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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 The Entity Within

anchored on:paranormal romancewitchesnorth americacontemporaryurban fantasyforbidden love+2 more

but

Mood

The mood the book leaves you in.

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

About

What the story runs on.

  • Stories in which extraterrestrial beings are central — as characters, cultures, or the object of the plot.
  • Stories structured as a quest — a journey undertaken to find, deliver, or destroy something of great import.
  • Stories in which staying alive against nature, catastrophe, or scarcity is the central problem.
  • Stories of lovers kept apart by law, family, faith, or station, where the obstacle to love is the plot.
  • Stories in which a friendship — its making, testing, or loss — is the emotional center.
  • Stories of growing up — a young protagonist crossing from childhood into adult knowledge and responsibility.
  • Stories about who a character truly is — self-discovery, doubled lives, and the search for a self.
  • Stories about mourning — living through the death of a loved one and what loss does to the survivors.
  • Stories in which a buried family truth — hidden parentage, crimes, or shames — surfaces and reorders the present.
  • Stories driven by maneuvering for power — factions, conspiracies, and statecraft conducted in shadow.
  • Stories in which war itself is the subject — combat, occupation, and what warfare does to soldiers and civilians.
  • Stories organized around investigating a killing — the case, the clues, and the pursuit of the killer, in any genre's clothing.

Shelf

Where it sits in the library.

    • Fiction built on magic or other supernatural elements that have no scientific explanation.
    • Secondary-world fantasy at large scale, where the fate of nations or the world turns on the protagonists' struggle.
    • Fantasy set in a recognizably modern city or contemporary world where the supernatural intrudes on everyday life.
    • Fantasy that blends in horror's atmosphere and imagery, keeping a fantastical frame around grim or frightening material.
    • Action-driven fantasy following warriors or rogues with personal stakes against sorcerous threats, rather than world-spanning conflicts.
    • Fantasy set in a real historical period or a close analogue of one, with magic woven into the era.
    • Fantasy in which protagonists cross from the ordinary world into another world through a portal or similar passage.
    • Fiction that retells or reworks a traditional fairy tale in a new form or setting.
    • Fantasy drawing directly on myths, legends, and folklore, retelling them or building on their figures and logic.
    • Fantasy of ghosts, vampires, shapeshifters, psychics, and similar phenomena, usually set in an otherwise ordinary world.
    • Fiction mixing science-fictional trappings with overtly magical or impossible elements in one setting.
    • Low-stakes fantasy emphasizing comfort, community, and everyday pleasures over conflict and peril.
    • Speculative fiction of pervasive moral ambiguity, violence, and cynicism that rejects heroic conventions — fantasy and SF alike.
      • Fiction that extrapolates from science and technology — future societies, space travel, or speculative inventions — within at least nominally natural laws.
      • Science fiction of interstellar scope — starships, galactic polities, and adventure across star systems.
      • Science fiction committed to scientific rigor, where technical plausibility constrains the story.
      • Science fiction centered on armed forces and warfare, told largely from a military point of view.
      • Science fiction of networked, corporate-dominated near futures, pairing high technology with social decay.
      • Science fiction styled on nineteenth-century steam-powered technology, often in a Victorian or pseudo-Victorian setting.
      • Fiction depicting an oppressive or catastrophic society, presented as a warning.
      • Fiction set after civilization's collapse, following survivors in the ruins of the old world.
      • Fiction in which characters move between past and future, and the mechanics or consequences of that travel drive the plot.
      • Fiction exploring a world where a historical event went differently and history diverged from ours.
      • Science fiction about humanity's first encounter and communication with an alien intelligence.
      • Science fiction in which extraterrestrial forces attack or occupy Earth and humanity resists.
      • Fiction whose primary aim is to frighten or unsettle the reader through dread, menace, or the monstrous.
      • Horror of vast, indifferent, incomprehensible entities before which humanity is insignificant, in the Lovecraft tradition.
      • Horror of decaying houses, buried family secrets, and oppressive atmosphere in the Gothic literary tradition.
      • Horror centered on hauntings and the returning dead.
      • Horror located in the mind — paranoia, obsession, and unreliable perception rather than external monsters.
      • Horror built around the reanimated dead and survival amid their outbreaks.
      • Horror defined by explicit, transgressive gore that refuses to cut away from violence.
      • Speculative fiction of the strange and uncanny that resists both natural explanation and standard genre categories.
      • Fiction organized around solving a crime or puzzle, typically following an investigator toward the identification of a culprit.
      • A puzzle-first mystery that lays out clues so the culprit's identity can be deduced before the reveal.
      • Crime fiction of moral ambiguity, fatalism, and hard-edged style, set among the corrupt and the doomed.
      • A mystery following the realistic routines of police work — forensics, interviews, and case-building.
      • A gentle mystery with an amateur sleuth, a small community, and violence kept off the page.
      • A mystery set in a past era, where the investigation works within that period's methods and society.
      • Fast-paced fiction driven by imminent danger, pursuit, or high-stakes conspiracy, built to sustain tension.
      • A thriller of espionage — agents, tradecraft, and intelligence services in conflict.
      • A thriller centered on lawyers and the courtroom, where litigation carries the suspense.
      • A thriller driven by detailed contemporary or near-future technology, often military or scientific.
      • A thriller whose tension comes from mental states and manipulation between characters rather than external action.
      • Fiction whose central plot is a romantic relationship and its development toward an emotionally satisfying resolution.
      • Romance in which one or both partners are supernatural beings, blending fantasy elements into the love story.
      • A fantasy-romance hybrid in which the romantic arc and the fantasy plot carry equal weight.
      • Romance set in a past era, with courtship shaped by the period's society and manners.
      • Romance set in the present day, without supernatural or historical elements.
      • Fiction set in a real past period, where the historical setting materially shapes characters and events.
        • General and literary fiction emphasizing prose style, character interiority, or formal ambition over genre plot conventions.
        • Fiction in a realistic world where magical events occur and are treated as ordinary, in the tradition of Latin American literature.
        • Fiction that ridicules people, institutions, or society in order to criticize them.
        • Fiction of dreamlike, irrational imagery and logic that breaks from realistic representation.
        • Fiction that plays with narrative convention through metafiction, fragmentation, and self-reference.
        • Fiction propelled by journeys, exploration, and physical peril, where action and survival carry the plot.
        • Adventure fiction of ships and seafaring — naval engagements, voyages, and life at sea.
        • Fiction of the American frontier West — gunmen, ranchers, and lawmen, typically in the late nineteenth century.
        • Fiction centered on soldiers, campaigns, and the experience of warfare, historical or imagined.
          • Fiction written primarily to amuse, using comedic situations, wit, or parody as its organizing principle.
            • Multi-generational fiction following a family or dynasty across decades, with inheritance and kinship as the through-line.
              • Fiction whose world runs on explicit game mechanics — levels, stats, and skills that characters can see and exploit.
                • Fiction about costumed or superpowered heroes and their conflicts with comparable villains.

                Practical

                How long a commitment, whether it stands alone, and whether it has finished.

                Tap a chip to ask for it · tap again to rule it out · once more to clear. Numbers show what would be left.

                • Cover of The Vampire's Seduction
                  The Vampire's Seduction

                  Cynthia Cooke · standalone novel · 2011

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                  Finding out she was a witch had upended Mari Saguna's staid life, but being thrown into a war between dark, otherworldly creatures in New York City surpassed the surreal. Her coven battled a clan of vampires...and caught in the middle were Mari and one vampire hell-bent on rescuing his kidnapped brethren. No spells could protect her from Nicholai, the potent, mysterious seducer. No potions could assuage the longing he'd awakened in her. In his lair, Mari wasn't sure she wanted protection...until she discovered Nicholai's dark intention. Could she believe the enemy she'd come to love meant to destroy her? And would it matter when Nicholai discovered she -- and her blood -- were her coven's secret weapon?

                • Cover of The Dark Artifices
                  The Dark Artifices

                  series · 4 books · 2016

                  part of The Mortal Instruments

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                  The Dark Artifices is a trilogy written by Cassandra Clare. The series is chronologically the fourth series in The Shadowhunter Chronicles and a sequel to The Mortal Instruments. It is set in Los Angeles. The series consists of three books: Lady Midnight, Lord of Shadows and Queen of Air and Darkness, in that particular order. Centered around the protagonist, Emma Carstairs, the series follows her journey as a Shadowhunter at the Los Angeles Institute, and her life with her best-friend and parabatai, Julian Blackthorn, and his family. The series is about a sacred bond of "parabatai", two bonded Shadowhunters, and it is more valuable than any bond in this world. This bond makes the two more powerful and strong, but there is only one drawback - it is forbidden to fall in love with your parabatai. It so happens that Emma and Julian, two parabatai, have fallen in love. The Dark Artifices is a trilogy about their struggle against their enemies and how the two protagonists deal with their forbidden love and the resulting consequences. The series is told from the point-of-view of the various different characters in the story.

                • Cover of Meena Harper
                  Meena Harper

                  series · 2 books · 2010

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                • VA
                  Vampire Academy Universe

                  series · 19 books · 2007

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                • Cover of In the Company of Vampires
                  In the Company of Vampires

                  series · 3 books · 2013

                  part of Beautiful Creatures

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                  Night Huntress World

                  series · 2 books · 2010

                  part of Night Huntress

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                • Cover of Hush, Hush
                  Hush, Hush

                  series · 5 books · 2009

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                  The Hush, Hush quartet is a series of four novels by Becca Fitzpatrick that follow teenager Nora Grey as she falls in love with the fallen angel Patch and discovers her own angelic heritage. The first book in the series, Hush, Hush, was released on October 13, 2009 through Simon & Schuster, with the final novel in the series, Finale, releasing on October 23, 2012. The series was initially promoted as a trilogy, with later announcements stating that the series would comprise four books.

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                  Chicagoland Vampires Universe

                  series · 25 books · 2009

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                • Cover of Meredith Gentry
                  Meredith Gentry

                  series · 10 books · 2000

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                  The Merry Gentry series is a series of urban fantasy novels by New York Times bestselling author Laurell K. Hamilton. The series is told through the lens of the titular character Meredith "Merry" Gentry, a faerie princess turned private investigator in a world where faeries exist and are known to the general public. The first book in the series, A Kiss of Shadows, was released by Del Rey on October 3, 2000. There are currently nine books in the series.

                • Cover of Entity / Vamptown
                  Entity / Vamptown

                  series · 5 books · 2013

                  completed

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                • Cover of Spellbinder (Melanie Rawn)
                  Spellbinder (Melanie Rawn)

                  series · 2 books · 2006

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                • Cover of The Changeover
                  The Changeover

                  Margaret Mahy · standalone novel · 1984

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                  The Changeover: a Supernatural Romance is a low fantasy novel for young adults by Margaret Mahy, published in 1984 by J. M. Dent in the U.K. It is set in Christchurch in the author's native New Zealand.

                • Cover of Evernight Universe
                  Evernight Universe

                  series · 7 books · 2008

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                • Cover of Three Sisters Island Trilogy
                  Three Sisters Island Trilogy

                  series · 3 books · 2001

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                  Dance Upon the Air opens Nora Roberts's Three Sisters Island trilogy with Nell Channing, who arrives on the island believing she's finally found refuge from an abusive marriage and the life she fled months earlier. She instead finds herself entangled in the island's own supernatural history and a curse tied to three founding sisters. Heaven and Earth and Face the Fire complete the trilogy, each centered on a different island woman.

                • Cover of Bayou Magic / Shadow Hunter (Debbie Herbert)
                  Bayou Magic / Shadow Hunter (Debbie Herbert)

                  series · 3 books · 2016

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                • Cover of The Hollows
                  The Hollows

                  series · 39 books · 2004

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                  The Hollows is a series of urban fantasy novels by Kim Harrison, originally published by HarperCollins Publishers and by Ace Books since 2020. The series includes 18 novels, numerous novellas and short stories, two graphic novels, and one compendium resource; a 19th novel, Absolute Demon, is forthcoming in 2027.

                • Cover of Georgina Kincaid
                  Georgina Kincaid

                  series · 7 books · 2007

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                  The Georgina Kincaid series is a collection of eight urban fantasy novels written by Richelle Mead. The series is written in a first-person perspective following the main character, Georgina Kincaid, who is a succubus with a heart, who is working at a local book store called Emerald City Books & Cafe.

                • Cover of Grace Divine
                  Grace Divine

                  series · 5 books · 2009

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                • Cover of Anita Blake
                  Anita Blake

                  series · 42 books · 1993

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                  Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter is a series of urban fantasy novels, short stories, and comic books by Laurell K. Hamilton. The books have sold more than six million copies; many have made The New York Times Best Seller list.

                • Cover of The Midnight Breed
                  The Midnight Breed

                  series · 29 books · 2007

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                  The Midnight Breed follows a secret species of vampire warriors descended from an ancient alien bloodline, sworn to protect humanity from rogue vampires who have succumbed to bloodlust while contending with a prophecy tied to their own survival. Lara Adrian's long-running paranormal romance series, beginning with Kiss of Midnight, follows different Breed warriors and their human partners across twenty-five novels.

                • Cover of Soul Fire
                  Soul Fire

                  R. F. Long · standalone novel · 2009

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                  "Iron born and iron bred. Trust not iron, it will see you dead. Rowan Blake could really use a magic wand to keep her struggling art gallery afloat. But the faerie key she stumbles across is far from a lucky charm. It's a magnet for danger, and by touching it she's unwittingly put herself in the middle of a war between the forces of light and dark. And in the arms of its rightful owner, Prince Daire. While searching for his brother, Daire finds himself trapped in the Iron World with a mere mortal woman who ignites his passion like no other. Each stolen kiss deepens their attraction and sends him spiraling closer and closer to the edge of his inherent dark desires. Desires that act as a homing beacon for the Dark Sidhe, who are intent on forcing him to fight on their side. The longer he lingers in her arms—and in her bed—the closer his enemies get to her door. And the greater the risk that the gateway to the Faerie Realm will shift, destroying not only his power to protect her, but his very life." — from this book's product page on Samhain's website as of 2016-11-11.

                • Cover of Wing Slayer
                  Wing Slayer

                  series · 5 books · 2009

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                • Cover of House of Night
                  House of Night

                  series · 20 books · 2007

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                • Cover of Guild Hunter
                  Guild Hunter

                  series · 23 books · 2009

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                  Guild Hunter is set in a world where angels rule openly over human society, served by vampires bound to them for a century of servitude and policed in part by hunters who track down vampires who break their bonds. Nalini Singh's series follows Guild Hunter Elena Deveraux after she is drawn into the orbit of Raphael, the archangel who governs New York, in a saga that widens to follow the broader archangel-run world across many further novels.