Gateway Series / Literature

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• Fantasy:
  • Harry Potter is a big gateway to fantasy novels, especially Urban Fantasy. It has also famously served as a gateway to books in general for people (children, teenagers and adults) who wouldn't normally read. Some Moral Guardians also think it's a gateway series to witchcraft, an idea that was spoofed in The Onion in an article that was sometimes cited by some that didn't get the joke.
  • The Lord of the Rings: For High Fantasy.
  • The Chronicles of Prydain: For readers who are too young/not advanced enough for Tolkien.
  • The Chronicles of Narnia
  • A Song of Ice and Fire especially after its TV adaptation premiered
  • The Belgariad
    • The drug metaphor is doubly apt as its own (now sadly deceased) author described it as "the literary equivalent of peddling dope."
  • The Wheel of Time was the gateway into the fantasy genre for a lot of nineties teens.
  • Many people see the Dragonlance and The Legend of Drizzt novels as gateways to bigger and better things.
  • The Earthsea series is seen as an alternative introduction to fantasy that shows there's more to the genre than white males solving problems with violence.
  • The Inheritance Cycle was the gateway into fantasy, especially high fantasy, for many young people in the noughties.
• Science Fiction:
  • Dune
  • Hyperion
  • Foundation Series
  • Ender's Game
  • For older preteens and teenagers, Animorphs can be a gateway to Starfish Aliens, Alien Invasion, and First Contact. It can also be a gateway to Darker and Edgier fiction since it's endorsed by Scholastic, meaning it can be found in many school libraries.
  • Sandy Mitchell's Ciaphas Cain and Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts novels are good introductions to the Warhammer 40,000 Universe; being not quite as dark as the rest, but introducing the concepts and names via genre mixing.
  • The Hunger Games trilogy has been a gateway series for Dystopian Fiction. Before that, it was either Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, or Fahrenheit 451.
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, also a gateway into British humor along with Monty Python.
  • The works of classic authors Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, and their abridged editions, have long been known for interesting younger readers in common science fiction concepts such as space travel, time travel, alien invasion, secret worlds hidden beneath the Earth's surface.
• Romance:
  • Pride and Prejudice
  • The Twilight Saga was one for many young readers with Vampire Fiction and supernatural/paranormal fiction overall.
  • Fifty Shades of Grey served as one for erotica, and even got people willing to explore BDSM in Real Life.
• Horror
  • The Shining or It
  • In The '90s, Goosebumps got many kids into reading in general.
• Xenofiction:
  • Warriors is by far the stand-out xenofiction series and is the most popular. It's readily available in many areas, and has soft enough mythology (and biological accuracy) not to confuse newcomers. Then, you have Warriors' sister series Survivors and Seekers, all written by the same team of authors working under the Pen Name Erin Hunter.
  • From there, due to Friendly Fandoms, it's an easy hop, skip, and jump to Wings of Fire and Foxcraft, which were both written by members of the Erin Hunter team.
  • Watership Down is traditionally the go-to book and is a Trope Codifier for the genre.
  • Black Beauty and The Call of the Wild are compulsory in many places, so they have acted as as gateways for generations.
  • Redwall is another traditional go-to book series to introduce someone to xenofiction.
• Danmei (aka Chinese Boys' Love webnovels):
  • If a Western reader is into danmei, the chances are very good that they were introduced to it by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu's works, especially Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation: Mo Dao Zu Shi which also tends to be these same Western readers' first xianxia work.

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