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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 Pools

anchored on:our worldcontemporary

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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 Midnight World
                  The Midnight World

                  series · 2 books · 2020

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                • Cover of The Gargoyle
                  The Gargoyle

                  Andrew Davidson · standalone novel · 2008

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                  The Gargoyle is the debut novel by Andrew Davidson. It was published in 2008.

                • Cover of The Midnight Club
                  The Midnight Club

                  Christopher Pike · standalone novel · 1994

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                  When you think Christopher Pike, you probably think ax murderers, cursed chain letters, and the occasional evil lizard person — and with good reason! But in this sensitive novel, set at a hospice for terminally ill teens, Pike mashes up standard scary stories with an exploration of what fear really means when illness is more of a threat than haunted houses or sexy vampires.

                • Cover of Love
                  Love

                  Angela Carter · standalone novel · 1971

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                  Love is a 1971 novel by Angela Carter. Her fifth novel, it follows the destructive love triangle between a psychologically unstable woman, her charming husband, and her volatile brother-in-law. Effectively exploring themes of infidelity, self-loathing, suicide, and emotional disconnection, the novel depicts three characters so alienated from society and reality, that they depend solely on each other. This unhealthy fixation slowly eats away at their individual relationships and themselves, until eventually culminating in despair and tragedy.

                • Cover of Shark Heart
                  Shark Heart

                  Emily Habeck · standalone novel · 2023

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                  Subtitled "A Love Story"

                • Cover of The Probable Future
                  The Probable Future

                  Alice Hoffman · standalone novel · 2003

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                  Alice Hoffman's most magical novel to date--three generations of extraordinary women are driven to unite in crisis and discover the rewards of reconciliation and love. Women of the Sparrow family have unusual gifts. Elinor can detect falsehood. Her daughter, Jenny, can see people's dreams when they sleep. Granddaughter Stella has a mental window on the future--a future that she might not want to see. In The Probable Future this vivid and intriguing cast of characters confronts a haunting past--and a very current murder--against the evocative backdrop of small-town New England. By turns chilling and enchanting, The Probable Future chronicles the Sparrows's legacy as young Stella struggles to cope with her disturbing clairvoyance. Her potential to ruin or redeem becomes unbearable when one of her premonitions puts her father in jail, wrongly accused of homicide. Yet this ordeal also leads Stella to the grandmother she was forbidden to meet and to a historic family home full of talismans from her ancestors. Poignant, arresting, unsettling, The Probable Future showcases the lavish literary gifts that have made Alice Hoffman one of America's most treasured writers.

                • Cover of The Ice Queen
                  The Ice Queen

                  Alice Hoffman · standalone novel · 2005

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                  The Ice Queen is a 2005 novel by Alice Hoffman, published by Little, Brown.Wishes... burn your tongue the moment they're spoken, and you can never take them back.

                • Cover of A Monster Calls
                  A Monster Calls

                  series · 2 books · 2011

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

                • Cover of Remarkably Bright Creatures
                  Remarkably Bright Creatures

                  Shelby Van Pelt · standalone novel · 2022

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                  Remarkably Bright Creatures is a novel by American author Shelby Van Pelt. It was published in May 2022 by Ecco Press. It has been on the New York Times hardcover fiction best-seller list multiple times.

                • Cover of Before I Fall
                  Before I Fall

                  series · 2 books · 2010

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                  Lauren Oliver's Before I Fall is a 2010 young-adult novel narrated by teenager Samantha Kingston, who is forced to relive the day of her death repeatedly over the course of a week. Attempting to understand why, Samantha tries different choices and actions each time through, some starkly out of character, as she reckons with her life and relationships. It was adapted into a 2017 film of the same name.

                • Cover of Release
                  Release

                  Patrick Ness · standalone novel · 2017

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                  "The most personal and tender novel yet from Patrick Ness, the twice Carnegie Medal-winning author of A Monster Calls. It's Saturday, it's summer and, although he doesn't know it yet, everything in Adam Thorn's life is going to fall apart. But maybe, just maybe, he'll find freedom from the release. Time is running out though, because way across town, a ghost has risen from the lake... This uplifting coming-of-age novel will remind you what it's like to fall in love." (toppsta.com)

                • Cover of Sacrament
                  Sacrament

                  Clive Barker · standalone novel · 1995

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                  Sacrament is a 1996 novel by British author Clive Barker. It follows a wildlife photographer who is obsessed with documenting species of animals that are faced with extinction. It is set in Yorkshire, England, San Francisco and Hudson Bay, Canada and explores how his obsession is connected to his upbringing in Yorkshire. The Author described it as "a story about how we become who we are and how we must deal with what we are by facing up to including the things that happened to us in childhood, good and bad. It's also about what's happening to our planet."

                • Cover of Empire of the Sun
                  Empire of the Sun

                  series · 2 books · 1984

                  completed

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                  J. G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun draws on his own childhood to follow Jim, a British boy separated from his parents in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during World War II and interned in a civilian camp for the rest of the war. Ballard revisited the same period and a version of the same character years later in The Kindness of Women, a more explicitly fictionalized continuation into Jim's adult life. Empire of the Sun is the more directly autobiographical and better-known of the two.

                • Cover of The Book of Form and Emptiness
                  The Book of Form and Emptiness

                  Ruth Ozeki · standalone novel · 2021

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                  The Book of Form and Emptiness is a novel by American author Ruth Ozeki, published in 2021 by Viking. Ozeki's fourth novel, the book won the 2022 Women's Prize for Fiction. The story follows a boy who hears voices from inanimate objects while the narrative explores themes of mental illness and bereavement.

                • Cover of Click
                  Click

                  Gregory Maguire, Tim Wynne-Jones, David Almond, Eoin Colfer, Margo Lanagan, Nick Hornby, Roddy Doyle, Deborah Ellis, Ruth Ozeki & Linda Sue Park · standalone novel · 2007

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                  A camera. Some photographs. A box with seven shells. And many mysteries. Those are the things that Maggie and Jason inherited from their grandfather, the famed photojournalist George "Gee" Keane. Gee traveled from Ireland to Russia, Japan to Australia, taking pictures of people at work, at war, in sports, and at play. Now Jason receives Gee's photographs and camera--though he has no idea what to do with them. And Gee leaves Maggie with the puzzle of the seven shells--one that might take her whole life to solve. As Maggie and Jason use these gifts, they will discover all the people their grandfather was...and all the people they might yet become. All royalties from the sale of this book will benefit Amnesty International.

                • Cover of Lost
                  Lost

                  Gregory Maguire · standalone novel · 2001

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                  Lost is a 2001 novel by American author Gregory Maguire. Unlike many of Maguire's other adult novels, Lost is set in the real world. The novel's concept is that the protagonist is a distant relative of the man who inspired Charles Dickens' character of Ebenezer Scrooge.

                • Cover of The Sentence
                  The Sentence

                  Louise Erdrich · standalone novel · 2021

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                  The Sentence is a 2021 novel by American author Louise Erdrich. The novel was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

                • Cover of The Time Traveler's Wife
                  The Time Traveler's Wife

                  Audrey Niffenegger · standalone novel · 2003

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                  The Time Traveler's Wife is the debut novel by American author Audrey Niffenegger, published in 2003. It is a love story about Henry, a man with a genetic disorder that causes him to time travel unpredictably, and about Clare, his wife, an artist who has to cope with his frequent absences. Niffenegger, who was frustrated with love when she began the novel, wrote the story as a metaphor for her failed relationships. The tale's central relationship came to Niffenegger suddenly and subsequently supplied the novel's title. The novel has been classified as both science fiction and romance.

                • Cover of The Returned
                  The Returned

                  Jason Mott · standalone novel · 2013

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                  The Returned is the debut novel by American author Jason Mott, published in 2013. It is centered on the return of dead people to the living world and their impact on the daily lives of the people around them. The TV adaptation Resurrection was produced by ABC Studios and aired on March 9, 2014.

                • Cover of Charlotte's Web
                  Charlotte's Web

                  E. B. White · standalone novel · 1952

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                  When he discovers that he is destined to be someone's dinner, Wilbur the pig is desolate until his spider friend Charlotte decides to help him. (WorldCat)

                • Cover of The Leftovers
                  The Leftovers

                  Tom Perrotta · standalone novel · 2011

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                  The Leftovers is a 2011 satirical supernatural novel by American author Tom Perrotta. Set in the aftermath of a Rapture-like event in which 2% of Earth's human population vanished into thin air, it chronicles the lives of several individuals from a small New York town attempting to adjust to the significant cultural shift brought about by the event, while also navigating their personal trauma and losses.

                • Cover of Hunter in the Dark
                  Hunter in the Dark

                  Monica Hughes · standalone novel · 1982

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                  Mike goes on a secret hunting trip alone in an effort to come to terms with his leukemia.

                • Cover of LaRose
                  LaRose

                  Louise Erdrich · standalone novel · 2016

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                  LaRose is a novel by the Ojibwe author Louise Erdrich, published in 2016 by HarperCollins. The novel features the same setting as Erdrich's 2012 novel The Round House. The book received positive reviews from literary publications. It won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

                • Cover of Answered Prayers
                  Answered Prayers

                  series · 6 books · 1987

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