 1989 and another in 2019 as well as several spinoffs.

                • Cover of Bod Owens
                  Bod Owens

                  series · 3 books · 2007

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                  The Graveyard Book follows Nobody "Bod" Owens, a toddler who escapes the murder of his family and is raised among the ghosts of an old English graveyard, absorbing their otherworldly customs while a threat from his past waits beyond the gates. Neil Gaiman's 2008 novel won both the Newbery and Carnegie Medals, and illustrator P. Craig Russell later adapted it into a two-volume graphic novel. Bod's story spans the original novel and that graphic-novel retelling rather than continuing in a prose sequel.

                • Cover of The Book of Love
                  The Book of Love

                  Kelly Link · standalone novel · 2024

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                  The Book of Love is a 2024 novel by American author Kelly Link. Set in a small coastal town in Massachusetts in December 2014, the fantasy novel follows four teenagers who return from the dead and must navigate magical challenges to remain among the living. Although Link has published several collections of short stories, The Book of Love was her first novel. One of Link's goals in writing a novel was to include elements not typically found in shorter fiction.

                • Cover of RoseBlood
                  RoseBlood

                  A. G. Howard · standalone novel · 2017

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                  Rune Germaine moves to a boarding school outside of Paris, only to discover that at this opera-house-turned-music-conservatory, phantoms really do exist. RoseBlood is a Phantom of the Opera inspired retelling in which Rune s biggest talent her voice is also her biggest curse.

                • Cover of What Big Teeth
                  What Big Teeth

                  Rose Szabo · standalone novel · 2021

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                  What Big Teeth is a 2021 young adult gothic dark fantasy novel by Rose Szabo and marks their debut novel.

                • Cover of Balyet
                  Balyet

                  Patricia Wrightson · standalone novel · 1989

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                  "Despite the precautions of the old aborigine woman she calls Granny, fourteen-year-old Jo falls under the spell of a secret thing in the Australian hills, a girl endlessly alive and crying for the death that will not take her." --summary, LC catalogue record of the 1st US ed.

                • Cover of Midnight at the Houdini
                  Midnight at the Houdini

                  Delilah S. Dawson · standalone novel · 2023

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                  Life has gone according to plan for Anna—she stays in the background, letting her sister, Emily, shine in the spotlight. But on Emily’s wedding night, Anna learns that her sister is moving away, abandoning her—and all their shared dreams. Devastated, Anna leaves the reception in the middle of a raging storm, taking shelter in a hotel she’s never seen before: the Houdini. The Houdini is a hotel unlike any other, with sumptuous velvet couches, marble tiled floors, secret restaurants, winding passageways, and an undercurrent of magic in the air. And when Anna meets Max, who has lived his entire life inside its walls, she’s captivated. For the first time in her life, Anna is center stage, in a place that anticipates her every desire, with a boy who only has eyes for her. But there’s a terrifying secret hidden in the Houdini. When the clock strikes midnight, Anna will be trapped there forever unless she can find a way to break free from its dreamlike magic. But will she be able to do it if it means leaving Max behind?

                • Cover of Witch House
                  Witch House

                  Evangeline Walton · standalone novel · 1945

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                  Witch House is a fantasy novel by American writer Evangeline Walton. It was published in 1945 by Arkham House in an edition of 3,000 copies. It was the first full-length novel to be published by Arkham House and was listed as the initial book in the Library of Arkham House Novels of Fantasy and Terror. An expanded version, with a newly written 20,000-word prologue, was published in England in 1950. In 2013, Centipede Press issued the first American edition of this revised version, also including previously unpublished writings by Walton and several of her short stories.

                • Cover of Boys of Blur
                  Boys of Blur

                  N. D. Wilson · standalone novel · 2014

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                  Boys of Blur is a 2014 young adult novel by N. D. Wilson, published by Random House. It is set in the Florida Everglades, where boys play football and chase rabbits through burning sugarcane fields. According to Booklist, "Wilson brings the stuff of folklore to life in this novel, as elements of Beowulf, voodoo, and zombie mythos combine with the everyday to fantastic effect. The story moves at heart-pounding speeds, furthered by magic and mystery and rooted in ideas of familial bonds and self-discovery."

                • Cover of Shadowland
                  Shadowland

                  Peter Straub · standalone novel · 1980

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                  WorldCat: Two apprentices studying under a master magician spend a season residing in a dark house located in the deep recesses of the Vermont forest. Learning secrets best left unlearned, they enter a world of incalculable evil and terror. Only one of them will survive the ordeal.