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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 Working for the Devil

anchored on:fantasyurban fantasydemonsour worldcontemporaryparanormal+5 more

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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 Dante Valentine
                  Dante Valentine

                  series · 6 books · 2006

                  similar bycontemporarydarktensedemonsurban fantasy+6 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 The Courier Trilogy
                  The Courier Trilogy

                  series · 3 books · 2016

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                • Cover of Fiend
                  Fiend

                  Alma Katsu · standalone novel · 2025

                  similar bycontemporarydarktensedemonsfantasyour worlddeal with the devil

                  Imagine if the Sackler family had a demon at their beck and call. The Berisha family runs one of the largest import-export companies in the world, and they’ve always been lucky. Their rivals suffer strokes. Inconvenient buildings catch on fire. Earthquakes swallow up manufacturing plants, destroying harmful evidence. Things always seem to work out for the Berishas. They’re blessed. At least that is what Zef, the patriarch, has always told his three children. And each of them knows their place in the family—Dardan, as the only male heir, must prepare to take over as keeper of the Berisha secrets, Maris’s most powerful contribution, much to her dismay, will be to marry strategically, and Nora’s job, as the youngest, is to just stay out of the way. But when things stop going as planned, and the family blessing starts looking more like a curse, the Berishas begin to splinter, each hatching their own secret scheme. They didn’t get to be one of the richest families in the world without spilling a little blood, but this time, it might be their own.

                • Cover of The Black Tattoo
                  The Black Tattoo

                  Sam Enthoven · standalone novel · 2006

                  similar bycontemporarydarktensedemonsfantasyour world+1 more

                  The Black Tattoo is a 2006 young adult fantasy novel by Sam Enthoven. It deals with a boy, Charlie, becoming possessed by a demon that manifests itself in the form of a black tattoo on his body.

                • Cover of The Devil's Apprentice
                  The Devil's Apprentice

                  Jan Siegel · standalone novel · 2013

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                  "The Devil is retiring - but who's taking over? When teenage Pen inherits the job of caretaker for a London building with no doors and only a secret entrance from the caretaker's lodge which she must never use little does she know it will lead her into unbelievable danger. For Azmordis, also known as Satan, a spirit as old as time and as powerful as the dark, immortality is running out. In the house with no front door, a group of teenagers are trapped in assorted dimensions of myth and history, undergoing the trials that will shape them to step in his cloven footwear or destroy them. Assisted only by an aspiring teen chef called Gavin, and Jinx, a young witch with more face-piercing than fae power, Pen must try to stop the Devil's deadly game plan before it's too late"--Publisher's description.

                • Cover of The Damnation Game
                  The Damnation Game

                  Clive Barker · standalone novel · 1985

                  similar bycontemporarydarktenseour worlddeal with the devilfantasy

                  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 Anita Blake
                  Anita Blake

                  series · 42 books · 1993

                  similar bycontemporarydarktenseurban fantasy+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 Felix Castor
                  Felix Castor

                  series · 7 books · 2006

                  similar bycontemporarytensedarkurban 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 The Demon's Lexicon
                  The Demon's Lexicon

                  series · 3 books · 2009

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                • Cover of The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
                  The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

                  series · 2 books · 2009

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                • Cover of Mookie Pearl
                  Mookie Pearl

                  series · 2 books · 2013

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                • Cover of Maddy Black / Black Wings
                  Maddy Black / Black Wings

                  series · 8 books · 2010

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                • Cover of Jerusalem's Lot
                  Jerusalem's Lot

                  series · 3 books · 1975

                  similar bycontemporarydarktenseour world+1 more

                  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 Devil's Game
                  The Devil's Game

                  Poul Anderson · standalone novel · 1980

                  similar bycontemporarydarktenseour worlddemonsdeal with the devil

                  Seven people—including a porno star, a mercenary soldier, and a woman who cannot afford the treatment to save her child—come to Havener's Island to play a deadly game with a million tax-free dollars as the prize. But they are unaware their host is following the instructions of an inhuman creature—and even Havener doesn't know the real purpose of his demonic master's game.

                • Cover of Angel
                  Angel

                  series · 38 books · 1999

                  part of Buffyverse

                  similar bycontemporarydarkurban fantasybig cityparanormal+4 more

                • Cover of Sunshine
                  Sunshine

                  Robin McKinley · standalone novel · 2003

                  similar bycontemporarytensefantasyour worldparanormal+1 more

                  From the front flap of the Berkley HB first edition: "There are places in the world where darkness rules, where it's unwise to walk. Sunshine knew that. But there hadn't been any trouble out at the lake for years, and she needed a place to be alone for a while. Unfortunately, she wasn't alone. She never heard them coming. Of course you don't, when they're vampires. They took her clothes and sneakers. They dressed her in a long red gown. And they shackled her to the wall of an abandoned mansion - within easy reach of a figure stirring in the moonlight. She knows that he is a vampire. She knows that she's to be his dinner, and that when he is finished with her, she will be dead. Yet, as dawn breaks, she finds that he has not attempted to harm her. And now it is he who needs her to help him survive the day..."

                • Cover of The Curse Workers
                  The Curse Workers

                  series · 3 books · 2010

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                  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 Rose Madder
                  Rose Madder

                  Stephen King · standalone novel · 1995

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                  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 The Devil's Advocate
                  The Devil's Advocate

                  Andrew Neiderman · standalone novel · 1990

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                  When Kevin Taylor joins the Manhattan criminal law firm of John Milton & Associates, he's hit the big time. At last, he and his wife can enjoy the luxuries they've so desired--money, a chauffeur-driven limo, and a stunning home in a high-rise. Then Milton assigns Kevin one of the most notorious cases of the year, with a file that had been put together prior to the crime. Throwing himself into his work, Kevin begins to see a pattern of evil emerging from behind the firm's plush facade. Acquittal after acquittal, every criminal client walks free, and Kevin's suspicions slowly give way to terror. For Kevin has just become The Devil's Advocate.

                • Cover of Дозоры / Watch
                  Дозоры / Watch

                  series · 6 books · 1998

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                  Sergei Lukyanenko's Watch novels are set among the Others, humans with supernatural gifts who split into the Night Watch, policing dark forces, and the Day Watch, policing the light ones, under a truce that keeps their ancient war frozen in an uneasy bureaucratic peace. Each book follows the Night Watch magician Anton Gorodetsky through a case that keeps threatening to unbalance that truce for good. Starting in Moscow, the series expands across six novels into other cities and a wider view of how the truce actually works.

                • Cover of Lore
                  Lore

                  Alexandra Bracken · standalone novel · 2021

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                  Every seven years, the Agon begins. As punishment for a past rebellion, nine Greek gods are forced to walk the earth as mortals. They are hunted by the descendants of ancient bloodlines, all eager to kill a god and seize their divine power and immortality. Long ago, Lore Perseous fled that brutal world, turning her back on the hunt’s promises of eternal glory after her family was murdered by a rival line. For years she's pushed away any thought of revenge against the man—now a god—responsible for their deaths. Yet as the next hunt dawns over New York City, two participants seek her out: Castor, a childhood friend Lore believed to be dead, and Athena, one of the last of the original gods, now gravely wounded. The goddess offers an alliance against their mutual enemy and a way to leave the Agon behind forever. But Lore's decision to rejoin the hunt, binding her fate to Athena's, will come at a deadly cost—and it may not be enough to stop the rise of a new god with the power to bring humanity to its knees.

                • Cover of Cal Leandros
                  Cal Leandros

                  series · 13 books · 2006

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                  The Cal Leandros series is a series of urban fantasy novels by American author Rob Thurman about the fictional character of Caliban "Cal" Leandros. The first novel, Nightlife, was published on March 7, 2006, through Roc Fantasy.

                • Cover of Cell
                  Cell

                  Stephen King · standalone novel · 2006

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                  In Cell, King taps into readers fears of technological warfare and terrorism. Mobile phones deliver the apocalypse to millions of unsuspecting humans by wiping their brains of any humanity, leaving only aggressive and destructive impulses behind. Those without cell phones, like illustrator Clayton Riddell and his small band of "normies," must fight for survival, and their journey to find Clayton's estranged wife and young son rockets the book toward resolution.

                • Cover of Entangled (Graham Hancock)
                  Entangled (Graham Hancock)

                  series · 1 book · 2010

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