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

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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 Starlight Web

anchored on:urban fantasyour worldcontemporaryparanormal

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 centered on witches and the practice of witchcraft — covens, hedge magic, familiars, and the witch's place in her community.
  • Stories structured as a quest — a journey undertaken to find, deliver, or destroy something of great import.
  • Stories in which staying alive against nature, catastrophe, or scarcity is the central problem.
  • Stories of lovers kept apart by law, family, faith, or station, where the obstacle to love is the plot.
  • Stories in which a friendship — its making, testing, or loss — is the emotional center.
  • Stories of growing up — a young protagonist crossing from childhood into adult knowledge and responsibility.
  • Stories about who a character truly is — self-discovery, doubled lives, and the search for a self.
  • Stories about 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 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 October Daye
                  October Daye

                  series · 42 books · 2009

                  similar bycontemporaryurban fantasyfae+3 more

                  October Daye is a New York Times Best Selling series of urban fantasy novels by American author Seanan McGuire. They follow October "Toby" Daye, a half-fae changeling and reluctant hero of the realm.

                • Cover of Black Dragon
                  Black Dragon

                  series · 2 books · 1983

                  similar bymysteriousour worldcontemporaryurban fantasy+1 more

                  R. A. MacAvoy's Tea with the Black Dragon pairs Martha Macnamara, a folk musician searching for her missing daughter, with Mayland Long, a courtly stranger who reveals himself to be a dragon living in human form, as they investigate a computer-fraud scheme in 1980s San Francisco. Its low-key blend of contemporary mystery and gentle fantasy proved popular enough to spawn a sequel, Twisting the Rope, following the same pair into a new case years later.

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

                  series · 100 books · 1996

                  similar bycontemporaryparanormalour worldurban fantasy

                  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 Rivers of London
                  Rivers of London

                  series · 32 books · 2011

                  similar bymysteriouscontemporaryurban fantasymurder investigation+1 more

                  The Rivers of London series is a series of urban fantasy novels by English author Ben Aaronovitch, and comics/graphic novels by Aaronovitch and Andrew Cartmel, illustrated by Lee Sullivan.

                • Cover of The Arcana Familia / Finn Fancy
                  The Arcana Familia / Finn Fancy

                  series · 3 books · 2015

                  similar bycontemporaryurban fantasyour world+3 more

                • Cover of Cainsville
                  Cainsville

                  series · 21 books · 2011

                  similar bymysteriouscontemporaryurban fantasy+3 more

                • Cover of Whisper Hollow
                  Whisper Hollow

                  series · 3 books · 2015

                  similar bycontemporaryurban fantasy+4 more

                • Cover of The Sisters Grimm
                  The Sisters Grimm

                  series · 9 books · 2005

                  similar bycontemporaryour world+3 more

                  The Sisters Grimm is a children's fantasy series written by Michael Buckley and illustrated by Peter Ferguson. The series is partially based on the works and lives of the Brothers Grimm, with the titular protagonists, Sabrina Grimm and Daphne Grimm, being their fictional descendants, and the supporting cast featuring many characters from the Grimms’ collection of fairytales.

                • Cover of The Grimm Files
                  The Grimm Files

                  series · 5 books · 2018

                  similar bycontemporaryurban fantasyour world

                • Cover of Singer of Souls
                  Singer of Souls

                  series · 2 books · 2005

                  similar bycontemporaryurban fantasyfae+3 more

                • ZM
                  Zoe Martinique Universe

                  series · 13 books · 2007

                  similar bycontemporaryurban fantasyour world+3 more

                • Cover of American Gods
                  American Gods

                  series · 10 books · 1999

                  similar bycontemporaryour world+2 more

                  Neil Gaiman's American Gods (2001) follows Shadow Moon, an ex-convict who takes a job as bodyguard to a mysterious drifter who is secretly the Norse god Odin, and is drawn into a brewing conflict between the old immigrant gods of myth and the new gods of media, technology, and modern American life. Gaiman's 2005 novel Anansi Boys is set in the same mythological world and shares the trickster god Mr. Nancy, but follows a different protagonist and story, making it a loose companion rather than a direct sequel.

                • Cover of Wicked Lovely
                  Wicked Lovely

                  series · 17 books · 2007

                  similar bycontemporaryfaeour worldurban fantasy

                  Melissa Marr's Wicked Lovely opens a YA urban-fantasy series about Aislinn, a teenage girl who has always been able to see faeries and has spent her life following her grandmother's rules to avoid their notice - until Keenan, the Summer King, decides she is meant to be his queen. Later books widen out to other faerie courts and other narrators drawn into the same modern-day faerie politics layered invisibly over ordinary life. It helped kick off the mid-2000s wave of YA faerie romance.

                • Cover of Deception Point
                  Deception Point

                  Dan Brown · standalone novel · 2001

                  similar bymysteriousour worldcontemporarymurder investigation

                  Deception Point is a 2001 mystery-thriller novel by American author Dan Brown. It is Brown's third novel. It was published by Simon & Schuster.

                • Cover of Red Letter Days
                  Red Letter Days

                  series · 2 books · 2005

                  completed

                  similar byour worldcontemporary+4 more

                • Cover of Persephone Alcmedi
                  Persephone Alcmedi

                  series · 7 books · 2009

                  similar bycontemporaryurban fantasywitches+4 more

                • Cover of Shifter (Sarah A. Hoyt)
                  Shifter (Sarah A. Hoyt)

                  series · 6 books · 2006

                  similar bycontemporaryurban fantasy+3 more

                  Sarah A. Hoyt's Shifter series opens with Draw One in the Dark, following Kyrie Smith, who has been able to shape-shift into a black panther since age fifteen, as a chance encounter at a Colorado diner pulls her into a hidden world of supernatural shifters. The series continues across five novels as Kyrie confronts what she is.

                • Cover of Keeley & Associates
                  Keeley & Associates

                  series · 9 books · 2020

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryurban fantasy+2 more

                • Cover of Aurora Donati
                  Aurora Donati

                  series · 1 book · 2020

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryurban fantasyparanormal+1 more

                • CW
                  Convergent World

                  series · 8 books · 2007

                  similar bycontemporaryurban fantasyfae+2 more

                • Cover of Myrtlewood Mysteries
                  Myrtlewood Mysteries

                  series · 8 books · 2022

                  similar bycontemporaryour worldurban fantasywitches+3 more

                • Cover of The Dark Elite
                  The Dark Elite

                  series · 3 books · 2009

                  similar bycontemporaryurban fantasyour world+3 more

                • Cover of Spellcrackers.com
                  Spellcrackers.com

                  series · 7 books · 2008

                  similar bycontemporaryurban fantasyour world+2 more

                • Cover of The Curse Workers
                  The Curse Workers

                  series · 3 books · 2010

                  similar bycontemporaryurban fantasyour world+2 more

                  Holly Black's Curse Workers trilogy is set in an alternate America where 'curse work' — magic that harms or transforms through touch — is illegal, enforced through gloves and Prohibition-era-style crime families. It follows Cassel Sharpe, the only non-worker in a family of con artists and workers, as he tries to stay out of his family's schemes despite his own hidden connection to their world. The series runs from White Cat through two further novels.