Cover 2012 Harper Collins (media tie-in) edition

(17) 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)

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

(16) 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 2000 Puffin paperback edition

(15) 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)

Amazon 2017 Kindle edition

(15) 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:

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

Cover Prometheus 2009 paperback edition

(14) 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 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)