Loreful
HomeDiscover
Search series, authors…⌘K
Loreful

Series-first reading tracker: what you've read, what's next, and what you're missing.

Explore

UniversesSeriesWorksAuthorsAtlas

Help

FAQAboutSite map

Account & legal

Sign inCreate accountPrivacyTerms

Data

Built on ISFDB, Wikipedia, Wikidata and Open Library. Every reading order is hand-picked, with a rationale on the page. Data sources & licenses

© Loreful · data: ISFDB · CC BY

More like Styxx

anchored on:paranormal romanceour worldcontemporaryfantasyemotionalmultiple pov

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.

                • The Bone Clocks

                  David Mitchell · standalone novel · 2014

                  similar byimmortalityour worldcontemporaryfantasymultiple pov+1 more

                  The Bone Clocks is a 2014 novel by British writer David Mitchell. It was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and described as one of the best novels of the year by Stephen King. The novel won the 2015 World Fantasy Award.

                • Immortal Beloved

                  series · 3 books · 2010

                  similar byimmortalityemotionalcontemporaryfantasyour world+2 more

                  Cate Tiernan's Immortal Beloved follows Nastasya, an immortal who has restarted her life more times than she can count and is tired of her aimless party-girl existence. She retreats to River's Edge, a refuge for wayward immortals, where she begins to confront long-buried secrets about herself and those around her. The story continues across Darkness Falls and Eternally Yours.

                • Lucy Undying

                  Kiersten White · standalone novel · 2024

                  similar byimmortalityemotionalcontemporaryparanormal romancefantasydark

                  Her name was written in the pages of someone else’s story: Lucy Westenra was one of Dracula’s first victims. But her death was only the beginning. Lucy rose from the grave a vampire and has spent her immortal life trying to escape from Dracula’s clutches—and trying to discover who she really is and what she truly wants. Her undead life takes an unexpected turn in twenty-first-century London, when she meets another woman, Iris, who is also yearning to break free from her past. Iris’s family has built a health empire based on a sinister secret, and they’ll do anything to stay in power. Lucy has long believed she would never love again. Yet she finds herself compelled by the charming Iris while Iris is equally mesmerized by the confident and glamorous Lucy. But their intense connection and blossoming love is threatened by outside forces. Iris’s mother won’t let go of her without a fight, and Lucy’s past still has fangs: Dracula is on the prowl once more. Lucy Westenra has been a tragically murdered teen, a lonesome adventurer, and a fearsome hunter, but happiness has always eluded her. Can she find the strength to destroy Dracula once and for all, or will her heart once again be her undoing?

                • The Vampire Chronicles

                  series · 15 books · 1976

                  completed

                  similar byimmortalityour worldcontemporarydark+1 more

                  The Vampire Chronicles is a series of Gothic vampire novels and a media franchise, created by American author Anne Rice, that revolves around the fictional character Lestat de Lioncourt, a French nobleman turned into a vampire in the 18th century.

                • The Time Keeper

                  Mitch Albom · standalone novel · 2012

                  similar byimmortalityemotionalour worldcontemporaryfantasy

                  The Time Keeper--a compelling fable about the first man on earth to count the hours. The man who became Father Time. In Mitch Albom's newest work of fiction, the inventor of the world's first clock is punished for trying to measure God's greatest gift. He is banished to a cave for centuries and forced to listen to the voices of all who come after him seeking more days, more years. Eventually, with his soul nearly broken, Father Time is granted his freedom, along with a magical hourglass and a mission: a chance to redeem himself by teaching two earthly people the true meaning of time. He returns to our world--now dominated by the hour-counting he so innocently began--and commences a journey with two unlikely partners: one a teenage girl who is about to give up on life, the other a wealthy old businessman who wants to live forever. To save himself, he must save them both. And stop the world to do so.

                • The Perfect Kiss

                  Amanda Stevens · standalone novel · 1993

                  similar byimmortalityemotionalour worldcontemporaryparanormal romance+1 more

                  The eternal woman... She was everything a woman could hope to be - and everything a man could hope to possess. And Zach Christopher wanted her timeless beauty as the symbol of his family's cosmetics firm. But the legendary model lived in seclusion, and nothing could draw her into the light - not even the stunning passion that flared between them the instant they met... The ternal hunger... A forbidden desire - the desire for a mortal man - had shaken Anya Valorian to the depths of her tortured soul. But she was determined not to give in to temptation, to the never-ending hunger that kept her forever in the shadows...For this man could know nothing of the price, the terrible price to be paid for loving one such as she...

                • Elixir

                  series · 3 books · 2010

                  similar byemotionalour worldcontemporaryparanormal romance+2 more

                • Enchantment

                  Orson Scott Card · standalone novel · 1999

                  similar byemotionalour worldcontemporaryfantasy+1 more

                  Enchantment is an English language fantasy novel by American writer Orson Scott Card. First published in 1999, the novel is based on the Ukrainian version of Sleeping Beauty and other folk tales. Various forms of magic, potions, and immortal deities also play an important role in the story.

                • Galilee

                  Clive Barker · standalone novel · 1998

                  similar byimmortalityemotionalcontemporaryfantasydark

                  Galilee is a novel by British writer Clive Barker, published in 1998 by HarperCollins Publishers. It chronicles the rise and fall of two very different, but equally powerful dynasties. The first dynasty, the Gearys, are a glamorous and rich family, similar to the Kennedys, who have been a power in America since the Reconstruction. The Barbarossas are a family of godlike beings. The two parents, Cesaria and Nicodemus, came into existence during the Bronze Age, somewhere between Canaan and the city of Samarkand. They have since had four children, the eldest of which is the titular Galilee.

                • The Four Horsemen (Laura Thalassa)

                  series · 4 books · 2018

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryparanormal romancefantasydark+1 more

                • Deeper Than the Night

                  Amanda Ashley · standalone novel · 1996

                  similar byemotionalour worldcontemporaryparanormal romance+1 more

                  Townsfolk of Moulton Bay said there was something otherworldly about Alexander Claybourne. Some people whispered that with his dark, arresting features and mesmerising eyes, the seductive stranger looked every inch a vampire. They never guessed how near the truth they were-or that after more than two hundred years of resisting temptation, Claybourne had found a woman he had to possess. Never one to be scared off by superstitious lore, Kara Crawford laughed at the local talk of creatures lurking in the dark. What harm could come of befriending the handsome stranger with the haunted look in his midnight eyes? No matter what shadowy secrets Alexander hid, Kara felt drawn to him, compelled to join him beneath the silver light of the moon, where they would share a love...

                • Fallen

                  series · 7 books · 2009

                  similar byemotionalparanormal romanceour worldcontemporaryfantasy

                  Lauren Kate's Fallen opens with Luce Price, sent to a reform school in Savannah after a fire she can't explain, where she meets Daniel, a boy she is certain she has met before. The series follows Luce's growing entanglement with fallen angels and a curse of repeated lifetimes across several sequels running through 2015.

                • Carpathian

                  series · 48 books · 1999

                  similar bycontemporaryparanormal romanceemotionalour world+2 more

                  Carpathian is Christine Feehan's long-running paranormal romance series about an ancient, near-immortal species who slowly lose color and feeling until they find a lifemate who restores both. Starting with Dark Prince in 1999, each book pairs a different Carpathian hunter with a human or gifted heroine, moving between the Carpathian Mountains and modern settings worldwide as the couple confronts vampires and other supernatural threats. It has grown to dozens of novels and novellas and is still being added to.

                • The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel

                  series · 15 books · 2007

                  similar byimmortalityour worldcontemporaryfantasy

                  The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel is a series of six fantasy novels written by Irish author Michael Scott, completed in 2012. The first book in the series, The Alchemyst, was released in 2007, and the sequels were released at the rate of one per year, concluding with The Enchantress in 2012. The cover artist for the series is Michael Wagner.

                • IU
                  Immortals Universe (Alyson Noël)

                  series · 10 books · 2009

                  similar byimmortalityemotionalcontemporaryfantasy+2 more

                • Argeneau Family

                  series · 39 books · 2003

                  similar bycontemporaryparanormal romanceour world+2 more

                  Lynsay Sands's long-running paranormal romance series follows the Argeneau family of vampires as different members find human partners across dozens of standalone-but-linked romances. An early entry, Single White Vampire, follows a romance-line editor determined to get a reclusive vampire author to a genre convention, only to discover his 'novels' are literal memoirs of his own vampire life.

                • The Last Vampire (Christopher Pike)

                  series · 9 books · 1994

                  similar bycontemporaryour world+3 more

                  The Last Vampire series consists of books written by Christopher Pike and chronicles the life of Sita, a 5,000-year-old vampire.

                • Vampire / The Black Rose Chronicles

                  series · 4 books · 1993

                  similar bycontemporaryparanormal romanceour world+2 more

                • The Taker / Immortal

                  series · 5 books · 2011

                  similar byimmortalityemotional+5 more

                  Alma Katsu's The Taker opens the Immortal trilogy (plus a linked prequel novella) when a young doctor named Luke meets a woman who reveals she is immortal, and hears how she was abandoned by a lover two centuries earlier and made eternal by a centuries-old Hungarian count who abducted her. The dark historical fantasy continues across The Reckoning and The Descent, with The Devil's Scribe serving as a prequel novella.

                • The Jinni

                  series · 1 book · 2014

                  similar byimmortalityemotionalour worldcontemporaryparanormal romance

                • The Order of Eternals

                  series · 3 books · 2007

                  similar byemotionalour worldcontemporaryparanormal romance+2 more

                • Flying Dutch

                  Tom Holt · standalone novel · 1991

                  similar byimmortalityour worldcontemporaryfantasy

                  Flying Dutch (ISBN 0-356-20111-2) is the third humorous-fantasy novel by popular British author Tom Holt. First published in the UK in 1991 by Orbit Books.

                • Vitals

                  Greg Bear · standalone novel · 2002

                  similar byimmortalityour worldcontemporary+1 more

                  From the flaps of the Del Rey first edition: "Hal Cousins is one of a handful of scientists nearing the most sought after discovery in human history: the key to short-circuiting the aging process. Fueled by a wealth of research, an overdose of self-confidence, and the money of influential patrons to whom he makes outrageous promises, Hal experiments with organisms living in the hot thermal plumes in the ocean depths. But as he journeys beneath the sea, his other world is falling apart. Across the country, scientists are being inexplicably murdered - including Hal's identical twin brother, who is also working to unlock the key to immortality. Hal himself barely eludes a cold-blooded attack at sea, and when he returns home to Seattle, he finds himself walking into an eerie realm where voices speak to him from the dead ... where a once-brilliant historian turned crackpot is leading him on a deadly game of hide-and-seek ... and where the beautiful, rich widow of his twin is more than willing to pick up the pieces of Hal's life-and take him places he's never been before. Suddenly Hal is trapped inside an ever-twisting maze of shocking revelations. For he is not the first person to come close to ending aging forever - and those who came before him will stop at nothing to keep the secret to themselves. Now every person on earth is at risk of being made an unsuspecting player in one man's spectacular and horrifying master plan. From the bottom of Russia's Lake Baikal to a billionaire's bionic house built into the cliffs of the Washington seashore, from the darkest days of World War II and the reign of Josef Stalin to the capitalist free-for-all that is the United States, Vitals tells an astounding tale of the most unimaginable scientific secret of all - exposed by the quest for immortality itself..."

                • The Blood Journals

                  series · 2 books · 2011

                  similar bycontemporaryfantasy+5 more