iiit's . . . showtime!
Let's see if I can really finish all this today.
Christopher Morley was a major literary figure in the earlier part of the twentieth century (and the founder of The Baker Street Irregulars); Morley wrote more than 100 books of essays, poetry, and novels, but our focus is on his two supremely charming fantasy novels
Where the Blue Begins and
Thunder on the Left.
Blue is a whimsical tale of the everyday modern world, except that there are no humans--it is dogs who commute from Connecticut to New York, who run the department stores (and do the shopping), and so on. The protagonist's search for the place Where the Blue Begins is a funny yet touching quest tale, with various (and wildly funny) wild misadventures along the way; but this is not a mere comic romp; funny as it is, it leaves one with some meaningful thoughts on Life, the Universe, and Everything. On the other hand,
Thunder is a thoroughly serious work: a nine-year-old, in a flash of magic, discovers, at novel length, what his adult life will be if he and his friends go on as they are; and he has to make hard, painful choices, along the way and at the end.
Manuel Mujica Lainez is better known in the Spanish-speaking world than the anglophone one, but translations of
The Wandering Unicorn, a soft, touching inquiry into the human condition as perceived through the eyes of the titular unicorn, is sheer pleasure.
John Myers Myers (yes, that's right: he was named for a forebear named "John Myers") wrote several fantasy things, but is today known almost exclusively for that unique romp,
Silverlock, which is not so much a novel as a wildly exuberant celebration of literature and imagination. The contemporary protagonist (A. Clarence Shandon) survives a shipwreck and washes up on the shores of a huge island, The Commonwealth. Well, it turns out to be (for us--Shandon never quite gets it) "the Commonwealth of letters", the community of all mankind's imaginative fictions. Shandon, dubbed "Silverlock" (for a silver streak in his dark hair), accompanied by his muse "Golias" (an amalgam of every bard there ever was) wanders and meets any number of famed characters and settings from literature: a large part of the book's perpetual appeal to readers is this sort of game, "Who was that?", that the book invites one to play. (NESFA Press issued the definitive edition, which includes a guide to who's who and what's what in the tale). This book ca, in the end, be summed with a single word:
fun. Myers followed some years later with
The Moon's Fire-Eating Daughter, something vaguely along the same lines; it has never been consider a success, but seems to remain around; I reckon it worth at least trying.
Edith Nesbit wrote what are classed "children's books", but most or all are what one would today call "bi-modal": they appeal on one level to children, but also have content more or less transparent to the kids that adults can enjoy. A particularly fine specimen is the little four-story collection (ok, ok, it's short stories)
Whereyouwanttogoto and Other Unlikely Tales, where the adult overlay is riotously satirical (picking on the established tropes of the traditional children's fairy tale).
"Flann O'Brien"--one of several pen names of Brian O'Nolan--is one of the great writers of modern times, and that does not mean genre fiction (indeed, he is rarely categorized as a writer of fantasies, though three of his five novels are, wildly so). Each exhibits a thoroughly bizarre contemporary world.
The Third Policeman follows the curious adventures of a murderer and his relations with two policemen; the whole thing seems a zany bit of madcap comedy, till the very end, when we meet the third policeman.
At Swim-Two-Birds, a struggling young author finds his struggles mightily increased by his characters, who take on lives of their own and fight back against his attempts to manage them. And in
The Dalkey Archive, we meet (among weird others) a James Joyce who didn't die when people think, and who now runs a pub in Dublin and loathes his own fiction. These are all three in the fantasy "must-read" category.
Cynthia Ozick is a well-known and respected mainstream writer whose novel
The Puttermesser Papers is a strung-together collection of stories that chronicle stages in the life of one Ruth Puttermesser (whose name, to her rueful dismay, means "butter knife"), a New Yorker whose adventures involve a lot of "magic realism", as when she becomes mayor and literally cleans up the town, or when she visits Paradise. Amusing, but also moving.
Mervyn Peake is another of the titans of classic fantasy, and no one interested in speculative fiction can afford to miss the "Titus" tales--usually mis-called the "Gormenghast" tales, and equally wrongly called a trilogy. Peake intended to chronicle the life of Titus from birth to death in a long series of novels, but was struck down by a deadly affliction after barely finishing the third. The first two tales (
Titus Groan and
Gormenghast) are set in the bizarre world of Gormenghast Castle, a self-contained place out of time and space, yet, in a curious way, quite in our world. It is sort of a fever-struck Charles Dickens world, populated by such characters as Dr. Prunesquallor or Swelter, the cook. The books do not have clear, simple plots: the entire thing seems an exercise in dense mood and characterization (though of rather alien characters). The third book,
Titus Alone takes Titus out of Gormenghast and into an equally strange but very different outer world, a science-fictional near future of sorts, but still populated with huger-than-life weird folk. Yet another "must do" fantasy.
Peake also produced a too-often-overlooked little gem,
Mr. Pye, set in modern times on the curious isle of
Sark, where the visiting Mr. Pye goes from angel to devil before learning the virtues of moderation. This is a nice, quiet, and charming little tale.
Edward Pearson seems totally sunk into oblivion: I can find no information whatever on him, and know of only this one book,
Chamiel, but it is a very nice book. In it, the angel Chamiel visits with a young boy and recounts to him, in a series of stories, the Biblical history, but in a very personal way, where Chamiel himself, as a youngster, participated in the events: the whole thing is put on a surprisingly "human" scale, with the heavenly denizens seeming much like ordinary people (and his presentation of God is also quite clever). Not eternal literature, but pleasing and well worth doing.
Josephine Pinckney was a major literary figure in between-wars-era America, but is now--like many literary figures from that era--almost totally forgotten. Her one fantasy was
Great Mischief, is set in 1895 Charleston, South Carolina (much of her fiction focussed on that region); Timothy Partridge, a bachelor pharmacist grown old and stuffy before his time one day gets a frantic customer, an attractive young woman, who turns out to be a witch from hell, and it goes from there. Pinckney writes in a nice, calm, even style, and the whole thing is a most pleasant read: not titanic, but pleasant, and--to me--that's quite enough.
Tim Powers is pretty well known, and needs little comment here. Just about anything by him s worth reading.
And the same, in excelsis, applies to Terry Pratchett, of whom I will only add that one shouldn't overlook his earlier non-Discworld fiction.
E. Hoffmann Price wrote a lot of bad pulp fiction in the 20s and 30s; but he was quite an Orientalist, and managed two charming tales, set in old China:
The Devil Wives of Li-Fong and
The Jade Enchantress. They each have a good flavor and interesting story line; they're not in anyone's hall of fame, but will definitely reward even the most scrupulous reader.
Herbert Read literally wrote the book (
English Prose Style) on writing fiction , so it is not surprising that his one own novel,
The Green Child, is a masterpiece (it shows up on almost every list of 100 greatest novels in English). It is a curious thing, being divided into three distinct (if of unequal length) parts: a prelude in England; a long block, not at all fantastic but fascinating, in which the protagonist, quite by accident (mistaken identity), ends up as the president of a revolutionary South American government; and the critical third part, in which he accompanies the titular Green Child into a bizarre underground world. The tale is an exploration of compared concepts of Utopia (the Latin nation's, and that of the green people), but I reckon its greatest merit is simply the wonderfully crystal-clear prose in which it is told: a classic demonstration that the best English prose is not purple but--as in the title of Jacque Barzun's book on the subject--
Simple & Direct. It doesn't get any better than this.
Matt Ruff is another well-enough-known author to need little comment here. I haven't yet gotten to his latest,
Bad Monkeys, but
The Fool on the Hill, his first novel, set at Cornel University and involving a wide cast of strange figures doing a wide variety of strange things, is both amusing and moving (you'll love the motorcycle gang getting its comeuppance).
Jessica Amanda Salmonson wrote three novels about Tomoe Gozen, a female samurai in "a Japan that never quite was"; they are not bloody-swords stuff but rather dense character studies, and richly rewarding reading. Have a care here: the book titled
Tomoe Gozen is to be avoided like the plague: it was a gross editorial cutting-up of what was later published in the "author's cut" version
The Disfavored Hero, which is what you want; the two subsequent volumes are
The Golden Naginata and
Thousand Shrine Warrior. Salmonson also produced a stand-alone bit of Orientalia,
Ou Lu Khen and the Beautiful Madwoman, vaguely reminiscent of Price's work mentioned above; it, too, is good reading.
Sharon Shinn is exasperating: she can write like a dream, but can also produce some real pot-boilers.
The Shape-Changer's Wife, one of her early novels (first?), is a bittersweet tale of an unfortunate woman tied to a brutal shape-change magician because he made her--from a tree. A passing young magician falls in love with her, and vows to take her from the shape-changer; but life is never that simple.
Thorne Smith is remembered today, if at all, for
Topper, and at that mainly from the derivative (and fairly awful) movie and TV show. Smith was a riotously funny writer, his tales and characters embodying the crazy, boozy high days of the Roaring Twenties. Most of the books are highly satiric about conventional morality, the protagonists and their associates continually discomfiting the staid conventionalists. All the books are hilarious, but I daresay the acme is the now-little-known
Rain in the Doorway, in which our hero steps back through a doorway and into another world; this is one of the very, very few works that manages to sound much like vintage R. A. Lafferty, and to the same effect. If you read only one Thorne Smith book, let it be that one. (But don't read only one: read them all.)
James Stephens was a thoroughly Irish writer. There is a deal of his stuff I still need to explore, but his best-known work,
The Crock of Gold, is a classic. It is a fully adult and whimsical yet serious tale of the proverbial "crock of gold" and the leprechauns to whom it belongs and a philosopher who obtains it. The whimsey is delightful, not at all saccharin; but there are also serious, life-altering journeys taken in the book, which offers a commentary on modern life, and indeed life in general. But even ignoring the profounder aspects, this is a thoroughly fun read.
Sean Stewart writes tales of a modern America in which magic is returning. Each--such as
Resurrection Man and
Galveston--shows three-dimensional human beings struggling to adapt their lives to the complex difficulties that the new world represents. The point, of course, is to use stress as a way to lay bare the essentials of human thought, emotions, and behavior, and Stewart does that excellent well. He also produced
Cloud's End, a somewhat different tale set on an imagined island of that name not really of this world and dealing with a young girl and her curious twin discovering and meeting their equally curious destinies; it is a poignant tale and recommended.
Paul Theroux is a well-known mainstream writer, but
Millroy the Magician is squarely fantastic. It is a strange exploration of the modern American soul, alternately funny and sad. Millroy, who really
is a magician, though at the outset he travels with a shabby carny, takes in a runaway 12-year-old girl, to whom he gives the name Jilly Farina: that changes both their lives. Millroy, stirred to action, takes his evangelical message--worship God by cleansing your bowels thoroughly (but the wonder is that it isn't funny to Millroy or to us)--to the nation, and rises to fame; ultimately, in a Christ-allegory, he is betrayed to the press (false accusations, of course) by some of his trusted acolytes, but Jilly Farina, whom Millroy has saved, in many ways and at many times, is finally able to in turn save him. This thing is humor, pathos, insight, and redemption: quite a combination.
Peter Tinniswood was a British humorist best known for writing zany radio comedies. But in this strange novel,
The Stirk of Stirk (one of the most offbeat you're likely to find)--he does a turn on the Arthurian-era sort of tale, only not with Arthur or any of those figures, but with Robin Hood (as a secondary character--the Stirk is the focus). It is hard to describe this thing: it is mock-serious, and beautifully works all the tropes of the 1200s sort of wonder tale--mysterious abbeys with magician-priests, encounters with forest bandits, the impossible landscapes--with precision. The especial wonder of the thing is that while it is mock-serious, it still contains and preserves a deep dignity: it does not savage or disdain the conventions it parodies, but rather shows them respect.
Michel Tournier's novel
The Four Wise Men tells us of travails and hopes of the forgotten fourth magus, but also provides fascinating imagined details of the three better-known pilgrims to Bethlehem. The tale is serious and thoughtful and rich in insights into human nature, but flows light and seamless and easy--a pleasure to read.
Of Jack Vance, what can one say? Of his work, that which best fits the OP's desiderata seems to me to be the Lyonesse Trilogy:
Suldrun's Garden,
The Green Pearl, and
Madouc.
Walter Wangerin Jr., a minister, is a prolific writer of rather jejune Christian propaganda books and light fiction, but in these two books he struck like lightning, for they are deep, harsh, strong medicine indeed. They are, of course, a Christian message of sorts, but that aspect is so submerged as to annoy no one: this is not partisan polemic, but rather a drilling down to the basics of a mythic examination of good and evil, of choice and free will and destiny. The tales are "animal tales", with no humans involved, just barnyard animals. They are not books in which all is sweetness and light by the closing page: as with, for example, Tolkien, the lesson is that choices have consequences, and in fights people get hurt, hurt bad. The duo comprises
The Book of the Dun Cow and the less-known sequel
The Book of Sorrows.
Sylvia Townsend Warner was another mainstream-popular writer of the earlier part of the last century (how strange that phrase, "the last century", seems!). She also produced three books with strong fantasy elements (one, not listed here, was short stories; another--her best-known of this lot--
Kingdoms of Elfin, is also stories, but inter-related ones, about, yes, the kingdoms of elfin as they are in the contemporary world. The tales are, at bottom, about human values and behavior, but transferred to fairies as a "distancing" tool. They are sedate, languorous reads, often wry but never savage. Meanwhile, the novel
Lolly Willowes is a feminist statement (don't run away), about a "useless" woman (unmarried, that is) who rusticates on a small income, but then decides to throw it up and join the Devil as a witch. The themes are handled in a thoroughly adult way, and as with Warner's other works are also wry, though at times a bit closer to savage (but, if one may so put it, a genteel savagery). Greatly entertaining and even thought-provoking.
Manly Wade Wellman famously told tall tales of the isolated backwoods mountain folk of Appalachia and their supernatural doings, focussing on a bardic protagonist known as Silver John the Balladeer (with his silver-stringed guitar). Some are much better than others, and none are classic literature. but all are good reads. In general, the earlier in the sequence, the better (the later ones seem less inspired than forced). There is some confusion on editions here: avoid the volume
Who Fears the Devil?, as the versions therein were editorially tampered with. Start with the classic
John the Balladeer and, if you like it, go on to
The Old Gods Waken,
After Dark,
The Lost and the Lurking,
The Hanging Stones, and [I[The Voice of the Mountain[/I]. Most of those are story collections, but I include them because they are linked.
T. H. White, best known for the Sword in the Stone cycle, also produced these small but polished gems:
The Elephant and the Kangaroo, in which an English writer, gone to Ireland for some quiet in which to write, has the archangel Gabriel tumble down his chimney one day to announce the coming of the next flood (much hilarity ensues, to put it mildly); and
Mistress Masham's Repose, in which a young English girl child finds, on a little island on her family estate, a colony of Lilliputians whose ancestors came over with Gulliver on his return from his famed travels, and has to protect them from the encroachments of modern civilization.
Tad Williams is best known for massive, complex multi-volume fantasy and science fiction series, but in
Caliban's Hour he tells a short, moving story of the Caliban of Shakespeare's
Tempest, come to England to take revenge on the daughter of Prospero; the tale is Caliban's explanations to her of why he is driven to seek such a revenge. (Does he then kill her? Read it and find out.)
Gary K. Wolf's
Who Censored Roger Rabbit? is vastly superior to the ghastly movie of similar title derived (vaguely) from it. It is a wonderful example of imagination run riot, and is a deal darker and more serious than the silly movie. It is
so{/i} patently absurd that we just discard our disbelief and settle in for the run. Again, like the noir fiction that it draws on, it is not a lightweight tale.
Finally (alphabetically) there is the prolific Roger Zelazny; of what the OP is looking for, the only Zelazny that seems to fit is A Night in the Lonesome October, a delicious romp, nominally serious, through the most famous legends of horror, from Jack the Ripper to Count Dracula, all set in contemporary times. Sheer fun.
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And dat's the twoof.
(Mind, all this--except the bare list of titles--is from memory alone; I could probably do better had I time to consult my notes and the original books themselves.)
