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

(14) 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:

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

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

(13) 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)

Cover 1995 Ace Books paperback edition – the edition I own

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

(12) 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)

Promotional art for the Amazon Kindle edition

(11) 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:

B-TIER (HIGH 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 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)

*

(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:

X-TIER (TOP TIER)