Lady knights are great but they make you think historical and European. I’ll take woman warriors in just about any setting (but I might group gunslingers and brawlers separately for my own idiosyncratic purposes). Be warned the woman warrior might be a side character, but I promise they’ll have a significant role.

Not your regular Dracula, Carmilla, or Twilight story

A specific but oddly large genre of respected religious figures in space. (A bit broader than clergy.)

Works inspired by Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus. The emojis reference Luigi Galvani’s galvanism experiments to make frog legs move in isolation which lead to the concept of “animal electricity” that inspired Shelly’s novel.

Riffs off F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Dr. T.J. Eckleberg sees all.

Non Sci-Fi/Fantasy classic books reimagined in sci-fi/fantasy settings

In the 2010s, Daniel Mallory Lavery retold children’s fairy and folk tales to be darker, deeper, or more political, publishing them in a series called “Children’s Stories Made Horrific” on the now-defunct website The Toast. These authors expand this idea. The goal isn’t for torture porn: each book has something to say.

Books featuring characters or descendants of characters in Bram Stoker’s Dracula/Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla or remixed stories

These dragons aren’t here to be killed. Books may prompt protagonists to question traditions of killing dragons or of treated them as unintelligent creatures.

For this one, neither the fighting nor the monsters are metaphorical

Humor my emojis

Books focused on human/AI relationships whether that be romantic, parental, friendly, or otherwise

Sci-fi, Fantasy, and some Horror (not all) where fungal and botanical contagion threatens our protagonists with ominous powers or foreboding new changes. (More than botanical horror.)