What’s it about? (SPOILERS!) Victor Frankenstein goes to college to study science and medicine. He eventually discovers a formula and process for building a living being out of spare parts. But he finds his creation hideous and runs away from it. The creature wanders about the country, learning to speak and fend for itself, while […]
What’s it about? (SPOILERS!) The hero Beowulf sails to the great hall of Heorot where the people are being terrorized by the monster Grendel. After a some courtly conversation, boasting, and insults, Beowulf and his men go to sleep in the hall. Grendel attacks and Beowulf rips off his arm, leaving the monster to limp […]
Elric, rebel sorcerer and albino outcast, would-be emperor and reluctant servant of Chaos, continues his wayward journey across his strange world, trying to learn new virtues and ideas of justice before he returns home to take his rightful place on the Ruby Throne of Melnibone. While fleeing from enemies, he climbs aboard a foreign ship […]
Having conquered his upstart cousin and acquired the soul-devouring sword Stormbringer, young emperor Elric sets out to explore the world to learn wisdom and justice so he can transform his people from amoral decadents into virtuous paragons. But his journey does not start out well. This is the second book in the linear progress of […]
Elric of Melnibone is often introduced and discussed in contrast to Conan the Cimmerian, so I will bow to that most noble tradition now. Robert E. Howard‘s Conan is an American fantasy hero of great strength and courage, powerful mirth and brooding, who wanders the world in search of adventure and fortune, critical of decadent […]
I’ve always had a soft spot for eastern European folklore and mythology. I grew up on Norse and Greek myths, and later Egyptian and Celtic. But Slavic myths were harder to stumble upon (when I was young and you had to look in books at the library), so references to Baba Yaga and the original […]
This 2009 short novel by science fiction writer John Scalzi does a fair job of blurring genre lines. It’s about space ships and a galactic empire! But it’s also about living gods, faith, magic, and monsters. As a short book, the story gets in and out quickly, focusing on its Big Idea more than its […]
This series of short stories and fix-up novels by Jack Vance spanning the 1950s to 1980s is one of my favorite works of fantasy. It’s about morally gray characters just trying to survive, it’s about a dying world where people still need to get paid, it’s about extra-dimensional demons and fallen angels and tentacle monsters […]
This novel (and animated film) by Peter S. Beagle was written in 1968, and remains one of my favorite fantasy works, in part for its lyrical fairy tale language and for its piercingly honest and often sad journey into loneliness, aging, and regret. Are you excited to learn more? What’s it about? A unicorn living […]
This novel by Glen Cook was written in 1984, and from what I hear it was an influential fantasy book in that era, particularly as it uniquely combined a cast of low-fantasy anti-hero mercenaries with a high-fantasy world of magic and apocalypses. I don’t recall any of that because I was 5 at the time, […]