7 Books to Read After Black Dagger Brotherhood
The Brotherhood series works because Ward takes the emotional pain of her characters completely seriously, even when the fantasy elements are operatic. These 7 series share that combination of supernatural world-building and genuine emotional investment.
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Rose Hathaway is a dhampir guardian protecting Moroi vampires at an elite boarding school. The romance is intense, the danger is real.
The most accessible on-ramp to vampire romance from YA — then the Brotherhood. Mead's world-building shares Ward's interest in vampire society as a functioning institution with its own rules.
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The slow-burn romance between a human girl and a vampire who has spent decades learning not to give in to his nature.
The genre template at its most concentrated. If you love the Brotherhood for the forbidden romance and supernatural world-building, Twilight is worth reading as the baseline — then you understand what Ward was building on and beyond.
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MacKayla Lane goes to Dublin to find her murdered sister and discovers she can see the Fae — the dangerous, old kind — and that the world is being unmade.
The same combination of a heroine who discovers she's more than she thought, a love interest who is genuinely threatening, and a supernatural world with genuine stakes. Darker and more literary than the Brotherhood.
Oxford historian Diana Bishop discovers a bewitched manuscript and falls in love with a 1,500-year-old vampire named Matthew Clairmont.
The intellectual adult vampire romance to the Brotherhood's emotional intensity. Same forbidden-love structure; different register entirely.
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The Breed — ancient vampires living in the shadows of the modern world — fight to protect humanity from a threat that is tearing their world apart.
The most direct structural equivalent to the Brotherhood: a warrior vampire society with its own rigid hierarchy, enemies hunting them, and romances between Breed warriors and their Breedmates.
The Dark Hunters are immortal warriors who protect humanity from the demonic Daimons. Each book follows a different hunter's redemption through love.
The series-with-each-book-following-a-different-warrior structure of the Brotherhood, by its closest contemporary equivalent. Kenyon's mythology is larger and more baroque.
Kate Daniels is a mercenary in a post-Shift Atlanta where magic and technology alternate. She's hiding what she is from everyone, including herself.
For readers who love the Brotherhood's competent, damaged heroine and the detailed supernatural world — urban fantasy with the same willingness to let characters be genuinely hurt.
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