For Fans of V.E. Schwab

Before antiheroes took over prestige TV, Schwab published Vicious: a story where both the protagonist and the antagonist are objectively terrible people pursuing objectively understandable goals. Victor Vale and Eli Ever are not foils for a moral the book wants to teach you. They are the moral. The book makes you root for the wrong person on purpose, then asks you to sit with that. The Umbrella Academy on Netflix pulls the same trick across a whole ensemble, and the Dishonored games hand you supernatural power in a city that punishes you for using it too freely. The company is good.

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is a 300-year novel about what it costs to be forgotten by everyone you meet. Schwab structures it as a kind of emotional archaeology: each century peels back a different layer of what Addie has lost and what she has kept. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke covers similar philosophical ground (a person whose memory of themselves has been taken) and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell puts the same weight on bargains made with powers that do not care about the person making them. If the premise hooked you, these go deeper.

Most parallel-world stories use the device as a plot mechanism. Schwab uses it as a character argument: the same city in different states of health is a way of asking what magic does to a society over time. Red London thrives because it lives with magic. White London destroys itself for it. Grey London has forgotten it entirely. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness borrows the visual grammar without the weight, but Control (the game) and His Dark Materials both take the interdimensional architecture seriously and build something genuinely strange out of it.