The Chronicles of Alice Books in Order

The Chronicles of Alice takes the bones of Lewis Carroll and rebuilds them as dark fantasy horror. The first book, Alice, opens in a hospital inside the Old City, where a young woman is locked away with shattered memories of blood, a tea party, and something terrible involving rabbit ears. She does not know why she is there. She only knows that the place is wrong.

This is not a cozy Wonderland retelling.

Alice escapes the hospital with Hatcher, a damaged man with a violent past and his own reasons for wanting out. From there the series follows the two of them through a world where familiar names from Carroll have been twisted into something harsher and more dangerous. Rabbit, Cheshire, the Jabberwock, the White Queen, the Black King, and the Red Queen are all here in one form or another, but nobody arrives to provide whimsy or safety.

What gives the books their pull is the bond between Alice and Hatcher. Alice is trying to piece together who she was and what happened to her. Hatcher is carrying loss, guilt, and the need to find his missing daughter. Their partnership gives the story a human center even when the world around them feels surreal. They keep moving because standing still usually means getting caught.

Setting matters a lot in this series. The Old City is crumbling, filthy, and violent, a place where power belongs to the cruel. Beyond it, the land is not the fresh green refuge Alice hopes for. In Red Queen, the countryside turns out to be ash, danger, and competing rulers with their own brutal games. The series keeps the dream logic of Wonderland, but it adds hunger, dirt, pain, and real physical stakes.

The ongoing arc is about memory, identity, power, and survival. Alice is not just trying to escape monsters. She is trying to understand her own place in this broken world, and the deeper she goes, the more it becomes clear that she matters to the larger struggle. Red Queen expands the scope through the search for Hatcher’s daughter and the clash of strange courts, while Looking Glass returns to the same world through four linked novellas that deepen the danger and the history around it.

Kindness exists in these books, but it never arrives without risk.

If you like fairy-tale retellings that lean all the way into horror, this series does that without blinking. The tone is brutal, eerie, and often sad, but not empty. There is loyalty here, and stubbornness, and a real sense that Alice and Hatcher are fighting for something more than survival alone. The books are dreamlike in shape but very grounded in fear, grief, and endurance, which is a big part of why they linger.