Loreful
HomeDiscover
Search series, authors…⌘K
Loreful

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

Explore

UniversesSeriesWorksAuthorsAtlas

Help

FAQAboutSite map

Account & legal

Sign inCreate accountPrivacyTerms

Data

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 Labyrinth

anchored on:contemporary

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 Damnation Game
                  The Damnation Game

                  Clive Barker · standalone novel · 1985

                  similar byour worldcontemporarydarktensefantasydark fantasyhorror

                  Marty Strauss is a compulsive gambler fresh out of prison when he's hired as bodyguard for Joseph Whitehead, a reclusive tycoon whose fortune and continued existence trace back to a bargain struck decades earlier, during World War II, with a man named Mamoulian. That bargain is coming due: Mamoulian, who commands powers reaching well past death, wants what he's owed, and Whitehead's household -- his wife, his daughter Carys, his previous bodyguard -- is caught in the middle of a decades-old debt finally being called in. Marty, out of his depth from the start, finds himself the only one willing to stand against Mamoulian. Clive Barker's first novel.

                • Cover of The Dark
                  The Dark

                  James Herbert · standalone novel · 1980

                  similar byour worldcontemporarydarktensedark fantasyhorror+1 more

                  WorldCat: It came like a malignant shadow with seductive promises of power. And somewhere in the night, a small girl smiled as her mother burned. Asylum inmates slaughtered their attendants. In slimy tunnels, once-human creatures gathered. Madness raged as the lights began to fade and humanity was attacked by an ancient, unstoppable evil.

                • Cover of Shadow Saga II (Christopher Golden)
                  Shadow Saga II (Christopher Golden)

                  series · 7 books · 1994

                  similar byour worldcontemporary+4 more

                  Christopher Golden's Shadow Saga follows Peter Octavian, a centuries-old vampire working as a private investigator in a Boston where humans live alongside a hidden population of supernatural creatures, beginning with Of Saints and Shadows. Later volumes widen the cast and stakes across a war among vampires, angels, and demons that runs through the mid-1990s and returns with new entries into the 2010s.

                • Cover of Alex Stern
                  Alex Stern

                  series · 4 books · 2019

                  similar bycontemporarydark fantasy+5 more

                  Leigh Bardugo's Alex Stern series follows Galaxy 'Alex' Stern, a survivor and college dropout offered a scholarship to Yale in exchange for policing the eight secret societies that practice occult magic on campus, as a member of the shadowy organization Lethe. The opening novel, Ninth House, establishes her as an outsider gifted with the ability to see ghosts; the sequels continue her investigation into the societies' abuses and the murder that first drew her into Lethe's world. It is a dark fantasy series blending campus intrigue with horror.

                • Cover of Jerusalem's Lot
                  Jerusalem's Lot

                  series · 3 books · 1975

                  similar byour worldcontemporarydarktensehorror

                  Stephen King's 1975 novel 'Salem's Lot follows writer Ben Mears as he returns to his childhood town of Jerusalem's Lot, Maine, only to discover that its residents are being turned into vampires by a newly arrived stranger. It transplants Gothic vampire horror into a small New England community, tracking that community's collapse under a supernatural siege. It is a single, self-contained novel.

                • Cover of The Andromeda Strain
                  The Andromeda Strain

                  series · 2 books · 1969

                  similar bycontemporarytense+3 more

                  Michael Crichton's 1969 novel The Andromeda Strain follows a team of scientists racing to contain a lethal extraterrestrial microorganism that crash-lands in Arizona, told in the clinical, document-driven style that helped establish the techno-thriller genre. Daniel H. Wilson's authorized 2019 sequel The Andromeda Evolution revisits the same threat five decades later. Together the two books form a two-part outbreak story separated by a fifty-year gap in publication.

                • D1
                  Department 19 Universe

                  series · 10 books · 2011

                  similar bycontemporary+5 more

                • Cover of Rose Madder
                  Rose Madder

                  Stephen King · standalone novel · 1995

                  similar byour worldcontemporarydarktensefantasyhorror

                  Rose Madder is a horror/fantasy novel by American writer Stephen King, published in 1995. It deals with the effects of domestic violence and, unusually for a King novel, relies for its fantastic element on Greek mythology. In his memoir, On Writing, King states that Rose Madder and Insomnia are "stiff, trying-too-hard novels."

                • Cover of Meredith Gentry
                  Meredith Gentry

                  series · 10 books · 2000

                  similar byour worldcontemporary+4 more

                  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 Anita Blake
                  Anita Blake

                  series · 42 books · 1993

                  similar bycontemporarydarktense+2 more

                  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 Library at Mount Char
                  The Library at Mount Char

                  Scott Hawkins · standalone novel · 2015

                  similar byour worldcontemporarydarktensefantasydark fantasyhorror

                  The Library at Mount Char is a contemporary fantasy/horror novel written by Scott Hawkins. It is his first novel.

                • Cover of The Last Werewolf
                  The Last Werewolf

                  series · 3 books · 2011

                  similar byour worldcontemporarydark+4 more

                • Cover of Vampire Huntress Legend
                  Vampire Huntress Legend

                  series · 15 books · 2003

                  completed

                  similar bycontemporary+3 more

                  L. A. Banks's Vampire Huntress Legend opens with Minion, introducing Damali Richards, a spoken-word artist and martial artist who moonlights as a vampire hunter. The urban fantasy series follows Damali across thirteen novels as she confronts escalating supernatural threats.

                • Cover of The Fury
                  The Fury

                  series · 4 books · 1976

                  similar bycontemporarytense+4 more

                  John Farris's The Fury centers on a teenage girl and boy with escalating psychic and telekinetic powers who become targets of a covert government program trying to weaponize them. The 1976 novel, adapted into Brian De Palma's 1978 film, gave rise to a string of later sequels following the same family's psychic bloodline across decades. Farris writes it as paranoid conspiracy thriller as much as horror, with the powers themselves treated as a violent, destabilizing force.

                • Cover of Hellraiser
                  Hellraiser

                  series · 5 books · 1991

                  similar bydarkcontemporarydark fantasyhorror+3 more

                  Clive Barker's The Hellbound Heart introduces the puzzle box that summons the Cenobites and the domestic horror story around it, later adapted into the Hellraiser film series. The Scarlet Gospels, written decades later, brings the character back for a direct confrontation with Barker's other recurring figure, occult detective Harry D'Amour. Other contributors have added further Hellraiser tie-in fiction, including prequel and screenplay-adaptation volumes, expanding the mythology started in the original novella.

                • Cover of Rosemary Reilly
                  Rosemary Reilly

                  series · 2 books · 1967

                  completed

                  similar bytensehorror+4 more

                  Rosemary's Baby follows a young wife in a Gothic Manhattan apartment building who grows increasingly convinced that her elderly neighbors, and even her own husband, are part of a conspiracy surrounding her pregnancy. Ira Levin returned to the character thirty years later in the 1997 sequel Son of Rosemary. Together the two novels form a short, self-contained horror series about faith, control, and motherhood.

                • Cover of Demonata
                  Demonata

                  series · 10 books · 2005

                  similar bydarktensecontemporarydark fantasyhorror+2 more

                  The Demonata is a young adult horror/fantasy series by author Darren Shan.

                • Cover of The Vampire Chronicles
                  The Vampire Chronicles

                  series · 15 books · 1976

                  completed

                  similar byour worlddarkcontemporaryhorror+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.

                • Cover of Charlie Manx / Christmasland
                  Charlie Manx / Christmasland

                  series · 3 books · 2013

                  similar byour worldcontemporarydark fantasyhorror+2 more

                  Joe Hill's NOS4A2 introduces Charlie Manx, a supernatural predator who abducts children in his Rolls-Royce Wraith and carries them to Christmasland, a frozen otherworld reached along roads that exist only in the minds of the gifted. Victoria McQueen, who has a similar power to find impossible roads, spends the novel and the companion story Wraith trying to stop him — a linked pursuit across decades rather than a conventional numbered series.

                • Cover of Dead Lines
                  Dead Lines

                  Greg Bear · standalone novel · 2004

                  similar byour worldcontemporarydarkhorror+2 more

                  From the flaps of the Ballantine first edition: "For the last two years, Peter Russell has mourned the death of one of his twin daughters - who was just ten when she was murdered. Recent news of his best friend's fatal heart attack has now come as another devastating blow. Divorced, despondent, and going nowhere in his career, Peter fears his life is circling the drain. Then Trans comes along. The brainchild of an upstart telecom company, Trans is (as its name suggests) a transcendent marvel, a sleek, handheld interpersonal communication device capable of flawless operation anywhere in the world, at any time. "A cell phone, but not" - transmitting with crystal clarity across a newly discovered, never-utilized bandwidth... and poised to spark a new-technology revolution. When its creators offer Peter a position on their team, it should be a golden opportunity for him. If only he wasn't seemingly going mad. Everywhere Peter turns, inexplicable apparitions are walking before him or reaching out in torment. After a chilling encounter with his own lost child he begins to grasp the terrifying truth: Trans is a Pandora's box that has tapped into a frequency not of this world... but of the next. And now, via this open channel to oblivion, the dead have gained access to the living. For Peter, and for humankind, a long shadowy night of the soul has descended, bringing with it the stuff of a horrifying nightmare from which they may never awaken."

                • Cover of Book of the Art
                  Book of the Art

                  series · 3 books · 1989

                  similar bycontemporarydarkfantasydark fantasyhorror+1 more

                  The Art was meant to be a trilogy about a hidden order guarding the boundary between our world and Quiddity, a dream-sea shared by all sleeping minds, but Clive Barker only completed two of its three volumes. The Great and Secret Show follows a decades-long feud between two men who discover Quiddity's power - one seeking to harness it, the other to protect it - with consequences that distort reality itself; Everville continues the story a generation later. The planned third volume was never published.

                • Cover of Atlas (Olivie Blake)
                  Atlas (Olivie Blake)

                  series · 3 books · 2020

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryfantasy+3 more

                  Olivie Blake's Atlas trilogy follows six magical scholars recruited into a secretive society that grants near-limitless magical resources in exchange for a mortal cost only revealed after they've already committed. The Atlas Paradox and The Atlas Complex escalate the group's rivalries and the price of the power they've been given. The series began as a self-published web serial before its traditional re-release.

                • Cover of Necroscope
                  Necroscope

                  series · 26 books · 1982

                  completed

                  similar bydarktensecontemporaryhorror+2 more

                  Brian Lumley's Necroscope opens an eighteen-book horror saga (1982-2017) centered on Harry Keogh, a man who can speak with the dead. Harry turns that gift against Thibor Ferenczy, a vampire buried since the Middle Ages, and against Ferenczy's agent Boris Dragosani, a Soviet spy who has learned to tear secrets from corpses in pursuit of world domination. Later volumes follow Harry's descendants and successors through further wars against the vampiric Wamphyri, across sequel trilogies and story collections.

                • Cover of In the Night Room
                  In the Night Room

                  Peter Straub · standalone novel · 2004

                  similar byour worldcontemporarydarktensehorror+1 more

                  In the Night Room is a 2004 horror-thriller novel by American author Peter Straub, a sequel to his 2003 book Lost Boy, Lost Girl. The work was first published in hardback on October 26, 2004, through Random House and it won the 2004 Bram Stoker Award for Novel. Straub encountered some difficulties while writing In the Night Room and had written several different passages for the work before growing bored with each version before writing it using the same technique he used for its predecessor in which he "reached down inside the book and turned it inside out."