Alternative poster art for the 1982 Conan the Barbarian film

I’ve ranked my Top 10 Fantasy Books but fantasy is too prolific – and phantasmagorical – a genre to be confined to a mere top ten books or even my usual list of special mentions.

Instead, I have two lists of special mentions – one classic and the other cult and pulp.

This is obviously the former – for those classic fantasy books or works that have iconic status or recognition within popular culture and imagination.

Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in the Forest – painting by Carl Larsson in 1881, profile image of Wikipedia “Fairy Tale” (public domain image)

(1) FAIRY TALES

“Fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already because it is in the world already…What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of (evil). The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St George to kill the dragon” – G.K. Chesterton

Unfortunately, the term fairy tale tends to be used dismissively for stories only for children – although the best children’s literature arguably speaks to all ages – or even pejoratively for obvious fanciful falsehoods or “happily ever after” wishful thinking.

To that, one could argue that such preconceptions don’t even apply to those stories commonly called fairy tales, except in their modern incarnations, particularly their modern cinematic and television adaptations. Perhaps such preconceptions might be avoided by one of their alternative names – of which my favorites are wonder tales or the German term marchen – but the term fairy tale is too deeply ingrained in popular consciousness or imagination.

Whatever the name, a fairy tale is a “short story that belongs to the folklore genre” or a “specific type” of fantastic folktale. Ironically, not many fairy tales actually feature fairies – the fairy in the name of fairy tale refers more to fairy as a place or setting, the fairy lands or otherworlds of folklore and mythology but taking on a more generic meaning as a place of magic. Such stories do indeed typically feature magic and enchantments as well as “mythical or fanciful beings”, fairies or otherwise, although some stories such as Bluebeard don’t have any explicit magic or supernatural elements.

“Fairy tales were originally intended for all ages, but for a long period of time, they were only written or presented as children’s stories”, particularly in their cinematic adaptations by Disney. Many fairy tales were extraordinarily dark in their original form – some to the point of verging on horror – and some remain so in their modern versions, even if only by way of lingering hints or subtext. Ironically again, there is a countervailing trend within popular culture to revert fairy tales to their darker and edgier roots – or to subvert them as more adult deconstructions (or reconstructions), as well as parodies or satires (or the trope of “fractured fairy tales”).

The demarcation between fairy tales and legends or fables can be fuzzy. Fairy tales tend to be distinguished from legends by some degree of belief in historicity or veracity for their events, location or people. By contrast, fairy tales tend to be more timeless – “once upon a time” – and set in their own space distinct from our own world. Fables tend to focus more on the moral of a story as their definitive element.

“Fairy tales are found in cultures all over the world” and with “widespread variants”, but “only a tiny handful of them are widely known in modern culture”. They have a span to match their geographic scale – “many of today’s fairy tales have evolved from centuries-old stories that have appeared with variations, in multiple cultures around the world”. Fairy tales in literary form are relatively modern, mostly evolving from their predecessors in oral form or tradition. This makes “the history of the fairy tale…particularly difficult to trace because often only the literary forms survive”, but even so some fairy tales may date back thousands of years to the Bronze Age or the beginnings of civilization and writing itself.

“What fairy tales do share is a distinct and consistent set of narrative conventions. They usually take place “once upon a time”, in a setting that’s familiar but usually broadly generic, with few (if any) references to real people, places or events…typically told in an extremely spare and laconic style, using archetypical characters and locations”. That style was cited by Italo Calvino as a prime example of “quickness” in literature.

JRR Tolkien famously used the term for literary fantasy, including his own, in his essay “On Fairy-Stories” – an essay well worth reading for its philosophy of literary fantasy and Tolkien’s own writing. Like others who have pointed out that even traditional fairy tales tended not to involve fairies as such, Tolkien defined fairy tales as “stories about the adventures of men in Faerie, the land of fairies, fairytale princes and princesses, dwarves, elves, and not only magical species but many other marvels”. However, by either definition of fairy tale, it is worth remembering that Tolkien’s definitive literary fantasy, “The Lord of the Rings” (and even more so “The Hobbit”), would qualify as (extended) fairy tales – with elves, dwarves, goblins and trolls that have all been regarded as types of fairies.

RATING: 5 STARS*****

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Cover Barnes & Noble Collectible Classics: Omnibus Edition, hardcover 2016

(2) H.P. LOVECRAFT – CHTHULU MYTHOS

Does any other literary fantasy or SF mythology have the pre-eminence, or even more so capture the paranoid modern zeitgeist, as Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos?

Lovecraft took the worldview of modern science and turned it into a source of cosmic horror, creating that genre of fantasy or SF horror.

“His famous cosmology, created almost single-handedly, did not celebrate science and progress, but was instead full of otherworldly monsters and blind, raving deities…all of his work resonates with the terror of the newly-discovered magnitude of the universe…Einstein’s theory of relativity opened a door into teleportation, time travel, and alien geometry, and radically altered peoples’ notion of space-time itself, while the discovery of pre-Cambrian fossils and Wegener’s then-new-and-controversial hypothesis of continental drift brought the notion that the Earth was far older than previously believed…All of this was subtly addressed in Lovecraft’s stories of alien horror, and of the remains of ancient civilizations lost to the abyss of geological deep time”.

Our science and technology are but a candle held up to the storm – worse, as developed by writers using the Cthulhu Mythos such as Charles Stross, they may actually draw the notice of entities that were best left not noticing us (and tend to drive us mad if we notice them). Or, as Stross observed elsewhere, it was a potent metaphor for such terrors as Cold War fears of nuclear warfare – as almost otherworldly forces of destruction lurking beneath the surface ready to be unleashed by unfeeling beings.

Although in fairness, Cthulhu is taken out by a steamship to his head in his original appearance in The Call of Cthulhu. Try doing that with pre-industrial technology.

TV Tropes observes how Lovecraft’s cosmic horror is an inversion of the philosopher Leibniz’s optimism “that the entire world could be described by reason, and that this is the best of all possible worlds”. For Lovecraft, “each new discovery only increased humanity’s knowledge of its own ignorance and insignificance, encouraging a nihilistic atmosphere, and this is perhaps the central theme of Lovecraft’s incisive fiction”. Interestingly that same comparison between Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds” and Lovecraft’s horror in James Morrow’s Blameless in Abaddon.

Lovecraft didn’t coin the term Cthulhu Mythos for his mythology – for that matter, I’m not sure how consistent or systematic his mythology was throughout his works. He was all about the vibe of it, with details changing between individual works. However, aptly enough, his creation had a life of its own, as developed and used by other writers, as encouraged by Lovecraft himself.

TV Tropes stated the premise of the Cthulhu Mythos best – “Humanity exists within a small flickering firelight of sanity and reason in a cold and utterly senseless universe full of ancient and terrible things with tentacles and too many eyes. Our science doesn’t properly describe the workings of the universe – ignorance really is bliss because even trying to understand the horrid truth of reality will surely drive you to madness. Our planet was owned by all manner of unknowable alien beings long before we crawled out of the primordial muck, and guess what? They want it back, which means doing a little pest control…”

It is for this mythology that Lovecraft ranks the second top spot of my special mentions – and more generally that he is “is considered perhaps both the greatest and most notorious of all American horror fiction writers, rivalled only by his idol Edgar Allan Poe”.

Fortunately, his mythology transcends Lovecraft himself, as there’s the matter of that notoriety – which remains for somewhat problematic reasons. There’s also the quality of his writing, with the style or execution of his prose often falling short of the dark grandeur of his cosmic horror – Lovecraft was notorious for his purple prose, and enthusiasm for more archaic expressions such as eldritch.

And then there is the fact that “much of his work is informed by a powerful fear and disgust for anything outside the limited sphere of an urban White Anglo-Saxon Protestant of his time” – or more bluntly, he “was “afraid of everything that wasn’t his home town of Providence, Rhode Island”.

Even so, his Cthulhu Mythos remains definitive for me of fantasy in general. If I was to simply fantasy down to just two elements, it would be a fusion of fairy tale and the Cthulhu Mythos. Come to think of it, that’s not a bad description or tagline for The Lord of the Rings – fairy tale meets Cthulhu Mythos. If only Tolkien had written that essay…

RATING: 5 STARS*****

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Cover of The Annotated Alice, combining both books, Penguin 2001 (the edition I own)

(3) LEWIS CARROLL –

ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND / THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS (1865 / 1871)

“Curiouser and curiouser”…

Few fantasies are as iconic as Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking Glass (although the two books are often merged in popular culture) – which for simplicity I’ll conflate with their protagonist, Alice.

Through the vivid imagery or encounters of her adventures, as well as their potential symbolic allusions, Alice has lent herself readily to adaptation and popular imagination.

Allusions to Alice have earned their own trope on TV Tropes, which notes that the original novels can be associated with surreal or psychedelic fantasy, drug imagery (as in Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit), gothic horror and other aspects of Victorian England, such as steampunk.

As TV Tropes notes, “the name ‘Alice’, when used in a reference to Alice in Wonderland, therefore tends to be used for fantastical, ethereal characters or concepts, and that goes double if her last name is a variation on Carroll” (or Liddell – but more about that later). Other frequent references include white rabbits or going down the rabbit hole (as in The Matrix) – into a world of the hero’s journey that doesn’t conform to real world logic (and in which our heroine has to use intuition, a good heart, and an ability to acquire allies).

Not to mention white rabbits, cats and tea parties – or Mad Hatters. While we’re here, I should also note cards and chess as the premise for each of the settings in Wonderland and beyond the looking-glass respectively.

As for Alice herself, Lewis Carroll described her (when writing on her personality in “Alice on the Stage”) as “wildly curious, and with the eager enjoyment of Life that comes only in the happy hours of childhood, when all is new and fair, and when Sin and Sorrow are but names — empty words signifying nothing!”. I can’t think of a better – or more endearing – description than that.

For Carroll, there was, at least to some extent, a real Alice – Alice Pleasance Liddell, who inspired Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, when she asked Carroll to tell her a story on a boating trip in Oxford. The extent to which his character can be identified with Alice Liddell is not clear (and the brunette Liddell certainly did not resemble the blonde illustrations in the original book by cartoonist Sir John Tenniel). However, there are direct links to Liddell in the books – they are set on her birthday and her half birthday six months later (with the corresponding age), they are dedicated to her and the letters of her name are featured in an acrostic poem in the sequel.

As Catherine Robson wrote in Men in Wonderland – “In all her different and associated forms—underground and through the looking glass, textual and visual, drawn and photographed, as Carroll’s brunette or Tenniel’s blonde or Disney’s prim miss…in novel, poem, satire, play, film, cartoon, newspaper, magazine, album cover or song—Alice is the ultimate cultural icon, available for any and every form of manipulation, and as ubiquitous today as in the era of her first appearance.”

Alice’s fantasy adventures arguably dovetail with my definition of the modern fantasy genre as a fusion of fairy tale and Cthulhu mythos, with Alice obviously towards the fairy tale end of that fusion – albeit Alice extends beyond fairy tale to logical and linguistic paradoxes, play, pun, and parodies. Although it is tempting to imagine an adaptation of Alice more towards the Cthulhu mythos end – some of the beings and realms she encounters in her adventures come close…

RATING: 5 STARS*****

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Cover Penguin Classics paperback edition 2003

(4) BRAM STOKER – DRACULA (1897)

Dracula is THE vampire, synonymous with vampires and vampirism in popular culture and imagination.

My love of vampire fiction – in literature, in film or television, in comics and in every other media in which vampires appear – originates directly from Dracula, as I read it in early childhood. It may be tame by standards of modern cinematic horror, particularly given its style as an epistolary novel, but it literally gave me nightmares as a child. Of course, it probably didn’t help that I read it when I was home from school sick with fever – and I still remember it in terms of fever dream.

There is a whole host of vampiric or ‘vampire adjacent’ beings or creatures in folklore and mythology, going all around the world and back to the dawn of history or beyond, as well as an incredible dense “folklore for the entity known today as the vampire” that “originates almost exclusively from early 18th-century southeastern Europe”.

And yet almost all of it pales (heh) in comparison to the archetype of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which effectively supersedes its predecessors in folklore, except to the extent it adapted them – and even then most people remember it by Dracula rather than the original folklore.

Vampires tend to be superpowered by nature and Dracula even more so, as his book codified the definitive vampire tropes in fiction. In adaptations, he has also been freakishly hard to kill, at least permanently. He can shift shape, most impressively into mist or dust in moonlight – passing through the smallest cracks and virtually teleporting. He can also command animals – and the elements. In short, he was potentially a Dark Lord to rival Sauron – indeed, it wouldn’t be too hard to recast Dracula as The Lord of the Rings, substituting Transylvania for Mordor and the Brides for the Black Riders (only much s€xier). Kim Newman did something of the sort with his Anno Dracula series, where Dracula bests Van Helsing and vampirizes Queen Victoria to rule the British Empire. Or at least, he might have done if he’d had any sort of plan in Stoker’s book beyond picking up British chicks – but then that’s just how he swings, baby.

Speaking of the Brides, they’re never referred to as such or the Brides of Dracula in the novel itself – that came later in other media and popular culture – but instead are referred to as the sisters. Nor are they portrayed as married to him or in any other relationship to him – their names as well as “the origin and identity of the Sisters, as well as the true nature of their relationship with Count Dracula, is never revealed”.

They were, however, written as hot, and they have been portrayed that way ever since in imitations or adaptations, something they use to bewitch their victims such as Jonathan Harker or those who seek to stake them such as Abraham van Helsing, albeit both narrowly survive or resist their bewitchment. One wonders why Dracula even leaves his castle at all, let alone for England, when he could just hang with the Brides – although in fairness it seems that his grand plan in England was to replicate the Brides. It amuses me that Dracula’s supernatural invasion of England ultimately involved not much else.

“Dracula is one of the most famous works of English literature and has been called the centrepiece of vampire fiction…the novel has been adapted many times. Count Dracula has deeply influenced the popular conception of vampires; with over 700 appearances across virtually all forms of media, the Guiness Book of World Records named Dracula the most portrayed literary character.”

And then you have all the themes, above and below the surface. I’ve already referred to Dracula’s supernatural invasion of England – which sees Dracula as an example of the invasion literature at the time, albeit the latter tended towards more mortal and mundane enemies. Dracula’s invasion also bears parallels to disease or plague – something made more explicit in the various films of Nosferatu, which was essentially Dracula with the serial numbers filed off. Throw in ethnicity (including Stoker’s Irish nationality), sexuality, religion or superstition, and science – and now we’re just getting started.

Dracula’s dark fantasy or horror arguably dovetails with my definition of the modern fantasy genre as a fusion of fairy tale and Cthulhu mythos, with Dracula obviously towards the Cthulhu Mythos end of that fusion.

RATING: 5 STARS*****

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Cover Penguin classics edition published in 2003 – the edition I own

(5) MARY SHELLEY – FRANKENSTEIN (1818)

“It’s alive!”

Wikipedia proposes that “Frankenstein is one of the best-known works of English literature”. I don’t know – in my opinion, it is, and it isn’t.

It isn’t because much of Frankenstein in popular culture or imagination comes not from the novel but from its cinematic adaptations, particularly the 1931 film directed by James Whale, such as my opening quote and indeed the whole mechanics – or dare I say it, the ‘electrics’ – of the creation of the monster.

That creation isn’t really the primary source of horror in the novel, so the novel is somewhat vague about it and indeed mostly skips over it to get to the main point, the conflict between the monster and its creator – or rather, the horror of the creator at his creation (or creature).

So that whole process of the monster “as a composite of whole body parts grafted together from cadavers and reanimated by the use of electricity” is not so much in the novel. I seem to recall hints of electricity or ‘galvanism’ (albeit perhaps more as influences on the novel than in the novel itself) but the novel is understandably coy about the details of the monster’s animation or reanimation other than it being part of the discovery of a previously unknown scientific “elemental principle of life”. For that matter, there are definitely explicit references to alchemy and magic, but these are also explicitly dismissed as possible mechanics for the creation of the monster.

Not only does much of Frankenstein in popular culture or imagination originate from elsewhere than the novel, but there’s substantial parts of the novel that tend not to find their way into adaptations, let alone popular culture or imagination. There’s the whole focus on Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, which is also implausibly what the monster uses to learn to read – although that’s simply one part of the implausibly contrived way the monster learns language at all.

Speaking of allusions or references, most adaptations – and even contemporary editions of the book – tend to drop the Shelley’s subtitle and subtext, the modern Prometheus.

Or that the whole novel itself is epistolary, with the framing device that it is written as a letter by the captain of an Arctic discovery ship to his sister – who firstly recounts the surprisingly detailed tale told to him firstly by the Victor Frankenstein dying from exposure to the Arctic ice after being found by him or his crew, and secondly by the monster when the latter pops in for an epilogue. For that matter, this whole ending by icy showdown in the Arctic between the monster and his creator tends to be replaced in popular culture or imagination by the fiery end at the hands of the village mob from the 1931 film.

And yet on the other hand it is “one of the best-known works of English literature” because of that very influence within popular culture and imagination that has seen plot details from the novel displaced by its adaptations. After all, the details may differ but the core concept or premise, basic plot, and themes remain the same – “infused with elements of the Gothic novel and the Romantic movement, it has had a considerable influence on literature and on popular culture, spawning a complete genre of horror stories, films, and plays”.

Its influence is such that it is often argued to be the first work (or trope maker) of science fiction – such as by Brian Aldiss in his history of SF, Billion Year Spree.

Not bad for the first novel of a teenaged girl who wrote it in a private competition with the two leading poets of the day, her future husband (and then partner) Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, to see who could write the best ghost or horror story – and who clearly won, given the novel’s influence and adaptations. Interestingly, the runner-up was neither Percy Shelley nor Lord Byron, but fellow guest Jonn Polidori with the first published modern vampire story in English, “The Vampyre” (albeit working from a fragment of a story from Byron).

You probably know that Frankenstein is not the name of the monster but of his creator, Victor Frankenstein – the archetype of scientific hubris, or more proverbially, the mad scientist – although the two tend to be conflated in name.

You also probably know the basic premise and plot. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl – no, wait, I mean, boy makes monster, boy rejects monster, and it doesn’t end well from there. Actually, there’s also the traditional boy meets girl plot in there but that doesn’t end well either, thanks to the crossover with the boy makes monster plot – as well as the boy makes girl for monster and boy rejects making girl for monster plot.

One of the ambiguities of the novel is making the monster may not be so bad of itself, it’s that Victor is the archetypal deadbeat dad who skips out to the store for some cigarettes and never comes back, because he is so horrified by the monster’s appearance. Hey pal, you made it! Funny that its appearance never bothered you throughout the lengthy process of making it until after you brought it to life. Perhaps all the subsequent pain could have all been avoided if he had made his monster less, well, monstrous, and more, you know, attractive? You know, in the style of Rocky from Rocky Horror Picture Show – or for that matter, how the Bride of Frankenstein tends to be depicted in adaptations.

Anyway, after he is so superficially abandoned, the monster rises to his own villainy with a murderous rampage. Okay, so murderous rampage is something of an overstatement, since he kills one person, Victor’s brother, William (and an innocent servant girl is hanged for the crime). He approaches Victor in truce, seeking Victor create a female companion for him. Victor initially does so, then destroys her as he fears a race of monsters. (Really, Victor? Come on – show a little imagination, man. You could always create her without ovaries. Or make the monster a male companion). The monster renews his rampage with a vengeance, or more vengeance anyway – killing Victor’s close friend and then Victor’s bride Elizabeth. In her bed on their wedding night – admittedly a nice villainous touch. Victor’s father dies of grief, as was the fashion at that time. Victor then pursues the monster to the Arctic for his own vengeance but fails miserably and freezes instead. The monster then mourns his creator, perhaps because he realizes he will now have nothing to do, and vows to destroy himself.

Thus, the monster wastes his potential as a Romantic Age Hulk. His character is somewhat different from his iconic film appearance, not least because he is sensitive and emotional – like an emo Hulk without the smashing. He is also highly articulate and literate, indeed having read Paradise Lost – clearly no good could come of that. Even so, he is as iconic as his creator – an enduring influence in theme, when not directly adapted in name or image. In his personal study of horror, Danse Macabre, Stephen King considered Frankenstein’s monster (along with Dracula and the Werewolf) to be an archetype of numerous horror figures in fiction, in a role he referred to as “The Thing Without a Name”.

RATING:

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Cover art of Tarzan Alive by Philip Jose Farmer published in 2006 by Bison

(6) EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS – TARZAN

Tarzan is the most iconic hero of fantasy and science fiction – the archetypal jungle hero (or perhaps modern barbarian hero), in a series of books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The start of the series is easy to date to “Tarzan of the Apes” in 1912 – the end of the series less so but I’ve dated it to “Tarzan and the Valley of Gold” in 1966, authorized as the 25th official Tarzan novel by the Burroughs estate.

Born John Clayton and heir to English aristocracy as Lord Greystoke (or more precisely Viscount Greystoke), Tarzan was marooned with his aristocrat parents and ‘adopted’ after their deaths by a maternal female ape within a ‘tribe’ of great apes – indeed, Tarzan is his name in the ape language.

Philip Jose Farmer condensed Tarzan’s fictional ‘biography’ from the series by Edgar Rice Burroughs into his book Tarzan Alive, which is essentially my central reference to Tarzan (and exclusively so after the first two books). Farmer was an enduring fan of the character and wrote of Tarzan (or his world) in a number of books – most infamously in A Feast Unknown, featuring a thinly veiled pastiche of Tarzan and Doc Savage, or most famously, in his so-called Wold Newton Universe, where he linked together a number of fictional superheroes to the effect of a meteorite.

And I say superheroes as Tarzan has virtually superhuman abilities. After all, we’re talking someone who has wrestled virtually every animal, including full grown bull apes and gorillas. In short, he easily out-Batmans Batman and is the Superman of the jungle.

He is also of superhuman intelligence – a feature not readily discerned from the unfortunate monosyllabic and broken English of his screen adaptations. In the books – indeed, the first book – he could read English before he could speak it, having taught himself to read from the children’s picture books left in his parents’ log cabin and deducing the symbols as a language, in complete isolation from humans. He also spoke French before he spoke English, learning it from the first European he encountered. He readily learns to speak English – as well as thirty or so languages after that. So much for “Me Tarzan, you Jane”.

Despite a certain lack of plausibility, he remains an enduring hero – a “daydream figure” who obviously appeals to our continuing fascination for an animal or nature hero (and perhaps less fortunately to a ‘white god’ figure)

RATING:

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O yes – he’ll be showing her his savage sword! Classic Conan pose (or leg cling) in The Savage Sword of Conan cover art by Earl Norem for “The Treasure of Tranicos”, issue 47, 1 December 1979, Marvel Comics (fair use)

(7) ROBERT E. HOWARD – CONAN

The Lord of the Rings may have defined modern literary fantasy – fantasy could well be classified as pre-Tolkien and post-Tolkien. And yet…there were of course other writers of fantasy before (and apart from) Tolkien, most notably Robert E. Howard and his Conan stories from 1932 to 1936. I understand that Tolkien read and enjoyed the Conan stories – and I can’t resist quoting George R. R. Martin, who came to The Lord of The Rings from those very different Conan stories:

“Robert E. Howard’s stories usually opened with a giant serpent slithering by or an axe cleaving someone’s head in two. Tolkien opened his with a birthday party…Conan would hack a bloody path right through the Shire, end to end, I remembered thinking…Yet I kept on reading. I almost gave up at Tom Bombadil, when people started going “Hey! Come derry do! Tom Bombadillo!”. Things got more interesting in the barrow downs, though, and even more so in Bree, where Strider strode onto the scene. By the time we got to Weathertop, Tolkien had me…A chill went through me, such as Conan and Kull have never evoked.”

On the other hand, Conan would have made quick work of the Quest, while making off with an elf girl or two…

Conan embodies heroic fantasy in his setting of the Hyborian Age – an age of our own world after “the oceans drank Atlantis” that conveniently predates all surviving historical records. Translation: a setting for which Howard didn’t have to do any of that pesky research for his quick pulp fantasy stories but which could still invoke or have historical vibes as the precursors of civilizations in recorded history.

“Know, o prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars — Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian; black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.”

That pretty much sums up Howard’s stories of his best known hero Conan which often invoke for me Conan as a Hyborian Bond – or is that barbarian Bond? – with similar vibes as James Bond with the different Bond girls for each story, as well as the different monstrous or sorcerous antagonists.

Due to his friendship with H.P. Lovecraft, “the original Conan stories are actually a peripheral part of the Cthulhu Mythos” – and perhaps that friendship also accounts for the huge “loathsome serpents” that recur throughout the stories. They are also canon to the Marvel Universe, thanks to their adaptation to comics by Marvel.

RATING:

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It Part 2 film poster art (fair use)

(8) STEPHEN KING – IT (1986)

Hail to the King! Stephen King, that is. One of the most iconic and prolific writers of our time, hence his inclusion in my classic special mentions. Lines and scenes from his work reverberate throughout popular culture, albeit particularly driven by cinematic or screen adaptations. His prose is vivid and visceral – indeed, the only books that have given me bad dreams, something which generally only occurs from the direct visualization of movies. In short, I am that Constant Reader to which King addresses his Author’s Notes.

As for which book to select for this entry, I chose It – not the pronoun but the book of that title , a book that not only has its own individual mythos and is an important part of King’s overarching mythos, but also encapsulates and symbolizes King’s mythology. It traces its shapeshifting eldritch entity of evil in its favorite shape of Pennywise the Clown, as well as its lair and hunting ground, the town of Derry in Maine, and its opponents, the Losers’ Club through multiple and overlapping layers.

Arguably Pennywise is King’s most iconic villain – thanks to its distinctive appearance as a clown and screen adaptations of the novel. Hence my choice of It above King’s other novels (or short stories) for this classic special mention, even if that requires me to mentally omit one scene from the novel. What scene? It doesn’t exist.

RATING:

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Not the most exciting cover art but it is the edition I own – the 2003 Penguin Classics edition

(9) ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON –

THE STRANGE CASE OF DR JEKYLL & MR HYDE (1886)

Or is that the strange case of Dr Ego and Mr Id?

Dr Jack and Mr Ripper?

The Abominable Hulk?

Yes – I know the novella preceded both Freud for my first reference and Jack the Ripper for my second (although not by too much), not to mention the Incredible Hulk. And yes – I know that the Abominable Hulk is to play into subsequent adaptations in which Hyde tends to be, well, hulking although in the novella Hyde is smaller than Jekyll, at least initially.

“The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is one of the most famous pieces of English literature, and is considered to be a defining book of the gothic horror genre.” It has had a momentous impact on popular culture and imagination- with Jekyll and Hyde becoming a vernacular phrase as well as a trope for the duality of a person with a dark side, particularly transforming from one to the other.

“When a character and his evil twin, evil counterpart or shadow archetype are really the same guy after all. Or, sometimes, a completely different character is sharing body space with another. The point is, the villain lives outside the hero’s body and therefore hides in plain sight.”

That’s the broader trope – in the novella, it is very much Doctor Jekyll’s dark side, which he unleashed, whether inadvertently or deliberately, by creating a serum he intended to contain or separate his darker urges “that were not fit for a man of his stature”.

One thing that amuses me is that Jekyll is fifty years of age or so, while his darker side Hyde is younger, making the whole novella something of Jekyll’s mid-life crisis and ending as badly as many such crises do. I mean, if only he’d just got himself a sports car or trophy wife instead of creating a serum…

The other thing that amuses me is that Utterson, the novella’s hero investigating the strange case, is a lawyer, as all good heroes should be.

Apparently, frameworks proposed for interpreting the novella include “religious allegory, fable, detective story, sensation fiction, doppelganger literature, Scottish devil tales, and Gothic novel”. Doppelganger literature – dare I quip doppelgangbang?

The book has seen numerous adaptations and parodies, although most omit the mystery of the strange case since it is now well known that Hyde is the flip side of Jeyll. Given that you don’t need him to solve the mystery (so that the famous twist is usually the starting point or clear from the outset), Utterson tends to get dropped or demoted as protagonist.

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Cover 2021 paperback edition using promotional art from the 2009 film Dorian Gray

(10) OSCAR WILDE –

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (1890)

Essentially Jekyll and Hyde but with Hyde in a portrait rather than a serum – the titular character remains young and handsome while his magical portrait ages and shows all the signs of his corruption and depravity. And we all know what that ‘corruption and depravity’ was, don’t we, Oscar?  Which makes it all seem somewhat coy and quaint today – so that the modern reader might want to imagine something more evil than gallivanting around gay London.

In fairness, Dorian does murder his friend and the painter of the portrait, before blackmailing another friend into destroying the body. (He is also responsible for other deaths, but more through callousness and melodrama). Ultimately, he stabs the portrait, fatally transposing the wound to himself while swapping their appearances (so that the portrait is now young and innocent while he is aged and corrupt).

Dorian woefully wasted his supervillain potential – one of the few good adaptations in the film of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, where he is practically invulnerable, as any injury is transferred to his portrait.

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Cover of hardcover Aesop’s Fables Classic Edition illustrated by Charles Santore (New York Times bestselling illustrator) published by Applesauce Press in 2018. Aesop’s most famous fable character, the tortoise (from The Tortoise and the Hare) is front and center winning the race!

(11) AESOP’S FABLES

The most famous anthology of fables – notably beast fables – in European culture, attributed to Aesop, a Greek slave and later freedman, “living somewhere in Asia Minor in the sixth century BC”, if indeed he existed at all. There was a tendency for subsequent European fables to be attributed to him as well – or at least added to collections of his fables.

And the most famous of Aesop’s fables would have to be The Tortoise and the Hare – slow and steady wins the race, illustrating the moral of the story as characteristic of fables, usually but not always explicitly pointed out at the end. Indeed, TV Tropes has dubbed the use of the moral of the story an “aesop”.

Of course, there’s a lot more fables by (or attributed to) Aesop – more than enough for a top ten Aesop’s fables many times over.

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Cover leatherbound Arabian Nights edition published in 2011 by Canterbury Classics

(12) ARABIAN NIGHTS

Also known as One Thousand and One Nights, the Arabian Nights are essentially Middle Eastern fairy tales or folk tales compiled from Arabic. The Arabian part of Arabian Nights is a bit of a misnomer – as the stories originate from the Middle East, central Asia, South Asia, and North Africa (as well as some with origins back to Persian or even Mesopotamian stories). Heck – Aladdin is even ostensibly set in China!

And there’s another heck right there. The three most well known tales of the Arabian Nights – Aladdin, Ali Baba, and Sinbad – were not part of the original Arabian Nights but were added to it by European translators and I understand Sinbad even traces its influences back to Homer’s Odyssey.

What is part of all variations of the Arabian Nights is the framing device of Scheherazade, one of the most tongue-twisting names (and most mind-boggling to spell), at least for those from Anglophone nations, which is why I prefer the Persian variant of Shahrazad. You may know her as simply the most famous and significant female character of the Arabian Nights, indeed without whom they wouldn’t exist according to their own narrative – the plucky heroine and narrator in the frame story, who told all one thousand tales in the titular one thousand and one nights.

As the story goes, the monarch Shahryar discovered his first wife was unfaithful to him and resolved upon the monstrously misogynistic plan to marry a new virgin every day and behead her the following day to avoid betrayal or dishonour. Betrayal or dishonour by her to him, that is – I’m not too sure that executing your wife the next day is quite in the spirit of marriage and certainly had the bride gagging in her wedding vows for death to do them part.

Anyway, the vizier ran out of virgins of noble blood and so Shahrazad, the vizier’s own daughter, volunteered to be the next bride, against her father’s wishes. Fortunately, Shahrazad had a plan – which was to tell the monarch a story on that first night, but leaving it on a cliffhanger at dawn, so the monarch postponed her execution until the next day for her to finish that story – which she did the next night, but started an even more exciting story, leaving that one too on a cliffhanger. And so on for a thousand nights or about three years, until she finally ran out of stories but the monarch had genuinely fallen in love with her, decreeing her to be his wife for life rather than execution the next day – although it might be noted that she had borne him three sons as well in this time. And so they lived happily ever after.

Or not, because I have difficulty imagining that Shahrazad did not have post-traumatic stress disorder after that – or why the monarch Shahryar deserved to live happily ever after executing so many innocent women. Indeed, one woman each day for three years, or approximately 1,100 women – at least according to British adventurer Sir Richard Burton in his translation, which makes Shahrazad’s heroism a little less impressive, given she sat on her plan for that time. Also the similarity of her name with that of the monarch suggests it was an honorific, either named as such after she was married to him – or named for him by her father, the monarch’s vizier.

But I prefer to overlook these things, as what’s not to love about her? Beautiful, intelligent, heroic and she tells a good story – indeed, a thousand of them.

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Cover art hardcover annotated centenniel edition W.W. Norton & Co 2010 (the edition I own)

(13) L. FRANK BAUM –

THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ (1900)

“I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore”

Better known these days from the 1939 cinematic adaptation – shortened to The Wizard of Oz – than from the original novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, the story and its female protagonist Dorothy Gale remain iconic in modern fantasy.

Through Dorothy’s adventures with their vivid imagery and characters, not least the central trio of her companions in the original novel and cinematic adaptation – the Scarecrow, the Tinman, and the Cowardly Lion – the book and its protagonist Dorothy have remained rich sources of adaptations and allusions throughout popular culture.

Dorothy is fundamentally (mid-western) American, befitting the protagonist of what was intended as a modern American fairy tale. She’s a Kansas farm girl, although she subsequently becomes a princess of Oz and lives there, in the numerous sequels which lack the iconic status of the first book. She’s an orphan raised by her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry, with her equally iconic dog Toto. Famously, she and Toto are swept up in a tornado to the Land of Oz.

However, Dorothy is more iconic in popular culture through the 1939 cinematic adaptation (portrayed by Judy Garland) than her original novels. Her appearance was never set out in the books, so that her cinematic appearance has become iconic – although it did retain the literary description of her clothing as her trademark blue and white gingham dress. Otherwise, the film condensed the novel – but most significantly altered the ending, that it was all just a dream – unlike the original novel, where it was all definitely real.

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Cover annotated centennial edition published by W.W. Norton & Company in 2014 (the edition I own)

(14) J.M. BARRIE –

PETER PAN (1902-1911)

Peter Pan, the fictional character created by Scottish novelist and playwright J.M. Barrie, needs little introduction but I’ll quote one anyway.

“A free-spirited and mischievous young boy who can fly and never grows up, he spends his never-ending childhood having adventures on the mythical island of Neverland as the leader of the Lost Boys, interacting with fairies, pirates, mermaids, Native Americans, and occasionally ordinary children from the world outside Neverland…Peter Pan has become a cultural icon symbolising youthful innocence and escapism”.

On the topic of fairies, I can’t mention Peter Pan without his fairy companion Tinkerbell.

However, there are some things I might be able to introduce about him.

The first major appearance of Peter Pan was in a play rather than the novel he is better remembered by – the 1904 stage play by Barrie, Peter Pan: or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (although that was preceded by his appearance in another of Barrie’s works, The Little White Bird in 1902), before the play was expanded into the 1911 novel, Peter and Wendy.

“The original play is fairy Child-Friendly: Captain Hook is a blustering comic villain, the violence is usually a pratfall or similar form of slapstick, and death is treated more like a time-out. In contrast, the book version (Peter and Wendy) later written by Barrie is a sly deconstruction of the Victorian notion of the sacred innocence of children, full of parental bonus dark humor and subtle gallows humor; Barrie was a master satirist for his time, though few of his satires are remembered today.”

However, Peter Pan is an archetypal magical trickster hero – “a playful demigod, with aspects of Puck and Pan” (the latter even in his name) and “a cultural symbol of youthful exuberance and innocence”. And I just can’t resist the revival of Pan, that most pagan of classical pagan gods – indeed one that came to embody classical paganism – as a trickster hero of children’s fantasy. Not to mention giving him a thoroughly Dionysian character and – particularly for the proverbial boy who never grew up – a veritable harem of fairies, mermaids and Wendy Darling.

And of course there’s his love of adventure among the Lost Boys fighting pirates, including the ‘adventure’ of his own mortality

“The story of Peter Pan has been a popular one for adaptation into other media” – film, both live-action and animated, stage plays or musicals, television, comics and so on, with perhaps the best known as the 1953 Disney animated film.

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Covers Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner with the original illustrations by Ernest H. Shepard

(15) A.A. MILNE –

WINNIE THE POOH / THE HOUSE AT POOH CORNER (1926-1928)

Everyone’s favorite beast fable!

I mean, it is essentially a beast fable, isn’t it? And yes – I know the “beasts” are the stuffed toy animals of the author’s son Christopher Robin Milne, although Winnie himself was also inspired by an actual zoo bear of that name. I think the Pooh part came from comically grandiose titles like Grand Poobah, itself originating from a character Pooh-bah in a Gilbert and Sullivan play.

“Winnie-the-Pooh is a British children’s book written in 1926 by author A.A. Milne. The original book of stories was, famously, inspired by Milne’s son Christopher Robin Milne and Christopher’s assortment of stuffed animals, including a teddy bear that became Winnie-the-Pooh, a tiger that became Tigger, and a donkey that became Eeyore. Pooh and his friends live in a Forest inspired by Ashdown Forest in Sussex, where Milne had a cottage.”

It was followed by the 1928 sequel House at Pooh Corner, although there are also some references to the characters in Milne’s collections of poetry.

And that pretty much sums up what has become a media franchise.

Except perhaps that the Disney media franchise is such that “Disney estimates that merchandise based on the Pooh characters brings in as much revenue as merchandise featuring the characters Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, and Pluto combined”.

It’s not hard to see why – the Pooh characters are just so darn endearing, while also representative of human personality types or emotional aspects that readily lend themselves to all sorts of allegorical interpretations.

Of those, my favorite would be The Tao of Pooh (and its sequel the Te of Piglet), in which Pooh represents the ideal balance of Taoism or at least a happy mean between the melancholy of Eeyore and the over-enthusiasm of Tigger, the latter being my favorite character.

In looking up this entry’s articles on Wikipedia and TV Tropes, I was delighted to learn that Christopher Robin’s original stuffed animals have been preserved and are on public display, except poor Roo “who was lost in an apple orchard around 1930” (itself something that sounds so…Milnesian). On that note, I had a stuffed Tigger as my favorite toy as a young child, which might have something to do with him enduring as my favorite character.

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Amazon 2017 Kindle edition

(16) W W JACOBS –

“THE MONKEY’S PAW” (1902)

To the extent that he is known, W.W. Jacobs is best known for this story but I’d venture that more people know of the story than they do of its author, as the story has acquired a life of its own, not unlike the titular object and the wishes it grants – which “come with an enormous price for interfering with fate”.

Such is the life the story has acquired for itself, that there are a surprisingly prolific number of adaptations of it – and even more variations of its central theme of being careful what you wish for – whether played straight, as in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, or parody, as in one of The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episodes.

“By the end of the 20th century, the story’s plot had become something of a stock parody trope, used whenever “be careful what you wish for” was needed as a punchline. ‘The monkey’s paw curls’ is a standard reaction phrase these days meaning ‘sure, you’ll get what you wish, but something else much more horrible will happen because of it.'”

RATING:

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Promotional art used for The Jungle Book film on the Disney channel (fair use)

(17) RUDYARD KIPLING –

JUNGLE BOOKS & JUST SO STORIES (1894-1895 & 1902)

Kipling was incredibly prolific, such that he won the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature and was considered for British Poet Laureate – and yet he is best known for his children’s fantasy in The Jungle Book and its sequel, The Second Jungle Book.

In part that may be because they are less tainted by the political controversy that attaches to his works these days, given that Kipling was the quintessential poet of the British Empire, the Victorian Virgil as it were.

However, mostly I think it comes from the sheer mythic resonance of the Jungle Books that has endured for children and adults since their publication, reflecting Kipling’s undoubted literary skill as well as “a versatile and luminous narrative gift”.

It helps that it pre-empted Tarzan as jungle hero, except with its protagonist Mowgli as a feral child raised by wolves rather than apes – invoking mythic characters who were similarly raised by wolves, most notably the founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus.

It also helps that it was adapted by Disney in both animated and live action versions, although it is disappointing that the latter didn’t take the opportunity to restore the python Kaa as heroic savior of Mowgli rather than villainous antagonist. Still, I can perhaps forgive the live-action version as it had Kaa voiced by Scarlet Johansson. I’d be hypnotized by her too – she could slither her coils around me anytime.

But for the iconic popularity of The Jungle Book, I’d be almost tempted to substitute his anthology Just So Stories, akin to myths with the flavor of fairy tales or beast fables explaining such things as how the elephant got its trunk (usually the cover art of the collection) or how the kangaroo got its legs.

RATING:

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

Cover 2012 Harper Collins (media tie-in) edition

(18) E.B. WHITE –

CHARLOTTE’S WEB (1952)

“Some pig”.

I mean, what else do you need to know than that message written in a spider’s web, which effectively states the premise of this classic children’s fantasy that has been heartwarming American audiences since publication.

I suppose I can expand on that a little more – it tells the story of a farm livestock pig Wilbur and his friendship with a barn spider Charlotte, who saves him from the usual fate of farm livestock pigs by writing messages about him in her web.

Ah, Charlotte – the only spider this arachnophobe may ever like or even love (but not in the sense of the twisted parody that the animated series Drawn Together did of it, now sadly forever etched in my mind).

This is of course a book that could never have been written in Australia.

Also, I’m sorry, Wilbur, but you’d just be too delicious as bacon.

RATING:

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

The rare and elusive first edition cover – most versions these days use art from the Disney films

(19) DODIE SMITH –

101 DALMATIANS (1956)

I mean, you all know it – although probably from the various Disney animated or live-action adaptations rather than the original 1956 children’s novel “about the kidnapping of a family of Dalmatian puppies” (alternatively titled and serialized as The Great Dog Robbery).

Which is a pity because the novel reads as a classic fantasy quest across the English countryside, with dogs as the protagonists. You know, kind of like The Lord of the Rings – but with dogs. Note to self – write The Lord of the Rings but with dogs.

It’s also a pity because the novel had a 1967 sequel, The Starlight Barking (a title adapted from the Twilight Barking or dog telegraph of the first novel) which hasn’t been adapted (despite film sequels such as 102 Dalmatians) – I haven’t read it but it sounds like it was absolutely tripping balls, going from The Lord of the Rings with dogs to The War of the Worlds with alien dogs..

RATING:

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Collage variant cover of the 2024 Fairytale Fantasies calendar by J. Scott Campbell (fair use)

(20) FAIRYTALE FANTASIES

And we come full circle for my usual kinky entry as final special mention – fairytale fantasies.

Yes, that’s a reference to the annual anthology pinup art calendars of that title, Fairytale Fantasies, by comics artist J.Scott Campbell – featuring pinup versions of iconic fairytale characters. To which I could add the pinup art covers and collections by Zenescope Entertainment for its comics series, Grimm Fairy Tales and various offshoot titles.

However, the concept of fairytale fantasies goes well beyond that to the reason for the Fairytale Fantasies calendars or Zenescope comics in the first place – the adaptation of fairy tales to er0tic themes, something that is surprisingly prolific. Of course, that last point reflects how much eroticism, like horror, was inherent in the original versions of traditional fairy tales, running naked below the surface.

RATING:

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

Cover – Conan the Barbarian #1 comic (October 1970), by Barry Smith and John Verpoorten, also used as the cover of the original comics omnibus Volume 1 published by Titan Books in February 2025 (fair use). Note once again the classic Conan pose

TOP 10 FANTASY BOOKS

(SPECIAL MENTION: CULT & PULP)

I’ve ranked my Top 10 Fantasy Books but fantasy is too prolific – and phantasmagorical – a genre to be confined to a mere top ten books or even my usual list of special mentions.

Instead, I have two lists of special mentions – one classic and the other cult and pulp.

This is obviously the latter – for those fantasy books or works that don’t quite that iconic status or recognition within popular culture and imagination of my classic special mentions but I like them anyway!

That or they’re an enduring influence on me despite (or perhaps because of) their “cult & pulp” status.

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Yes – it’s the ur-text of (Advanced) Dungeons and Dragons, the iconic cover of the Player’s Handbook for the first edition of the game, featuring its classic art stealing the stones from the eyes of a demonic idol (by artist D.A. Trampier), as featured in the book profile in the Forgotten Realms Wiki

(1) DUNGEONS & DRAGONS

Although I do have a special mention entry for an actual Encyclopedia of Fantasy, Dungeons & Dragons remains the best de facto encyclopedic treatment of fantasy themes and tropes- which is not surprising for something that strives to systematically codify the genre of fantasy for obsessive-compulsive rules-lawyering geeks to play as a game.

Of course, the standout is its holy trinity – the three enduring core rulebooks of The Player’s Handbook, Monster Manual and The Dungeon Master’s Guide.

Dungeons and Dragons essentially kills two birds with one stone – a twenty-sided stone. As the fantasy game, it set out to codify both fantasy and games – fantasy tropes or themes for use in play, and the mechanics of role playing games to play them. And its achievement is unparalleled in both.

Firstly, it is THE tabletop role-playing game – “While Dungeons & Dragons may not have created tabletop roleplaying games, it codified many of the mechanics and tropes associated with them, is what most people picture when they think of a tabletop RPG (even if they’ve never played one), and is by far the most popular tabletop RPG of all time”.

My interest in it, however, is more for its codification of fantasy tropes or themes, reflecting my use of it more as comprehensive reference work rather than game – “Dungeons & Dragons is one of the trope codifiers of the modern era, having single-handedly mashed swords and sorcery and epic high fantasy into the fantasy genre as we know it today”

And even more so than entries from the Encyclopedia of Fantasy, I (and probably most contemporary readers of fantasy) tend to default to descriptive terms or codified tropes used by Dungeons and Dragons when I think of fantasy – its distinctive character classes, alignments, schools of magic and so on.

RATING: 5 STARS*****
(S-TIER: GOD TIER)

St Martin’s Press, hardcover 1997 edition – the edition I own

(2) JOHN CLUTE & JOHN GRANT –
THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FANTASY

The best single reference work concerning fantasy fiction in all media – even better now that it is online, although sadly, not updated like its companion and predecessor The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

However, that it is not updated does not detract from its greatest strength as a reference work and influence on me personally, which is not so much its entries for individual authors or works, but its compilation of fantasy themes and tropes, including its classification of fantasy subgenres. Many of these are compiled as entries under an evocative or striking phrase, many of which in turn were invented by the editors – one notable example being ‘thinning’, for the gradual loss of magic or vitality from the world.

Others include the descriptive term for one of my favorite subgenres of fantasy – posthumous fantasy, a fantasy set in the afterlife. The latter is more usually styled as Bangsian fantasy, named for John Kendricks Bangs who arguably codified or pioneered it as a modern fantasy subgenre – but often leads to confusion with its more conventional use for fiction or in this case fantasy published after an author’s death when I casually use the term posthumous fantasy elsewhere.

RATING: 5 STARS*****
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The map of Fantasyland in the book and also part of the satirical deconstruction of fantasy tropes. It may also look oddly familiar

(3) DIANA WYNNE JONES –

THE TOUGH GUIDE TO FANTASYLAND (1996)

Following on from Dungeons & Dragons and the Encyclopedia of Fantasy, this is the third of my top three or god-tier entries that are all effectively encyclopedic reference works for the genre of fantasy, whether informally as for the rulebooks of Dungeons & Dragons or formally as for the Encyclopedia of Fantasy. The Tough Guide to Fantasyland leans more to the formal reference work of the latter arranged in alphabetical order, but with a twist – its meta-fictional premise that it is a tour guide to “Fantasyland” as the generic setting of pretty much all fantasy. The creators of fantasy stories are the “Management” of Fantasyland and their stories are “tours” for their audiences, so the book is in the style of a tourist guidebook, albeit a fictional parodic one – hence the title, adapted from the popular Rough Guide series of tourist guidebooks at the time.

The end result is a Devil’s Dictionary deconstructing the tropes or cliches of the fantasy genre – such as entry on elves, which has lodged itself deep in my psyche ever since such that I have never quite been able to look at the elves in The Lord of the Rings the same way again.

“Elves appear to have deteriorated generally since the coming of humans. If you meet Elves, expect to have to listen for hours while they tell you about this – many Elves are great bores on the subject – and about what glories there were in ancient days. They will intersperse their account with nostalgic ditties (songs of aching beauty) and conclude by telling you how great numbers of Elves have become so wearied with the thinning of the old golden wonders that they have all departed, departed into the West. This is correct, provided you take it with the understanding that Elves do not say anything quite straight. Many Elves have indeed gone west, to Minnesota and thence to California, and finally to Arizona, where they have great fun wearing punk clothes and riding motorbikes”.

RATING: 5 STARS*****

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*

Creative Education 2008 hardcover edition cover art

(4) SHIRLEY JACKSON –

“THE LOTTERY” (1948)

Like the Awards named after her, Shirley Jackson is known for stories of psychological suspense, horror and dark fantasy, ever so subtly bubbling to the surface of our world. This is amply demonstrated by her most famous story “The Lottery”, and indeed, in her collection of stories, named for it – The Lottery and Other Stories. One might consider the nature of her stories as fantasy to be arguable, but as I said, the fantasy in her stories is a subtle intrusion into our world – maybe mundane, maybe magical. The Lottery and Other Stories bore the subtitle The Adventures of James Harris, for a recurring figure in the stories of that collection, who may or may not be supernatural – he certainly seems to be a daemon lover or Dionysian force, complete with his retinue of maenads (who can then take over people’s apartments by sheer force of persuasion).

As for “The Lottery”, it has an ambience of dark fantasy to it – set, it seems, in an alternative United States. One in which small American towns casually celebrate an annual festival in much the same way as any other annual event – a lottery which the winner does not seem eager for the prize (and indeed vociferously protests its unfairness), but which the townsfolk insists on giving to her. Because, you know, the crops and harvest depend on it. Cue the stones…or in the words of John Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn – “Who are these coming to the sacrifice?”

Of course, the story’s power is in its symbolism, resonant of so many images of the dark underbelly of American society, or the American Dream. After all, it doesn’t take too much to imagine something like the Lottery – perhaps not so blunt of course, but still, you know…

As newscaster Kent Brockman referred to it in an episode of The Simpsons, it is a chilling tale of social conformity – and not, much to Homer’s disappointment on checking it out of the library, a guide to winning the lottery.

RATING:
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Apparently, not one but two films were adapted from Leiber’s short story – one in 1967 and one in 1995, with this as the poster for the latter. I’ve never seen it so I don’t know if it’s any good or lives up to its blurb as the best horror film of the year. I suspect not.

(5) FRITZ LEIBER –

“THE GIRL WITH THE HUNGRY EYES” (1949)

Fritz Leiber rocked my fantasy world, as he did the world of literary fantasy in general, even if he is sadly overlooked in the genre now. I guess that’s the fate of most fantasy writers that aren’t the current thing or aren’t named Tolkien. There’s also Leiber’s love of cats, chess, and theater – which are all fun to see pop up in his stories like playing the fantasy nerd equivalent of a drinking game.

Anyway, there simply is too much Leiber to choose from for its influence on me or the genre. There’s his novels, of which the standout is The Big Time – an SF novel of time war, as in two sides fighting a mysterious cosmic war against each other across time and space by changing history on each other (or the Change War as they call it). It’s even more intriguing as much of the vast cosmic backstory is only dropped in hints or remains mysterious (even when Leiber set a few other stories in the same universe). Indeed, the entire novel is set in a kind of cosmic waystation (in the titular Big Time, outside Little Time or the space time of our universe constantly being changed by the war), once again evoking Leiber’s love of theater both in the story (as the waystation is for rest and relaxation) and for the story itself as it is easy to imagine it as a stageplay. It is strikingly multi-layered, as the story extends through time and space as a cosmic backdrop yet effectively takes place entirely within the one “room”, albeit a room somewhat like the Tardis.

However, it’s his stories that effectively made his reputation as well as his influence for me or the genre – stories that largely created or inspired at least two sub-genres of fantasy. There’s his most famous creations, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, an adventuring duo of unlikely heroes in the world of Newhon (or “no when” backwards) and the city of Lankhmar – defining many of the tropes of the so-called sword-and-sorcery or heroic fantasy subgenre. However, it is his short stories that largely created or inspired the genre of contemporary fantasy – that is, adapting fantary or horror tropes to the setting of our contemporary or modern world.

It was a close call for this entry with my runner-up story – “The Man Who Never Grew Young”. This story is not so much contemporary fantasy but a parable all of its own, although not unlike the time changing science fiction of The Big Time – the narrator lives in a world recognizably our own, but one in which history and time are now running in reverse, such that people do indeed grow younger, “born” into existence from the grave and ultimately going back to the womb before disappearing into time. Although as the title suggests, the narrator himself is mysteriously unaffected by this part of the time reversal – never growing younger although history is still going backwards all around him. I particularly like the hints, at least in my perception, that this has come about from some terrible weapon deployed in a war in the future – which has of course become the distant past to the narrator – such that time itself was broken and reversed.

However, I have to give this special mention entry to the story that has remained and resonated with me ever since I read it – which definitely is one of his stories of contemporary fantasy – and that is his modern vampire story with a twist, “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes”.

“She’s the smile that tricks you into throwing away your money and your life. She’s the eyes that lead you on and on, and then show you death. She’s the creature you give everything you’ve got and gives nothing in return. When you yearn towards her face on the billboards, remember that. She’s the lure. She’s the bait. She’s the Girl”.

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Promotional art for the Amazon Kindle edition

(6) JAMES BLISH –

BLACK EASTER / THE DAY AFTER JUDGEMENT (1968 / 1970)

Black Easter essentially reads like a joke – an arms dealer, a black magician and a priest walk into a bar…

Well, not quite a bar but the arms dealer does a deal with the black magician to release all the demons from Hell on Earth for a single night. The reason – partly for the lulz but mostly to drum up business for arms. The priest comes in due to a pact between white magicians (from the Vatican!) and black magicians to monitor each other – incredibly, the priest does not attempt to interfere with the deal but is simply there to ensure the black magician sticks to the rules of the pact.

It’s a slow burn – dare I say it, something of a shaggy dog joke, or is that shaggy God joke? – a short story premise expanded to novel or novella and mostly focused on the details of the black magic involved, but like any good joke it’s all set up for the punchline.

And that punchline is (spoiler alert) that they have unleashed the apocalypse on the world, except that God is dead and there is no power to return the demons to Hell. (One wonders why the demons didn’t break out on their own before if that was the case.)

The sequel novel doesn’t quite have the same wham effect for its punchline. The characters from the first novel as well as everyone else in general deal with hell let loose on Earth in – where else? – California and Las Vegas.

The punchline arises from the apparent premise that God may not be so dead after all as something seems to be restraining the force of Hell. The punchline, delivered with Miltonian effect by the Devil himself, is that something turns out to be Satan, who now has to assume the role of God – something he now realizes he never really wanted and so is undone by his own Pyrrhic victory.

It might seem a fantasy duology based on one or two theological punchlines (depending on whether you like the second as much as the first) but it has continued to endure as an influence on my imagination and psyche.

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Cover art of The Compleat Discworld Atlas, Doubleday UK 2025 edition

(7) TERRY PRATCHETT –
DISCWORLD (1983 – 2015)

*

Discworld needs little introduction to fans of fantasy – a literal flat-earth (hence its name) balanced on the back of four titanic elephants in turn on the back of the cosmic turtle, Great A’Tuin. This world is the setting for a fantasy comedy series (spanning over 40 books and a similar number of years) which is a parody or satire of virtually every trope within fantasy and many outside it, as well as virtually every major work of fantasy – from Lovecraft through Conan to Tolkien and even the bard himself, Shakespeare.

Books in the series follow different story threads or characters within it – with my favorite being those that follow the cowardly ‘wizard’ Rincewind, “a wizard with no skill, no wizardly qualifications, and no interest in heroics”, ever since his role as the protagonist in the first two books (escorting the naïve tourist Twoflower and his Luggage). Sprawling in some degree through most of the books is the city of Ankh-Morpork (and its City Watch, the protagonists of their own story arc or thread of books within the series) – a city clearly influenced by Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar, and like that city, a city which somehow survives despite itself.

*

RATING:
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

*

Collage of cover art of all twelve Nightside books published by Ace (and the editions I own)

(8) SIMON R. GREEN –

NIGHTSIDE (2003-2012)

“The Nightside. That square mile of Hell in the middle of the city, where it’s always three AM. Where you can walk beside myths and drink with monsters. Where nothing is what it seems and everything is possible.”

Simon R. Green is the author of one of my favorite of the ‘trenchcoat brigade’ of occult detectives following in the footsteps of Hellblazer’s John Constantine – John Taylor of the Nightside. The Nightside itself is an eldritch and extra-dimensional suburb of London, except of course that it is not so much a suburb as a hidden world inside London. And in it is all manner of beings, gods and eldritch abominations. As for John Taylor, he has a magical gift or ‘inner eye’ for finding anything, or would if it generally didn’t find him trouble first – or worse, allow trouble to find him.

What I particularly enjoy about the Green’s writing in general and the Nightside series in particular is that it has the tongue-in-cheek sensibility of writing in comics – indeed, the Nightside series often feels like a prose comic, particularly in its vivid characters with matching names or titles. Protagonist John Taylor is of course somewhat nondescript in his name, but then there’s his colleagues like Shotgun Suzie, Razor Eddie, Sinner (and Pretty Poison), Madman, Dead Boy and the Oblivion brothers. Not to mention antagonists or abominations like the Harrowing, the Lamentation and Kid Cthulhu.

The highpoint of the series is the first half of it, with its longer story arc through the individual books in which John Taylor confronts the mystery of his mother – a mystery which was best left unsolved, particularly as it involves his apparent destiny in ushering in the Apocalypse (and the source of the Harrowing which pursues him), a destiny even more disturbing because he has seen it for himself in the future…

Close runner-up is his standalone novel Shadow’s Fall, although it has a similar premise (and was ultimately interconnected with) the Night Side series – “a town, where legends, human and otherwise, go out to live their lives as belief in them dies” on the brink of apocalypse (or apocalypses)…

RATING:
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Cover art from Killing Pretty, seventh book in the series

(9) RICHARD KADREY –

SANDMAN SLIM (2009 – 2021)

How could I resist a hero – or anti-hero – named Stark? No simple revenant clawing his way out of the grave – James Stark or the titular Sandman Slim is a revenant who claws his way like a badass out of hell. Literally. The first book (and series) had me at hell – I have a soft spot for heroes back from the dead, or even better, gone to hell and back. Stark is a naturally talented magician (not wizard, because wizarding is for wimps like Harry Potter) in the secret magical underworld of Los Angeles and falls afoul of one of his colleagues, who sends him straight to hell, before stealing the keys to the universe to return to our world for revenge on those who dealt out his damnation. And that’s just where the first book starts!

The other books in the series up the ante even more – from hell coming to Los Angeles and Los Angeles going to hell…

The series might well be described as dark fantasy noir or occult detective fiction, sharply written with an engaging cast of characters, not least Sandman Slim himself (whom I can’t help but picture as author Richard Kadrey). If you read contemporary fantasy, you must read Sandman Slim. Where the hell is the screen adaptation?

RATING:
A-TIER (TOP TIER)

*

(10) JAMES LOVEGROVE –

PANTHEON (2009 – 2019)

“Watch closely, everyone. I’m going to show you how to kill a god”

That’s not from James Lovegrove’s Pantheon series – it’s from the film Princess Mononoke – but it captures much of the same spirit (heh).

The premise of his Pantheon series is straightforward – each is a standalone story with a human military or paramilitary protagonist reacting to or resisting one of the titular pantheons of gods (and goddesses) literally returning to the modern world to rule it. Note that standalone as each story features only one pantheon at a time – they don’t return in combination or all at once, although that would make an interesting premise of competing pantheons. Obviously the titular pantheon in the first book The Age of Ra is the Egyptian one – the series continues through The Age of Zeus, The Age of Odin, and so on.

The premise of these series particularly resonates with me because it reflects my own unwritten – and let’s face it, only partly baked – story ideas involving the same premise, both for single pantheons and multiple pantheons returning in combination. So kudos for Lovegrove for actually baking the cake and icing it – although I suppose there’s still room for competing pantheons.

It’s a similarly dark premise to David Brin’s Thor Meets Captain America (and even more so its sequel The Life Eaters) – hence why I also like those works as well. And it’s a somewhat parallel premise to that of a higher entry on this list.

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

*

Cover art of the First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant – I think from the 1996 Harper Voyager paperback editions but certainly the editions I own

(11) STEPHEN DONALDSON –

THE CHRONICLES OF THOMAS COVENANT (1977-2013)

The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant might seem a lot like The Lord of the Rings and indeed it is to a point. It has a similar fantasy secondary world – the Land instead of Middle Earth – menaced by a similar Dark Lord, Lord Foul the Despiser, who if anything is even darker than Sauron, as his name indicates. It even has a Ringbearer in its titular protagonist, albeit that ring is a mundane object in our own world – Covenant’s white gold wedding ring – but the ultimate ring of power in the Land.

At a certain point, however, the reader becomes aware that the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant is a profound deconstruction of The Lord of the Rings. Typically, that point is a plot point soon into the first book of the first trilogy, Lord Foul’s Bane, where Covenant is overwhelmed by the sensory overload of the Land and commits a crime that has consequences through the first trilogy. If not that point, it is typically a point in the second book of that first trilogy, The Illearth War, where the leader of the military forces against Lord Foul fails despite his best efforts and must resort to a self-sacrificial Pyrrhic victory.

Or that point may be the overarching nature of its titular protagonist – where The Lord of the Rings had three Christ-like heroic figures (Frodo, Gandalf, and Aragon), Thomas Covenant is the Land’s literal leper-messiah. Worse, because of his leprosy in our world, he has spent a lifetime of managing the disease to the effect of rigorous mental discipline that he cannot believe in the false hope of any magical cure or else he will succumb to the disease – his survival depends on such things as his habitual VSE or visual surveillance of extremities. Hence, when he finds himself transported to a world in which there is a magical cure, it goes against a lifetime of literally life-saving mental discipline and so he cannot believe in that world, becoming Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.

And yet after the deconstruction comes reconstruction, as the series ultimately returns to something like The Lord of the Rings after all – with the heroic resistance of the Land against Lord Foul and Covenant finding some balance between unbelief and doing the right thing, even in a dream, because as he himself says, Lord Foul laughs at lepers.

And between the deconstruction and the reconstruction falls the resonance – a resonance of phrase and fable that lodges in the psyche long after reading it and refuses to go away. Phrases such as Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Lord Foul the Despiser, and my personal favorite – the Ritual of Desecration, the original sin that almost destroyed the Land in the distant past.

RATING:

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

*

Cover 1995 Ace Books paperback edition – the edition I own

(12) SEAN STEWART –

RESURRECTION MAN TRILOGY (1995-2000)

Stephen King meets Ibsen. Trust me.” – Neal Stephenson.

Contemporary fantasy or magical realism in which magic comes bubbling back into our world as a wild and uncontrollable elemental force, coalescing as beings from the force of Jungian collective unconscious.

And it is very much Jungian collective unconscious, pointed out in exposition by way of a stand-up comedy routine (a device of exposition I have not encountered elsewhere) – as opposed to Freudian, although I would like to have seen a fantasy based on the elemental forces of magic bubbling out of our Freudian unconscious.

Admittedly, I found the world-building more intriguing than the actual story in Resurrection Man, which doles out that world-building in fragments and hints – a world “profoundly altered by WWII and the increasingly monstrous magic it unleashed’, first as golems from the camps and then as minotaurs from the American ghettoes. A world in which China is superpower – not through economics as in our world, but through geomancy or feng shui.

That world formed the setting for two other books by Stewart with more intriguing stories, Night Watch and the World Fantasy Award winning Galveston. In the latter, the Texan city has been isolated and divided by the flood of magic, literally into a normal ‘non-magical’ half, scraping and scavenging its living from the increasingly derelict remnants of science or technology, and Carnival, an endless magical Mardis Gras celebration.

His novel Mockingbird had a similar theme, but on a family rather than world scale.

Sadly, after this creative flurry of novels in the nineties and noughties, Stewart moved from writing novels to writing interactive fiction or games.

*

RATING:
B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

*

Cover Prometheus 2009 paperback edition

(13) MARK CHADBOURN –

THE AGE OF MISRULE (1999 – 2009)

The magic goes away…and the magic comes back.

Those two tropes – two of my favorites in fantasy – pretty much sum up the premise of this trilogy, or more precisely trilogy of trilogies with The Age of Misrule as the first trilogy (followed by The Dark Age as second trilogy and The Kingdom of the Serpent as third trilogy).

It’s not an analogy used by the books but the magic struck me as like the Ice Age we are still in, with the magic going away corresponding to the interglacial period on which the rise of human civilization depended – and precariously rests. Just as the return of Ice Age glaciation would threaten to overwhelm our civilization, so too with the return of magic in these books – except less threatening to do so than actually doing so.

Give or take just a little, the series matches up with the trope description for The Magic Comes Back in TV Tropes:

“The past was an exciting time to live in: Magic was real, mythological creatures roamed the Earth, and humans lived side by side with elves, dwarves, hobbits and the rest. Such a shame that it didn’t last and we’re stuck with plain, old boring mundane life. But wait, reports are coming in that something strange is happening all over the planet: Mysterious creatures thought only to exist in storybooks have been sighted in isolated areas and their numbers are increasing with each passing day. Some humans are starting to exhibit fantastical powers that science can’t explain…What’s going on? Why, the exact opposite of The Magic Goes Away. Maybe it completely disappeared at one point or maybe it didn’t exist at all. Regardless of the past situation, however, magic is back and, as a result, can often pave the way for an urban fantasy setting. If magic and science are inherently opposed then certain areas of civilization may revert to a primitive form.”

Yeah – you can check off almost all those points in Age of Misrule. In this case, the titular magic apocalypse is a fairy apocalypse. No, not fairies as in cute little gossamer-winged pixies like Tinkerbell. We’re talking the older fairies of British and Irish folklore – most aptly styled as the Fair Folk, itself a euphemism for things that would flay you and walk around in your skin. In fairness (heh), only one of the two warring groups of fairies – the Fomorians – is so extreme as to literally flay you and walk around in your skin. The other group, the Golden Ones or Tuatha de Danaan, aren’t as extreme – or least more indifferent to wanting to flay you and walk around in your skin.

Fortunately, one effect of the magic coming back is that there are humans who can use it to save the day – the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons.

“You can’t bring back the gods and demons of Celtic mythology without a few side-effects, though. Cue rolling blackouts, alien abductions, lycanthropes, spooky visitations, psychopathic goblins…”

RATING:

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

Cover 2000 Puffin paperback edition

(14) RICHARD HARLAND –

HEAVEN & EARTH TRILOGY (2000 – 2003)

Australian post-apocalyptic fantasy trilogy that combines two of my favorite fantasy tropes – a post-apocalyptic setting, particularly in its rarer fantasy version as opposed to the more common science fiction version, as well as the rage against the heavens or war on heaven trope. The latter is the source of the apocalypse.

The premise is straightforward. It turned out that space wasn’t the final frontier, but heaven was – as human technology turned to the exploration of the afterlife. So, like all frontiers, exploration led to invasion, as humanity’s celestial astronauts – psychonauts – trampled the sacred fields of Heaven.

Of course you know, that meant war – and it didn’t go too well for us. Eurasia is still burning – the Burning Continents – from the portions of Heavenly ether that fell on it from the Great Collapse, while much of north America is frozen under an angelic ice sheet.

And we’re still fighting the war against Heaven – except that by we, I only loosely mean humanity. Most of actual humanity that has survived the war, at least in Australia, have been reduced to so-called Residuals living in tribes. The war is waged by the possibly posthuman and certainly inhuman Humen, led by the technocratic Doctors, although they seem to use that title in the same sense supervillains do – or Doctor Josef Mengele, who seems to be invoked by the name of two Doctors who led the war against Heaven from South America.

The Residuals are nominally allies with the Humen against Heaven and its angels but are used more as cannon fodder – in perhaps the most literal way possible. All this changes when the titular young male Residual happens across a stray angel left behind after being wounded in battle…

As I said, it’s Australian post-apocalyptic fantasy – both in its setting, and perhaps not surprisingly given that setting, fantasy written by an Australian author (albeit originally from Britain). Forget Harry Potter – with Garth Nix in my top ten and Richard Harland in my special mentions, it seems all the best young adult fantasy is from Australia.

RATING:

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

Cover of Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey, first book of the Kushiel’s Legacy series, 2002 edition

(15) JACQUELINE CAREY –

KUSHIEL’S LEGACY (2001-2023)

Who can say no to literal s€xy French angels as courtesans? It’s a oui from me!

RATING:

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

Excerpt clip from the American Gods TV series adaptation

(16) NEVERWHERE & AMERICAN GODS

“So do you have mighty bacchanals in her honour? Do you drink blood wine under the full moon while scarlet candles burn in silver candle holders? Do you step naked into the sea foam chanting ecstatically to your nameless goddess while the waves lick at your legs like the tongues of a thousand leopards?”

I had quite the quandary with this entry, which I ultimately resolved by separating the art from the artist by effectively featuring the works anonymously, without reference to their author, as I can’t deny the enduring influence of these two works on me. Also, as I understand it, the author seems to have retired from writing, possibly due to the same reasons for which I separate the art and the artist. And in a sense, these two works exist independently of their author in other media. Indeed, a little like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Neverwhere began as a BBC TV series, albeit also written by the author. Apart from the novelization of it, it has also been adapted to nine issue comics series (written by Mike Carey) as well as a radio play, although I anticipate it’s unlikely to see further adaptations. American Gods has seen an adaptation as a TV series – I liked the first season, although it went in some very different directions from the book. The second season apparently fizzled with the departure of the showrunners for the first season, although it may have bounced back in its third and final season. The book has also had a sequel novel (or more precisely a novel set in the same world with the same premise) and two sequel short stories (that are indeed sequels to the book), as well as an adaptation as a series of comics.

Of the two, my favorite is American Gods and its premise is also more straightforward to explain. Essentially its premise is that all myths are true, to the extent that people believe in them. However, that is not as good as it might sound for the myths in question. Yes, all the old gods of all the people that came to America still continue to exist but eke out that existence on the dregs of whatever belief in them that remains, even if half (or completely) forgotten and even if only as symbol or metaphor. And if that wasn’t bad enough, they’re squaring off against the new gods, such as the god of Media, who are very much coked up to the eyeballs on belief in them. It also has one of my favorite protagonists of fantasy, Shadow Moon – who wants nothing more than to return to his wife and a job with his best friend after release from prison, but the gods have other plans for him. Literally.

Neverwhere has a similar premise, not quite all myths are true but that there is a magic – not unlike megapolisomancy in Fritz Leiber’s literal urban fantasy novel Our Lady of Darkness – formed from large cities and that takes shape in their magical underground equivalents, such as London Below. I particularly like how each city has its mystical Beast at its heart.

RATING:
X-TIER (WILD-TIER)

This but we’re doing it to both of them – indeed, there’s even the pun that the Sun of Man rose up in Heaven when we nuke it. The Son casts the Rebels out of Heaven – 1885 illustration by Gustave Dore for Milton’s Paradise Lost (public domain image)

(17) SALVATION WAR

Yes – it’s cheesy and never evolved past its raw first draft as a playful tongue-in-cheek thread on an online forum (hence the wild-tier special mention) but I still have a soft spot for it. After all, what’s not to love about humanity taking on both sides of the apocalypse, heaven and hell? And winning!

Sadly, it remains unedited and unpublished as an actual book as it should have been – and also unresolved, as only the first two parts of a trilogy (although the war on heaven at least reached its conclusion), as the author firstly faced issues with its publication and then passed away as he was working on the third part. That author, Stuart Slade, did publish another series The Big One as self-published books – the title referring to its opening premise of the United States nuking the crap out of Nazi Germany in 1947 after Britain made peace in 1940).

The premise of The Salvation War is simple. What is humanity to do when God abandons Earth in the apocalypse, declaring it and everyone on it forfeit to the forces of Hell? Well, what else but declare war on both Heaven and Hell – and to kick ass doing it!

RATING:
X-TIER (WILD TIER)

Screencap of Hookland account on Twitter

(18) HOOKLAND

Hookland is reminiscent of my top 10 entry for Night Vale, similarly an eldritch fantasy kitchen sink setting – but where Night Vale leans more to conspiracy theory and urban myth (as well as outright Lynchian surreal fantasy), Hookland leans more to English folklore, ghosts and the fair folk.

The key distinction – by which Hookland ranks as wild tier special mention rather than a top 10 entry as for Night Vale – is that where Night Vale has spread from its original podcast to books, Hookland remains in its original form as a ‘web original’ project on social media, primarily (at least for this reader) through the Hookland Guide Twitter profile (which dates back to 2014). Indeed – I yearn for books from Hookland, although it is perhaps apt that Hookland Guide is almost as elusive as Hookland itself, teased though gossamer strands and tantalizing threads on Twitter. I understand that it is a collaborative project, with its origin (and prime mover) in author David Southwell.

Another key distinction, albeit not to my fantasy rankings, is that where Night Vale is primarily narrated through the town’s community radio broadcaster, Hookland is narrated through a number of voices – dramatis personae teased out through threads across time, from witches to police detectives. Despite the consistency of narrator in Night Vale, Night Vale and Hookland – like the best fantasy or SF in general – doles out their mythos or world-building in doses, mostly hints and oblique references. For Hookland, however, these are in sore need – at least to this reader – of compilation in more formal reference, such as an encyclopedia or wiki, even as pages in Wikipedia or TV Tropes (from which it is sadly absent). The closest thing is the working map of Hookland posted

Despite Night Vale being an American desert town and Hookland an English county, both are similarly amorphous – not quite fixed in time and space, although remaining within the confines of their respective nations (albeit as quasi-independent entities), and dotted with distinctive landmarks.

As I said, Hookland leans more to English folklore, notably ghost and fair folk – but has many more elements in its fantasy kitchen sink setting, all the way to technofantasy or SF, such as the Hum, electricity pylons as latter day ley lines and mystic transcendence.

RATING:
X-TIER (WILD TIER)

Screencap Neoltitude account on Twitter

(19) NEOLTITUDE

Evocative magical realist short-form poetry or surreal fantasy micro-fiction on Twitter – wild tier special mention because I’m waiting for the book compilation.

Like haikus – but, you know, instead of the formal structure of three phrases and seventeen syllables, it’s a limit of 240 characters, as each tweet is its own embedded story.

I’ve encountered quite a bit of microfiction on Twitter but Neoltitude is the one to which I keep coming back. Of course, that’s because I follow them, so it would be more accurate to say they’re the one I stuck with or never left in the first place.

That’s because they’re good – always evocative, often haunting or beautiful images that burn themselves into your psyche. Much like the angels or gods that are their frequent subject.

And because they’re fun – leavened with wit and humor, often self-effacing. As in their Patreon –
“You can think of this like carbon offsets, only for making the world more confusing & surreal…Hi, I’m ｃｔｒｌ. I have written over 9000 short fiction tweets, which I estimate have cost me at LEAST several years of my life. In order to gain back some of this lost time, I am reaching out in desperation to you, kind reader. please, this is all I have”.

RATING:
X-TIER (WILD TIER)

Classic cover art by Boris Vallejo for Tarnsman of Gor – questionable book content but quintessential fantasy art!

(20) FANTASY ART

On the face of it, this may not appear to be my usual kinky entry I throw in among my wilder special mentions as my final or twentieth special mention – but it is, o yes, it is.

Fantasy art – the art illustrating subjects from cinematic or literary fantasy, whether as art of itself or book covers and film posters or promotional art.

You know the ones – the ones from about the 1970s onwards, particularly in the pulpier book covers. Conan books as well as comics, particularly in the archetypal Conan pose with leg cling – the leg cling of course being the scantily clad damsel clinging to the warrior’s leg.

And that reference to the Conan pose alone shows where the kink comes in – that fantasy art tends to default to pinup art, for both male and female subjects.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that – we’re talking Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo and Luis Royo among others.

Perhaps the pinnacle of fantasy pin-up cover art is for Gor – the book covers for the Gor series, the best of which was by Boris Vallejo. The books may be pure pulp in content – I’ve never read them, but I know the basic premise – but that content, which I understand to be increasingly of female bondage and submission as the series goes on, is perfect for for pinup fantasy art.

RATING:

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

Classic cover art by Boris Vallejo for Tarnsman of Gor – questionable book content but quintessential fantasy art!

(20) FANTASY ART

On the face of it, this may not appear to be my usual kinky entry I throw in among my wilder special mentions as my final or twentieth special mention – but it is, o yes, it is.

Fantasy art – the art illustrating subjects from cinematic or literary fantasy, whether as art of itself or book covers and film posters or promotional art.

You know the ones – the ones from about the 1970s onwards, particularly in the pulpier book covers. Conan books as well as comics, particularly in the archetypal Conan pose with leg cling – the leg cling of course being the scantily clad damsel clinging to the warrior’s leg.

And that reference to the Conan pose alone shows where the kink comes in – that fantasy art tends to default to pinup art, for both male and female subjects.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that – we’re talking Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo and Luis Royo among others.

Perhaps the pinnacle of fantasy pin-up cover art is for Gor – the book covers for the Gor series, the best of which was by Boris Vallejo. The books may be pure pulp in content – I’ve never read them, but I know the basic premise – but that content, which I understand to be increasingly of female bondage and submission as the series goes on, is perfect for for pinup fantasy art.

RATING:

X-TIER (WILD TIER)