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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 Super Ghost

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 Charlie (Roald Dahl)
                  Charlie (Roald Dahl)

                  series · 6 books · 1964

                  completed

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                • Cover of Dirk Gently
                  Dirk Gently

                  series · 3 books · 1987

                  completed

                  part of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Universe

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                  Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987) introduces Douglas Adams's eccentric investigator, whose approach treats all events and objects as ultimately connected however implausibly, as a case involving time travel, a ghost, and a Cambridge murder tangles into one plot. Adams completed one further full novel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), before his death; The Salmon of Doubt (2002) later collected his unfinished notes toward a third book alongside essays and other writing, rather than completing the story.

                • Cover of Artemis Fowl
                  Artemis Fowl

                  series · 15 books · 2001

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                  Artemis Fowl is a series of eleven fantasy novels by Irish author Eoin Colfer, revolving around various members of the Fowl family. The first cycle, the Artemis Fowl series, consists of eight books, and the second cycle, The Fowl Twins series, is a trilogy. Both releases have received commercial success and positive critical reception in the children's literature genre, and also originated graphic novel adaptations. As of 2013, the novels have sold more than 21 million copies in 44 languages, and are one of the best-selling series of all time. In 2010, Artemis Fowl was voted by readers as their favorite Puffin Books title of all time.

                • Cover of Bromeliad
                  Bromeliad

                  series · 3 books · 1989

                  completed

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                  The Nome Trilogy, also known as The Bromeliad, is a trilogy of children's books by British writer Terry Pratchett, consisting of the books Truckers (1989), Diggers (1990) and Wings (1990). The trilogy tells the story of the Nomes, a race of tiny people from another world who now live hidden among humans. Through the books they struggle to survive in the human world and, once they learn of their history from an artefact known as "The Thing", make plans to return home.

                • Cover of American Gods
                  American Gods

                  series · 10 books · 1999

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

                • BU
                  Bunnicula Universe

                  series · 20 books · 1979

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                • Cover of Good Omens
                  Good Omens

                  series · 2 books · 1990

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                  Good Omens is Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's 1990 comic fantasy novel in which an angel and a demon, both grown fond of life on Earth, try to head off an apocalypse foretold in a seventeenth-century witch's uncannily accurate prophecies, complicated by the fact that no one can find the misplaced Antichrist. Paired with it here is The Quite Nice and Fairly Accurate Good Omens: Script Book, a companion volume collecting the screenplay for the television adaptation rather than a second novel.

                • Cover of Samuel Johnson
                  Samuel Johnson

                  series · 3 books · 2009

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                  John Connolly's Samuel Johnson trilogy follows an ordinary boy and his dachshund, Boswell, who accidentally open a portal to Hell in his English hometown and end up as the unlikely last line of defense against the demons who pour through, beginning with The Gates. The comic horror trilogy continues through Hell's Bells and The Creeps.

                • Cover of Support Group
                  Support Group

                  series · 2 books · 2009

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                • Cover of Nursery Crimes
                  Nursery Crimes

                  series · 2 books · 2005

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                  In an alternate Reading, England, where nursery-rhyme and fairy-tale characters live as ordinary if eccentric citizens, Detective Inspector Jack Spratt of the Nursery Crime Division investigates cases that keep colliding with their source material. The Big Over Easy turns Humpty Dumpty's fall into a murder investigation; The Fourth Bear follows with the Gingerbread Man as a serial killer. Jasper Fforde plays the premise for satire and wordplay as much as plot, in the same absurdist vein as his Thursday Next novels.

                • Cover of The World of Skulduggery Pleasant
                  The World of Skulduggery Pleasant

                  series · 38 books · 2007

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                  These are standalone companion stories set in Derek Landy's Skulduggery Pleasant world, rather than a numbered sequence of their own. Hell Breaks Loose is a one-off prequel following the skeleton detective Skulduggery on a solo hunt years before the main series begins; The Haunted House on Hollow Hill and A Small Matter of Impending Catastrophe are novellas slotted between the main series' sixteenth and seventeenth books, the former adapted from an audio drama. None require following a separate ongoing plot of their own.

                • Cover of The Wish List
                  The Wish List

                  Eoin Colfer · standalone novel · 2000

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                  Humorous young-adult fantasy novel of a girl trying to save her soul from the devil (Locus1).

                • Cover of Thursday Next
                  Thursday Next

                  series · 8 books · 2001

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                  Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next novels follow a literary detective in an alternate England who can jump physically into the world of books to solve crimes against literature itself. Beginning with The Eyre Affair, the series mixes metafiction, wordplay and parody across increasingly personal plots as Thursday balances family life with adventures inside classic novels. Fforde has extended the sequence across eight books and several decades, with further installments in the works.

                • Cover of Alcatraz Smedry
                  Alcatraz Smedry

                  series · 6 books · 2007

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                • Cover of Johnny Maxwell
                  Johnny Maxwell

                  series · 4 books · 1992

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                  The Johnny Maxwell trilogy follows an ordinary British teenager who keeps ending up at the center of small-scale, largely unglamorous brushes with the fantastic: an old arcade game that turns out to house a real alien fleet, a haunted cemetery, and a WWII bomb that displaces him in time. Terry Pratchett wrote it as a departure from Discworld, aiming his humor and social observation at a contemporary setting and a young teenage cast. Only You Can Save Mankind, Johnny and the Dead, and Johnny and the Bomb make up the sequence.

                • Cover of Rivers of London
                  Rivers of London

                  series · 32 books · 2011

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

                • Cover of The Ogre Downstairs
                  The Ogre Downstairs

                  Diana Wynne Jones · standalone novel · 1974

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                  When a disagreeable man with two boys marries a widow with three children, family adjustments are complicated by two magic chemistry sets which cause strange things to happen around the house.

                • Cover of The Great Ghost Rescue
                  The Great Ghost Rescue

                  Eva Ibbotson · standalone novel · 1975

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                  The Great Ghost Rescue is a children's novel authored by Eva Ibbotson. It was published by Macmillan in 1975 and was Ibbotson's first published novel. The story deals with a ghost called Humphrey the Horrible.

                • Cover of Magic Shop
                  Magic Shop

                  series · 7 books · 1982

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                  Bruce Coville's Magic Shop books each send a different kid into Mr. Elives's strange antique shop, where an ordinary-looking item turns out to carry real magic and consequences. The Monster's Ring opens the series with a boy who buys a ring to scare a bully on Halloween, only to find he can genuinely transform into a monster. Later entries repeat the pattern with new objects and new children, tied together by the shop and its owner rather than a continuing plot.

                • Cover of Frightfully Friendly Ghosties
                  Frightfully Friendly Ghosties

                  series · 4 books · 2010

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                • Cover of 43 Old Cemetery Road
                  43 Old Cemetery Road

                  series · 7 books · 2009

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                • Cover of Flying Dutch
                  Flying Dutch

                  Tom Holt · standalone novel · 1991

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                  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.

                • Cover of Love Story
                  Love Story

                  series · 3 books · 1995

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                  Christopher Moore's Love Story trilogy opens with Bloodsucking Fiends, a comic horror-romance about a young San Francisco woman turned into a vampire. You Suck and Bite Me continue the story across the following two novels, keeping Moore's irreverent, comedic take on vampire fiction.

                • Cover of Azazel
                  Azazel

                  series · 28 books · 1982

                  completed

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                  Isaac Asimov's Azazel collects eighteen linked comic fantasy stories about George Bitternut, an eccentric linguist who stumbles onto an incantation summoning Azazel, a two-centimeter demon of formidable — if often disastrous — magical power. Azazel refuses to help George directly but repeatedly, chaotically, helps out George's friends instead, framed as tales George tells to an eager Asimov himself.