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 Under Attack

anchored on:urban fantasyour worldcontemporarymystery & detectivedemonsangels+4 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 Dresden Files
                  The Dresden Files

                  series · 56 books · 2000

                  similar bycontemporaryurban fantasynorth americabig city+4 more

                  The Dresden Files is an urban fantasy series written by American author Jim Butcher. The novels are narrated from the first-person perspective of Harry Dresden, a private detective and wizard, as he investigates supernatural disturbances in contemporary Chicago. The first entry, Storm Front, was published in 2000 by Roc Books.

                • Cover of Hang Wire
                  Hang Wire

                  Adam Christopher · standalone novel · 2014

                  similar bytensecontemporaryurban fantasymystery & detectivemurder investigationour worldnorth americabig city

                  Ted Hall worries when his sleepwalking seems to coincide with murders by the Hang Wire Killer, a very strange circus comes to town, and some immortals searching for an ancient power arrive in the city.

                • Cover of Anita Blake
                  Anita Blake

                  series · 42 books · 1993

                  similar bytensecontemporaryurban fantasynorth america+3 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 Case Files of Justis Fearsson
                  Case Files of Justis Fearsson

                  series · 6 books · 2014

                  similar bytensecontemporaryurban fantasymystery & detectivemurder investigationnorth america+1 more

                • Cover of Felix Castor
                  Felix Castor

                  series · 7 books · 2006

                  similar bytensecontemporaryurban fantasydemonsbig city+1 more

                  Mike Carey's Felix Castor novels follow a freelance exorcist working London's supernatural underside, taking paying jobs to banish ghosts and bind demons in a city where the dead don't always stay quiet. The opener, The Devil You Know, sends Castor into a museum haunting that spirals into a hunt by rival ghosts and demons all keen to be the one that finally kills him. Across six books the series mixes hardboiled detective plotting with occult horror.

                • Cover of Mulengro: A Romany Tale
                  Mulengro: A Romany Tale

                  Charles de Lint · standalone novel · 1985

                  similar bytensecontemporaryurban fantasymystery & detectivemurder investigationnorth americabig city

                  The Gypsies live in the shadows of the city, blending in with Canadian society but never adapting to it, cling to the traditional Romany ways. Now a series of bizarre murders have baffled the police - each death somehow connected with the city's elusive Gypsy community. The police are looking for a human murderer. The Romany know better. They know the name of the darkness that hunts them down, one by one. He Who Walks With Ghosts - Mulengro.

                • Cover of Alchemy of Secrets
                  Alchemy of Secrets

                  series · 1 book · 2025

                  similar bytensecontemporaryurban fantasymystery & detectivenorth americabig city

                  Alchemy of Secrets follows Holland St. James, a young woman convinced that magic is real, who tracks down a local urban legend called the Watch Man and is told she will die at midnight the next day unless she finds an ancient object called the Alchemical Heart. Pulled into a hidden magical Los Angeles alongside a stranger who claims her missing sister sent him to protect her, Holland has to work out who is lying to her before the clock runs out. Stephanie Garber wrote it as a standalone 2025 novel rather than the start of a numbered series.

                • Cover of Deception Point
                  Deception Point

                  Dan Brown · standalone novel · 2001

                  similar bytensecontemporarymystery & detectivemurder investigationour world

                  Deception Point is a 2001 mystery-thriller novel by American author Dan Brown. It is Brown's third novel. It was published by Simon & Schuster.

                • Cover of Occult Crimes Unit Investigations
                  Occult Crimes Unit Investigations

                  series · 3 books · 2011

                  similar bytensecontemporaryurban fantasymystery & detectivenorth america+3 more

                • Cover of The Hollows
                  The Hollows

                  series · 39 books · 2004

                  similar bycontemporaryurban fantasydemonsnorth america+3 more

                  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 Finders Keepers (Stephen King)
                  Finders Keepers (Stephen King)

                  series · 7 books · 2014

                  similar bytensecontemporarymystery & detectivemurder investigationnorth america

                  The books gathered here follow Holly Gibney, who first appeared as a supporting character in Stephen King's Bill Hodges trilogy (Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, End of Watch) before graduating into her own strand of stories: a major role in The Outsider, then top billing in the novella If It Bleeds and the novels Holly and Never Flinch, where she works as a private investigator taking on cases with a supernatural edge. The mix of true-crime procedural instincts and creeping horror is a hallmark of King's later work with the character.

                • Cover of Daniel McEvoy
                  Daniel McEvoy

                  series · 2 books · 2011

                  similar bytensecontemporarymystery & detectivemurder investigationour world+2 more

                • Cover of The Curse Workers
                  The Curse Workers

                  series · 3 books · 2010

                  similar bytensecontemporaryurban fantasynorth americaour world+1 more

                  Holly Black's Curse Workers trilogy is set in an alternate America where 'curse work' — magic that harms or transforms through touch — is illegal, enforced through gloves and Prohibition-era-style crime families. It follows Cassel Sharpe, the only non-worker in a family of con artists and workers, as he tries to stay out of his family's schemes despite his own hidden connection to their world. The series runs from White Cat through two further novels.

                • Cover of Dante Valentine
                  Dante Valentine

                  series · 6 books · 2006

                  similar bytensecontemporarydemonsurban fantasy+3 more

                  Working for the Devil opens Lilith Saintcrow's Dante Valentine series with Dante, a necromancer-for-hire who reluctantly takes a job from the Devil himself: kill a rogue demon, Vardimal Santino, in exchange for her life. The catch is that Santino isn't something that dies easily, and the job pulls Dante deeper into a world of demons and bargains than she planned for. Saintcrow continues the series through Dead Man Rising, The Devil's Right Hand, Saint City Sinners, and To Hell and Back.

                • Cover of Effective Engineering Solutions
                  Effective Engineering Solutions

                  series · 37 books · 1995

                  similar bytensecontemporarymurder investigationmystery & detectivenorth america+1 more

                  The Ice Limit follows a team hired by an eccentric billionaire to recover what looks like the largest meteorite ever found, off a remote island near Cape Horn, only to discover, as they flee across the Antarctic seas aboard a retrofitted tanker, that they've actually excavated something alive. Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child wrote it as a standalone techno-thriller in 2000; it later fed into their separate Gideon Crew series rather than getting a direct sequel of its own.

                • Cover of Robert Langdon
                  Robert Langdon

                  series · 6 books · 2000

                  similar bytensecontemporarymystery & detective+2 more

                  The Robert Langdon novel series is named after Robert Langdon, the protagonist of the novels by American author Dan Brown. Langdon is portrayed as a Harvard University professor of religious iconology and symbology, a fictional field related to the study of historic symbols, which is not methodologically connected to the actual discipline of semiotics. Brown's novels that feature the lead character also include historical themes and Christianity as motifs, and as a result have generated controversy. Brown states on his website that his novels are not anti-Christian, and that he is on a "constant spiritual journey" himself.

                • Cover of Whispers from the Dead
                  Whispers from the Dead

                  Joan Lowery Nixon · standalone novel · 1989

                  similar bytensecontemporarymystery & detectivemurder investigationour worldnorth america

                  "Only Sarah senses the horror. The minute she steps through the door of her family's new home, she feels a smothering cold mist and hears the echo of a scream and a heartbreaking whisper in Spanish: "Help me!" Sarah feels compelled to find out who is trying to reach her. But can she uncover the mysteries of the past before terror strikes again?" — quoted from the back cover of the Laurel-Leaf paperback edition.

                • Cover of The Wolfen
                  The Wolfen

                  Whitley Strieber · standalone novel · 1978

                  similar bytensecontemporarymystery & detectivemurder investigationnorth americabig city

                  The Wolfen (1978) is the debut novel of Whitley Strieber. It tells the story of two police detectives in New York City who are involved in the investigation of suspicious deaths across the city, which are revealed to be the work of a race of intelligent beings descended from canids, called the Wolfen. The novel is told from the point of view of the human characters as well from the Wolfen themselves.

                • Cover of Henry Fitzroy
                  Henry Fitzroy

                  series · 29 books · 1991

                  similar bycontemporaryurban fantasynorth america+5 more

                  These short-fiction collections gather stories built around Henry Fitzroy, the illegitimate son of Henry VIII turned centuries-old vampire and romance novelist, a recurring character from Tanya Huff's Blood Books urban-fantasy series. Rather than continuing that series' novel-length plots, the collections give Henry shorter, self-contained cases and encounters set in the same "Blood 'Verse." They function as a minor spinoff for readers already invested in the character from the main Blood Books.

                • Cover of Witch Hunt (Viguié)
                  Witch Hunt (Viguié)

                  series · 3 books · 2012

                  similar bytensecontemporaryurban fantasymurder investigationnorth america+3 more

                • Cover of Red Letter Days
                  Red Letter Days

                  series · 2 books · 2005

                  completed

                  similar bytensecontemporarymystery & detectiveour world+3 more

                • Cover of Ancient Images
                  Ancient Images

                  Ramsey Campbell · standalone novel · 1989

                  similar bytensecontemporarymystery & detectiveour worldnorth america+1 more

                  A lost horror film holds the key to terrifying secrets. The legends have persisted for decades of a lost horror film starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi that was never released. Rumor has it that, for reasons long forgotten, powerful forces suppressed the film and burned all known prints. Nobody now living has seen the finished film. But that might no longer be true… Film researcher Sandy Allan is invited to a screening of a newly-discovered sole-surviving print, but then the film disappears and the real horror begins. Sandy’s search for the film leads her to Redfield, a rural community known its rich soil, fertilized by blood from an ancient massacre. But Redfield guards its secrets closely, with good reason. During every step of her search, Sandy is watched, shadowed by strange figures. Is it paranoia, or is someone—or something—determined to keep the lost film and the secrets it reveals buried forever?

                • Cover of The Legendborn Cycle
                  The Legendborn Cycle

                  series · 3 books · 2020

                  similar bytensecontemporaryurban fantasynorth america+3 more

                  Tracy Deonn's Legendborn Cycle follows Bree Matthews, a Black teenager who enrolls in an early-college program and stumbles into a secret society descended from Arthurian legend operating alongside her North Carolina campus. The society's magic turns out to be entangled with her own family's hidden history and her mother's recent death. Over the trilogy Bree has to decide how much of that inherited legacy, and its exclusions, she wants to claim.

                • Cover of Rising Sun
                  Rising Sun

                  Michael Crichton · standalone novel · 1992

                  similar bytensecontemporarymystery & detectivemurder investigationnorth americabig city

                  Rising Sun is a 1992 novel by Michael Crichton. It was his eighth under his own name and eighteenth overall, and is about a murder in the Los Angeles headquarters of a Japanese corporation. The book was published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. An image of fashion model Gia Carangi is incorporated in the cover art for the original edition.