3473 books across eight primary genres: romance, fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery and thrillers, historical fiction, literary fiction and adventure. Romantasy and contemporary romance are tags on top of those shelves rather than genres of their own. Every page gives you the author, the publication year, the series it belongs to and a short synopsis that stops before the plot turns.
Search by title or author, narrow the list by primary genre or by tag, or sort it. Every title here is a different book: no duplicate editions and no omnibus volumes. A book that genuinely belongs to two genres appears once and is listed on both.
This is page 4 of the list. The search box and the filter chips read the whole catalogue, not just this page, and the page links below walk the shelf in order.
Showing 48 of 3473 books
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Results below cover the whole catalogue, not just this page. Use the page links to browse everything in order.
Rating coming soonSethe escaped slavery at a cost that included a husband and a child, and now lives on the edge of a small Ohio town in the years after the Civil War. Her household is her mother-in-law Baby Suggs, her daughter Denver, and a house with room for one more. The young woman who arrives and calls herself Beloved pulls the family's buried history back into the open.
Rating coming soonSamantha is a scholarship student in a selective New England writing programme and has no patience for the wealthy cohort she is stuck with, a set of rich girls who share one name, one wardrobe and one voice: Bunny. She accepts an invitation to their private salon, drops the one friend she has, and finds their sweet, sinister world very hard to step back out of.
Rating coming soonA young woman becomes the target of a vampire who calls herself Carmilla, and whose interest in her is romantic as much as it is predatory. The name turns out to be an anagram of the visitor's real one, Mircalla, Countess Karnstein. The story was first published as a serial in 1871 and 1872.
Rating coming soonJonathan Harker, a solicitor, travels to a castle in Transylvania to settle a client's affairs and finds that his host is not alive. Count Dracula soon leaves for England, where he begins feeding on the people of a seaside town. Told through letters, diaries and newspaper reports rather than by a single narrator, the book follows Harker and the group led by Professor Van Helsing who set out to destroy him.
Rating coming soonAfter his uncle dies, the writer Don Wanderley comes to Milburn in upstate New York, where the death turns out to be tangled up with a group of older men who meet to tell one another ghost stories. They call themselves the Chowder Society, and their shared past, and what the society has been telling itself about it, is where the trouble comes from.
Rating coming soonA dying millionaire offers a physicist and two mediums a large sum each if they can settle whether anything survives death. They choose the Belasco House in Maine to work in, a place shut up since 1949 after years of drink, drugs and worse, and known locally as Hell House. One of the mediums has been inside it before.
Rating coming soonBlack Spring in the Hudson Valley is watched by more cameras than a small town should need. The reason is a seventeenth-century woman the locals call the Black Rock Witch, whose mouth and eyes were stitched shut, and who walks the streets and enters houses as she likes. The elders keep Black Spring sealed off to stop the curse spreading; the teenagers, bored, put the haunting online.
Rating coming soonMallory Quinn is out of rehab and glad of the job: looking after five-year-old Teddy Maxwell in a comfortable house, with a room of her own and a routine that suits her. Teddy draws constantly, mostly trees and animals, until he produces a picture of a man in a wood dragging a woman's body. Later drawings start matching details from a case that was never solved.
Rating coming soonA family discovers that their house is bigger inside than it is outside, and that the extra space keeps growing. Their attempts to measure it and film it become a documentary called The Navidson Record, and the novel around that record is assembled from a recovered manuscript, footnotes, letters and commentary. It is the author's debut, published in 2000.
Rating coming soonLouise's parents die suddenly, and she flies with her daughter to the South Carolina house she grew up in to get it ready for sale. It is packed with what is left of her mother's decades of puppets and dolls and her father's academic papers, and clearing it means working with her brother Mark, who stayed in town and resents her. The house, it turns out, has no intention of being sold.
Rating coming soonA plague carried on dust storms has killed most of the population and turned the rest into pale, nocturnal things that come for Robert Neville every night. He fortifies his house, keeps up the old protections that hold them off, and spends his days driving through a city with nobody else in it, looking for supplies and for a way to understand what everyone else has become.
Rating coming soonLouis tells his life story, beginning with the night the vampire Lestat turned him in New Orleans and then taught him what being one of the undead involves, whether or not Louis wanted the lessons. Later he finds a lost child, Claudia, and makes her a vampire too, leaving a grown woman's mind sealed inside a body that never ages. The two of them become allies against Lestat.
Rating coming soonChildren keep dying in a small Maine town, and whatever is responsible wears the shape of whatever frightens its victim most, usually a clown called Pennywise. Seven friends work out as children that it is far older than the town and that it feeds on fear, and that knowing what it is does not make it any easier to face.
Rating coming soonNoemi Taboada's cousin writes from her new marriage asking to be rescued from a doom she cannot explain, and says her English husband means to poison her. Noemi's father sends her to High Place, the family's house in the mountains, where the Doyles are unwelcoming, Catalina is kept from her, and the house itself starts turning up in Noemi's dreams.
Rating coming soonJade Daniels knows more about slasher films than anyone else in Proofrock, Idaho, which is why she recognises the shape of what is happening when the town starts losing people. The place has the right ingredients: a lake, an old summer camp where a massacre took place fifty years ago, and a new luxury development cutting into the national forest. Nobody else is treating any of it as a pattern.
Rating coming soonFive friends travel to Japan for a wedding, held in a Heian-era mansion where a bride was buried alive in the foundations and where a girl was walled up in the house every year afterwards. They have come for the atmosphere. The dead are there, and so are the grudges the group brought with them.
Rating coming soonKazuyuki Asakawa, a reporter, looks into the deaths of his niece and three other teenagers, four young people who died together in a manner nobody can explain. Following their last movements takes him to a resort, where he finds an unmarked videotape whose warning tells him he has a week left to live. The part of the tape that is supposed to explain how to survive has been taped over.
Rating coming soonGabriel Utterson is a London lawyer whose old friend, Dr Henry Jekyll, has made a will leaving everything to a violent stranger called Edward Hyde. Utterson cannot see what the two men have to do with each other or why Jekyll protects Hyde, and he starts asking questions the doctor does not want answered. What he finds is worse than a bad will.
Rating coming soonTommy Tester lives in 1920s Harlem, plays guitar where he can and runs occult errands on the side. A delivery to a sorceress and a party at a rich man's house put him in the way of powers that should have no interest in him at all. The novella reworks a Lovecraft story and gives the tale to a Black man to tell.
Rating coming soonApollo Kagwa deals in rare books, has dreams he has never been able to explain, and is determined to be a better father than the one who left him. When his wife Emma starts pulling away from their baby son he puts it down to exhaustion or depression, until the night she does something unforgivable and disappears. Finding her takes him into an enchanted world where the old stories are true.
Rating coming soonMario's four-year-old daughter is diagnosed with leukaemia, he loses his job and his health insurance, and the treatment does not work. To pay for it he takes work as a hired killer, and once that door is open it does not shut. When his daughter dies and his wife leaves, a final job, robbing a cartel's cash shipment, looks like the only way out.
Rating coming soonBeldame is a strip of land on the Gulf where three Victorian summer houses were built and sand has been swallowing the place ever since. Two are still used by the McCray and Savage families from Mobile; the third is being left to fill up, and something is living in it. This summer the families arrive with a funeral behind them and a divorce ahead.
Rating coming soonRegan MacNeil is eleven, her mother is a film actress, and the behaviour that begins in their Washington house is not an illness any doctor can name or treat. When medicine fails, two priests are brought in to attempt an exorcism on the girl. The novel grew out of a case of possession and exorcism its author heard about as a university student, and it is set in the neighbourhood around that campus.
Rating coming soonAbe and Dan are widowers who fish together in the woods of upstate New York, and the shared habit is the one thing keeping either of them upright. When they hear about a creek where the fishing is meant to be extraordinary, and where the catch is supposed to be able to undo a loss, they treat it as a tall story. Then they follow it up the water and into an older story about a bargain, a long-kept secret and a man called Der Fisher.
Rating coming soonFour people come to Hill House: an occult scholar who wants evidence that a haunting is real, his assistant, a friendless young woman with nowhere else to go, and the man who will inherit the house. They expect a few odd noises and some inexplicable events. Instead the house works on each of them in turn, and it becomes clear that it has been choosing.
Rating coming soonA man who has tried every pleasure he can find buys a puzzle box and solves it, which opens a door for the Cenobites: beings who make no distinction between pain and pleasure, and who are in no hurry to give back what they are given. The box is known as the LeMarchand Configuration, and it is not a toy.
Rating coming soonA young woman finds an old book and a bundle of letters in her father's library, each letter addressed to a successor expected to continue a search begun centuries earlier. Following the trail leads her into her father's past, her mother's disappearance and the history of Vlad the Impaler, whose name has been attached to something much older than he was.
Rating coming soonThree of them share the boarded-up house at the end of a dead-end street on the edge of the Washington woods: a girl who is not allowed outside, a man drinking in front of the television and losing pieces of his memory, and a cat with strong opinions about scripture. What holds the household together is not affection, and it is buried somewhere among the birch trees. Then a new neighbour moves in next door.
Rating coming soonOn a hot summer after the war, a country doctor is called out to Hundreds Hall, the crumbling Georgian house he remembers visiting as a boy. The Ayres family are down to a widowed mother and her two grown children, living in a house they can no longer afford to keep. Strange things begin happening there, and the doctor has to decide whether they are the usual miseries of a family in decline.
Rating coming soonAmbrosio is a monk with a reputation for virtue, and Matilda is the young woman who joins the monastery as his pupil, in disguise, because she wants him. He gives in to her, and once that rule is broken the others come more easily, each act worse than the one before. Whatever Matilda is and whatever she is offering him, she is not finished with Ambrosio.
Rating coming soonTen years ago four Blackfeet men shot a herd of elk outside Browning, Montana, and went home. Something about that hunt was different, and now all four are being stalked and killed in turn by a hunter none of them can name. What is doing it has been waiting a decade.
Rating coming soonBasil Hallward paints a portrait of Dorian Gray, a young man whose good looks are the whole of his reputation, and Dorian is frightened of what time will do to him. He wishes that the painting, and not he, would carry the years, and his wish is granted: the portrait ages and rots while his own face stays as it was. Everything he does from then on is recorded in the painting.
Rating coming soonIn 1950 in Florida, twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens is sent to the Gracetown School for Boys for six months after he kicks the son of the town's biggest landowner, who was threatening his sister. Robbie sees the dead, or haints as his mother called them, and the ones at the school show him what happens to boys who are sent out to work and never come back.
Rating coming soonFour friends from university go walking in the far north to get away from their lives for a week, and find they have almost nothing left to say to each other. A shortcut meant to make the hike easier leaves them lost in forest that has been left alone for a very long time. They take shelter in a building they find there and work out that the rites once performed in it were meant to feed something that has not gone away.
Rating coming soonJack Torrance takes a job as winter caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, a large empty place in the Colorado mountains that closes for the season, and moves in with his wife Wendy and their small son Danny. Danny has a gift the hotel badly wants. The Overlook has a long and violent history, and by the end of the winter it has started working on Jack.
Rating coming soonElsie Bainbridge expected a wealthy marriage and got a husband who died within weeks of the wedding, a crumbling estate called The Bridge, resentful servants and a hostile village. Sent there to see out her pregnancy, her only company is her husband's awkward cousin. Then she finds a locked door, and behind it a painted wooden figure carved to look like a person, with Elsie's own face.
Rating coming soonPatricia Campbell's days belong to her husband, her teenagers and her mother-in-law, and the one evening she keeps for herself is book club, where a group of Charleston women talk about true crime. After an elderly neighbour attacks her, the neighbour's charming nephew James Harris arrives and makes himself useful. Then children begin disappearing on the other side of town, and Patricia starts to suspect him.
Rating coming soonTwo Royal Navy ships sail north in 1845 looking for a passage across the top of the world, and two years later they are still there, frozen in with the coal running low and the food behind it. The novel follows the officers and crews of the Terror and the Erebus as cold, scurvy and each other wear them down, and as something out on the ice starts picking them off.
Rating coming soonEvery year a scoutmaster takes a group of boys camping in the Canadian wilderness for a weekend, and this year a stranger reaches their camp: emaciated, pale, starving and carrying a man-made parasite inside him. It spreads quickly and they are far from any help. Once they are hungry, frightened and infected, the boys turn on one another.
Rating coming soonA young woman takes her first post as a governess at a remote country house, with two children to look after and instructions from an uncle who does not want to be bothered. She starts seeing the former governess on the stairs and in the garden, and a man who used to work on the estate. Certain that the dead are coming for the children, she takes on the job of protecting them alone.
Rating coming soonYeong-hye is a part-time graphic artist and housewife in Seoul who stops eating meat and animal products after a nightmare about human cruelty. The decision is hers, but the people around her treat it as illness, betrayal or a problem to be managed. The novel is told in three parts and follows what her refusal does to her family and to the life they had planned around her.
Rating coming soonFrank lives with his father in a remote part of Scotland, where the household runs on the older man's inventions and on Frank's own rituals, which are not like other people's. His mother is long gone and his older brother Eric is locked up in a psychiatric hospital. When Eric escapes and starts heading home, Frank has to get ready for a visit he knows is coming.
Rating coming soonMary Katherine Blackwood, Merricat to herself, is eighteen and lives with her older sister and their ailing uncle on the family estate, in isolation from the nearby village. Six years ago the family had a tragedy that the three survivors have neither forgotten nor been forgiven for. Then a cousin arrives expecting to be welcomed, and the arrangement the three of them have built starts to come apart.
Rating coming soonAlex Easton, a retired soldier, is summoned to Ruravia because Madeline Usher, a friend from childhood, is dying in the house she has never left. What Easton finds is fungus spreading over everything, a lake that seems to be alive, animals behaving wrongly and Roderick Usher losing his nerves. A mycologist and an American doctor help, and together they have to work out what is actually wrong with the House of Usher.
Rating coming soonMiranda is a twin, and both of them grew up in a Dover house their father has since turned into a guest house. She has pica, a hunger for things that are not food, which runs in the women of the family and worsened after her mother died. The house is sentient, it dislikes strangers, and it is not a safe place to be a guest.
Rating coming soonSherlock Holmes, a consulting detective, works a murder investigation with Dr John Watson, the friend and chronicler who writes his cases down. This is the book that introduced both of them, and its title comes from the phrase Holmes uses to describe the kind of work he is doing: a study in scarlet.
Rating coming soonTen people are brought to an island off the coast of Devon, and each has a death in their past that was never answered for. Then they begin to be killed one at a time, in the order set out by a counting rhyme that hangs in every bedroom. Nobody can leave the island, and nobody can work out who among them is doing the killing.
Rating coming soonNick and Amy Dunne have been married five years, and Amy disappears from their rented house in a small Missouri town on the morning of their anniversary. Nick tells the police what he knows, and then behaves in ways a worried husband is not supposed to behave: he is evasive, he is angry, and he is not sorry enough on camera. The book keeps the question of his guilt open throughout.
The library is split into eight primary genres so you can find the kind of book you actually want: romance, where the relationship carries the story; fantasy, from epic quests to cosy shops; science fiction, from the classics to this year's awards; horror, from gothic novels to haunted houses; mystery and thrillers, from detectives and spies to domestic suspense; historical fiction, for stories built inside a past period; literary fiction, for books whose interest is in the writing and the people rather than in a plot engine; and adventure, for journeys, survival and treasure hunts. Each shelf page says what belongs on it.
Tags are a second, separate layer. Romantasy marks the books where romance and a fantasy world carry the story together, and contemporary romance marks the love stories set in the modern real world. Neither is a genre: a tagged book still lives on one or two of the eight shelves, and the tag is a way to narrow a shelf rather than a shelf of its own. Tags have landing pages too.
The title, the author and the publication year are checked against the publisher or a library record before a page goes up, and the cover is the one that record carries. Where no source states the first-publication date, the page says the year is the earliest edition we could confirm instead of claiming a date.
The synopsis on each page is written for this library. It tells you who the characters are and what they are up against, then stops. It is not a review, there are no scores anywhere on these shelves, and nothing here claims that we have read a book we have not written about yet.
Baby Bat keeps the V4mp book library.
Goodreads and social links will be added soon.
Eight primary genres, each with its own filters. Titles that genuinely belong to two genres are listed on both and keep one page.
The love story is the plot: fantasy courts, dragon academies and modern cities all count.
676 booksPrimary genreEpic quests, grimdark cities, retold myths and a few very stubborn rabbits.
685 booksPrimary genreGeneration ships, dying empires, robots with opinions and one very unlucky astronaut.
536 booksPrimary genreHaunted houses, old vampires, cosmic dread and the odd very bad week.
381 booksPrimary genreDetectives, spies, locked rooms and the people who lie to the police.
599 booksPrimary genreCathedrals, courts, trenches and revolutions, all of it set in a past that is doing the work.
580 booksPrimary genreNovels where the prose carries the book: families, cities, memory and the modern self.
575 booksPrimary genreShipwrecks, expeditions, chases, frontiers and people who should have turned back.
324 booksOne page per book, shared between genres: 858 titles sit on more than one genre right now. Romance 676, Fantasy 685, Sci-Fi 536, Horror 381, Mystery & Thriller 599, Historical Fiction 580, Literary Fiction 575, Adventure 324.
Tags cut across the genres. 225 of the 3473 books carry one.
Romance at the centre of the story, with a fantasy world carrying it.
70 booksTagModern love stories: offices, small towns, sports teams, group chats and people who talk too much.
155 booksRomantasy 70 and Contemporary Romance 155. A tag landing works like a shelf: search, subgenre chips, primary-genre chips and sorting.
