10 Great Fantasy Stand Alone Novels (Part 2)

Legend by David Gemmell

Ok so now we’re getting into the territory of what one might consider “proper fantasy”. Gemmell in his day was the big don-dada of straight up two fisted action adventure fantasy. While he did not write long interconnected series many of his books share a universe with the others. This one, Legend is but the first in a whole series of the  world of the Drenai, who are a sort of western coded people (though not specifically Greek or Germanic or even Celtic) and takes place at a pivotal moment in their long resistance to the incursions of the Mongol-coded Nadir tribesmen (which thankfully manages to dodge a lot of the dodgy orientalist tropes that one can get what fantasy decides to dip into that tainted well for inspiration).

It’s the story of the siege of Dros Delnoch, that last outpost of the Drenai on their northern frontier holding the gap between two great mountain ranges, a choke point that the Nadir must overcome before then can pass into the lands of the Drenai and is told from the perspective of the defenders.

So far so very so very much what one might expect from a fantasy novel, its Helms Deep but a whole book. What makes it special is what Gemmel himself was bringing to it. By all accounts he was a very genial and kind man, but he was a big dude and while he cut his teeth writing as a stringer on the local beat in his home town of Hastings, he was also a bouncer and grew up around a lot of other big tough guys for whom violence was a normal part of their lives like his beloved step father Bill. There’s a lot in here about masculinity of the decidedly non toxic variety. Also, I was not aware of this the first time I read it but on hearing about it made perfect sense; when Gemmell was writing Legend he had had a cancer diagnosis and legitimately didn’t know if this was going to be the only novel he would ever get to write. It was essentially a form of therapy, the siege of the fortress was him resisting the threat of a potentially life ending illness. The characters in the book, particularly the titular Druss The Legend (based on his stepdad) were his imaginative actualisation of the fighting spirits of those people and the lessons they’d taught him over the course of his life deployed against the existential crisis he was facing down.

Luckily for us, he got over the cancer and though he would die relatively young at 58 of heart disease he would go on to give us some absolute bangers, Echoes of The Great Song, Dark Moon and my favourites the 4 part Rigante series, the first two of which are his take on the Arthurian mythos. So if you read and enjoy Legend there’s a whole body of work of admittedly variable but mostly high quality fantasy for you to get stuck into. But Legend is the best place to start. If you are only ever going to read one David Gemmell book this is very much the one.

Weaveworld by Clive Barker

When horror authors jump genre they tend to bring a certain flavour with them. This fantasy novel from
the horror author Clive Barker who created Hellraiser and whose shorts inspired Candyman and The Midnight Meat Train definitely have a lot in them that is of the macabre and horrific. It’s a portal fantasy about magical beings hiding in a world contained, as the title suggests within the warp and weft of an intricately patterned carpet. Set in the Liverpool of the 80s, the shadow of Thatcherism and the radical kick back against that in that city with the poll tax riots and a Trotskyist faction running the city council add a lot of grit and a profound sense of place and moment to the world building. Our protagonists are all decidedly working class heroes, one of the villains seems to be the embodiment of capital and another is a bitter old cop.

Barker has also never been one to shy away from the intersection between the horrific and the erotic and while used sparingly there are definitely some passages in this that are on the spicy side of things so be warned, this is not for kids or anyone who isn’t comfortable with that type of thing. You will likely squirm at one scene in particular, no spoilers but suffice to say that it’s a memorable depiction of the monstrous feminine specifically the mother aspect. What you should get out of this is again a really good story that rollicks along and keeps you guessing as it unfolds with some great flights of fancy and Barker’s elegant and evocative prose.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Clarke came right out of nowhere back in the early 00s with Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrell, a historical fantasy about rival magicians set in early 19^th century Britain. It was a darling of the critics and genre fans alike, one that both the literary world and genre fiction readers could really get behind, like a latter day Doris Lessing. If I had read it myself instead of just watching the apparently very accurate and faithful TV adaptation it might be on here, but I have not. I did read her long anticipated and much shorter though no less lauded follow up Piranesi which came out only a couple of years ago making this the most recent book on this list. Clarke unfortunately for everyone is a long term sufferer of CFS and only produces a book every decade or so, so it behoves us to appreciate them when she does, and appreciate it I did.

Piranesi is the journal of a man with a dodgy memory who finds himself in a huge Gormenghastian mansion which is half full of sea water and has its own tidal system referred to only as The House. As far as he’s aware, this is it, him and the mysterious and enigmatic figure referred to as The Other who shows up occasionally to speak to him are the only two living entities in the entire universe. The human remains of the dozen or so other people he finds around The House are the only other people that ever have existed. Without giving too much away, obviously we as the reader know that there’s something not quite right going on there, particularly as The Other makes to us what are clearly ominous references to places and things from the real world. It’s a short book and it gives up the goods in a nicely paced and well executed fashion so if any of that has you intrigued enough to look into getting a copy and having a look for yourself, you’re in for a treat.

Jerusalem by Alan Moore

Alan Moore is for my money the greatest living writer at least in the English language. After blazing a trail through the comics industry becoming the undisputed king of 80s/90s writers he, after a lot of provocation and bad deals took a sickner with that whole side of the cultural sphere and concentrated on writing fiction. 

His first novel Voice of The Fire was a psycho-geographical exploration of his home city from the first human settlers in that part of the world through to the present of 1997 when the books was written, which is essentially him writing in first person as he takes a walk around his neighbourhood. As great as that was, and indeed worth reading in its own right, it was but a taster for Jerusalem, in which he draws on local history, his own family history and such knowledge as he has gleaned from his own esoteric investigations (the man is a fully accredited practicing IRL wizard) he restates the case made in Voice of the Fire for Northampton city, and specifically his local district The Burroughs being not just the geographical centre of Britain but also of the world in general, indeed of life the universe and everything.

It’s a weighty tome, the longest book on this list by far and its not always an easy read. It is one which will sometimes require careful study to get your head around certain parts of it, especially the section where he’s in character as Lucia Joyce and goes full on Finnegan’s Wake with the prose (no one will blame you for skipping that section tbh), but it’s eminently readable and rewarding for those prepared to pull up their big boy smarty pants and make the effort. It is about a lot of things, the nature of time and reality itself. The Nietzschean notion of eternal recurrence, the degradation of life under what once were important and thriving urban centres by neoliberalism. Its about art and the necessity of making art, ever if its not something you’ll make a living off and its just for you (aka why I keep writing this fucking blog that nobody reads lol). It is rich, textured, funny as hell and if you’re in the right frame of mind for it may rewire your consciousness and cure your todesangst, if that’s a thing you’ve had to deal with in your life.

..........

And so we come to the last and by no means least book on this list. A few years ago I would 100% have had Coraline by Neil Gaiman on here and be talking about it right now but since all the stuff came out its just like nah. As much as the books themselves are all great and whatever weird shit he got up to in his private life very little of it ends up on the page, unlike other problematic authors, looking at You Marion Zimmerman Bradley (and yes I did read a pirated copy of The Mists of Avalon out of curiosity and after knowing what we know now about her, and fuck me as great as that book is in the abstract it is really hard going when you have the full context, genuinely uncomfortable and squicky the way horror fiction is meant to be and this was definitely not written as a horror novel). So yeah, Coraline, American Gods, Anansi Boys, Good Omens, which he did with Terry Pratchett are great stand alone fantasies and read them if you must but please for the love of god buy second hand, pirate or better still, shoplift a hard copy from your local non-independent big book chain retail store if you have to. Whatever it takes, just do not legally purchase a physical or digital copy because even if his numerous accusers are just money grabbing bitches who are exaggerating to fill their pockets (which funnily enough is exactly the same line taken by Rolf Harris about his accusers) if he only did the stuff that he’s admitted to himself, that cunt does not need nor deserve penny one of any residual sales from his work from now until the end of time. 

So with that out of the way, what to do? Like I do love Terry Pratchett and technically all his books in the Discworld series are stand alone but I’ve done a whole other long essay on here about him and his work which you can find here. The TL:DR being, if you’ve not read any of his stuff before, Small Gods, Guards Guards!, Wyrd Sisters or The Wee Free Men for younger and particularly female readers are all good.

Which brings us to someone who I am a massive fan of, haven’t written about on here before and at least to the best of my knowledge hasn’t fucked any of his twenty-something unpaid domestic servants and what I feel is the best jumping on point for him and his whole schtick

Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie

Joe, aka Lord Grimdark, writes much like David Gemmell, good straight up two fisted violent action adventure fantasy. For many people he’s the go to after they’ve read all the Game Of Thrones books. He, Like GRRM does morally dubious complex characters against a complicated and dark setting animated by a black humour (and he’s actually capable of finishing a series once he’s started so there’s that…). There are some horror elements and implied science behind the fiction so it's at least New Weird adjacent. I actually first heard of him through a hit piece by a highly strung traditional fantasy author kvetching about the turn away from fantasy with a firm Christian moral basis into the modern trend of nihilism. I can’t dig up the exact quote but it was something along the lines of: imagine if at then end of the Lord Of The Rings it turned out Gandalf was just as much of a dick as Sauron and only wanted the one ring destroyed so he could be the undisputed power in the land himself and Aragorn was just some useful dupe that he’d installed, to which my immediate response was That sounds dope as fuck, sign me up, and I have been on the Abercrombie train ever since, binging through everything he’d had out up to that point and reading every new book of his as they’ve released.

Joe writes in something like the traditional fantasy style, the main series set in the First Law universe is a trilogy, followed by three stand alone books set in other parts of the same shared world peripheral to the Union, the main setting of the first three, followed by a trilogy set a generation after and starring the children of some of the characters from the previous books and recurring characters from the stand-alones. As a fan and disciple of terry Pratchett he has purposefully written each book so that they really could stand alone and be read out of order, even the individual parts of the two trilogies, but probably better if you don’t tbh. No no, my recommendation is that if you just want to read one of these books to get a flavour of the world and see everything that Abercrombie can do as a writer go for the first of the three stand alone books Best Served Cold. Aside from a very light spoiler for some stuff at the end of the trilogy that doesn’t actually matter there’s nothing in here that’s going to take away from reading the previous books if you go back, hell one of the main POV characters from that trilogy shows up in one scene but its written delicately around it so you wouldn’t actually know unless you’ve read the previous books, but if you have it’s a lovely little Easter egg for you.

This is Abercrombie doing his take on the revenge thriller, it's his Count of Monte Christo or Kill Bill. It starts off our heroine(?) Monza Murcatto being defenestrated after seeing her twin brother murdered in front of her and left for dead by the Duke Orso for whom she’d been formerly employed as one of his top generals. She survives and gathers a rag tag bunch of misfits to seek her revenge, including a few characters you might have come across in the previous trilogy such as Caul Shivers, who shows up in basically every book in this setting aside from the first one and goes through one of the wildest character arcs in genre fiction, with this being the one he’s in the most and has his most pivotal moments. It also has fan favourite Nicomo Cosca, another memorable and well written character who runs the gamut from anti-hero, to hero to primary villain-antagonist in another of the books, though in this one he’s on the side of our main characters and very much on the hero part of that arc.

It’s a great meditation on the nature of revenge as what starts off as a righteous quest for vengeance gets increasingly murky as the collateral damage stacks up and Monza herself begins to doubt the validity of what she’s doing but also hammers home that once you start off on a certain path it can be very hard to get off.

This is Joe on absolute top form, the competence in his character work, world building and technical writing is off the scale. In the later part of the book there’s one of the most cleverly written sex scenes you’ll ever read, not just for the smut but for how he handles character perspectives. The action and battle sequences are characteristically visceral. There’s a great heist sequence. It’s just a good meal well served and you’re in the hands of a master.

And apparently there's talk of a film of this one in the works so if you want to get hipster points by getting in early and reading the novel so you can brag about it now's probably a good time :)

 

So there you go. If you’re looking to branch your reading into fantasy and don’t want to dive head first into a big chonky multi part book series that only starts getting really good 4 books in or whatever or may or may not at the time this is going out ever come to a conclusion, looking at you Patrick Rothfuss and GRRM, this should hopefully have given you something to chew on and possibly inspired you to take a peek at something listed above. I may or may not come back to this topic for there are indeed a few books of which I’m fond that would be considered stand alone fantasy that have been bubbling under and might have been in here if I’d read them more recently. Or I might do something about completed series / trilogies for people that liked A Song Of Ice and Fire and want something similar to get into while enduring the long and possibly unending wait for that next book. Lets just see where the mood takes me. Anyways, I hope you’ve enjoyed this, peace out and if you’ve read any of these and want to comment or especially if you’ve actually picked any of these up thanks to me do leave a comment or share, it would mean the world to me.

10 Great Fantasy Stand Alone Novels (part 1)

This is a thing I often see coming up on forums and Facebook groups dedicated to the fantasy genre. When one thinks of fantasy you tend to think of trilogies like the iconic Lord Of The Rings, big expansive series like The Wheel of Time, A Song Of Ice and Fire, Malazan The Book of The Fallen or even CS Lewis’s Narnia books which run to seven books. For people brought up on the genre who love it there’s nothing better than plugging your mind into someone else’s for an extended period of time, watching the world building unfold and getting nerdy about the lore. For many people though these big commitments are a little much of an ask, newer readers who might just be feeling their way into the genre, people who might not have as much reading time and many other people might just legitimately want a good stand alone book that can show off what the genre can do. 

So the question does often come up, and I’ve answered it enough times that I’ve settled on a list of ten solid rec’s that at least one of them should appeal to anyone who just wants a “one and done”. Some of these might be part of larger series or share universes and characters with other novels by the same author but are perfectly fine to read in isolation or out of sequence. I’m also going to give a short explanation of each, what people are looking for from a novel is going to vary so this is in the spirit of a fair heads up and much as why I rate them.

Some of these books are in my opinion among the best writing of any genre. They’ve ideas that will fire the imagination, prose writing comparable to the best of any literary fiction and some contain a sophisticated commentary on fantasy and the world in general.

So, in no particular order these are the first five:

 The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson.

This book is one cited by the noted fantasy author Michael Moorcock as Better Than Tolkien. In the context of the 60s when that statement was made, performatively dunking on the undisputed king of the genre was a spectator sport indulged in by the young revolutionaries working in the field who wanted to kick against the thing that very much defined the genre. It was a provocative statement then and will have many up in arms to this day, think Jonny Rotten’s “I Hate Pink Floyd” T.

But actually, the man has a point. Its interesting to compare with The Lord Of The Rings since they’re contemporaneous, the first editions of it and The Lord Of The Rings each dropping the same year, and they’re both original works of fantasy fiction that draw from the same well, the western European mythological canon and dark ages history. Whereas Tolkien takes inspiration from these works to create the complete world of Middle Earth with its own mythos, history, languages and even geology, what Anderson does is to read The Book of Invasions, Ulster Cycle, Mabinogion, Norse Mythology, the Sagas, Fairy Lore, The Tales of King Arthur etc. and treat them as a consistent and co existing Extended Universe and writes his own new story set at the end of the dark ages. As someone brought up on this stuff, to me it rings very authentic, it has the style, the feel and inhabits the morally ambiguous universe as the old pagan sources. Its also just a cracking read, much tighter than The Lord Of The Rings and many another which would try to imitate it.

It’s also of a certain historical significance in that it might be one of the earliest of the seminal genre works to be inspired by Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, we’re talking a good decade before Earthsea and two before Star Wars. I’m not quite sure if those were direct conscious influences or just convergence from working with similar resources along the same lines but if you are familiar with The Heros Journey, the idea of archetypes and specifically The Shadow Self from Jung you’ll see that in it.

So yes, if you’re getting into fantasy and have read and enjoyed Tolkien and looking something else that might scratch that itch, maybe give it a go and see if you come to the same conclusion as Moorcock and myself. Conversely if you have read Tolkien and maybe weren’t so fussed and would prefer something similar that’s a bit darker and spicier this could be something you’ll enjoy.

 

The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien

 This is some peak mid 20^th century Irish literary fantasy by one of the great unsung heroes of Irish literature. Flann, real name Brian Nolan, was a Dublin man who ran in the same literary and drinking circles as Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh. Though overshadowed by them in posterity in terms of the quality and brilliance of his writing he was very much their equal, arguably Joyce’s true heir. The problem is that he didn’t have such an expansive literary output, or not for his fiction anyway, as he was a journalist and wrote a daily column under the name Myles Na Gopaleen which took up most of his creative energies and was in all fairness one of the most popular and widely read in its day. He did leave us with a couple of short but excellent books and The Third Policeman is the one I would consider the most accessible. It’s a novella length story of a strange young man who is what we might today term a sociopathic incel that after plotting and carrying out a robbery with an associate finds himself in circumstances stranger than himself as he wanders into a distorted surreal version of the Irish countryside. Its kind of funny but also kind of horrifying. I’m not sure how appealing that sounds but I think the best way I could sell it is that it is beyond trippy, a fairy story for adults that will do things to your head you would normally need chemical assistance for, which is interesting since as far as we know O’Brien never indulged in anything more psycho active than the sup, which he was very into by all accounts. It counts amongst its fans Alan Moore and Blindboy Boatclub, the latter of who’s mother prays to the shade of O’Brien’s brother on his behalf for his continued literary success. It’s a short enough and quick enough read that I don’t want to give up the goods re the plot beyond what I have but lets just say that one of the most memorable sequences involves a dialectic of fractal infinity in the form of a series of little boxes each a perfect copy of the other and each fitting into the other perfectly until we reach the material limitations of the tools by which reality is perceived and manipulated. I mean if that alone isn’t appealing, I don’t know what to tell you.

 

Wizard Of the Pigeons by Megan Lindholm

This is an urban fantasy (and one of the seminal works that brought that subgenre into popularity) by the author who is much better known for writing epic high fantasy under her other pen name Robin Hobb. As Hobb she’s one of the big dogs of the modern fantasy genre along with George R R Martin, her Realm Of The Elderlings series in particular being one of the ones rec’d to people who liked ASOIAF and want something else to get stuck into, and its actually finished. This earlier work is as good as any of her better known stuff and has many of the qualities that make her epics great. She’s a great world builder and in this instance she captures her home city of Seattle of the early 80s.

If you’re familiar with the Terry Gilliam film The Fisher King you’ll be in familiar territory (like “very familiar” to the point where I’m surprised that no legal action was taken or even mooted) in that it’s an ambiguous fantasy whose phantasmagorical elements might just be the hallucinatory subjectivity of a psychotic unhoused person. The character writing is strong, the titular Wizard is a compelling and tragic figure who we feel and suffer along with as he uses his “cunning insight” (making him a true Wizard in the original sense of the word, a “Wise-ard” / wise man rather than someone in a pointy hat who can cast spells) to navigate the urban jungle much as you do with Hobb’s protagonists over the much longer stretches of her blockbuster series. There’s a strong anti-war subtext in that the wisdom the character has was hard won through being away to a traumatising war experience, a life hard lived ever since and deep connection to the psychogeography of the city.

 Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay

 Kay started his career in fantasy at the top as an associate of and worker for the Tolkien estate who would become with his own work one of those along with Tad Williams who would quietly revolutionise the genre in the 80s by bringing a critical and modernist sensibility into high fantasy. This particular story inspired by IRL cultural genocide (Kay cites Translations by Brien Friel, a play about the culture wars over the Irish language) it has one of the great central premises in the genre. An evil wizard – conqueror casts a spell to erase the name of an entire people from the collective cultural memory in a fit of pique after a particularly bloody act of defiance by them sees his son die in battle. Our heroes are essentially nationalist revolutionaries on a quest to rise the people in rebellion and break the spell so that the name of their country; ‘Tigana’, can be heard once again. You cannot tell me that if Bibi had wizard powers he wouldn’t be pulling this type of shit, like the Zionist lobby are doing essentially this with their insistence that “Palestine” was made up by the USSR in the 1960s. It’s a good rollicking fantasy yarn but this premise gives it thematic heft often lacking elsewhere in the genre. It is complex. Our “heroes” will sometimes do things that are of dubious ethicality for the cause, make great sacrifices of themselves or just fuck other people over. One of our POV characters becomes tragically enamoured with the antagonist, as some subjugated people do with their oppressors. Also, as someone who has studied modern history and was introduced to Carlo Ginzburg’s work in my 101 class at uni the bit where it segues into The Night Battles for a little bit was just *chef’s kiss*.

The Iron Dragon’s Daughter by Micheal Swannick

A human child called Jane is taken to the land of faerie. A changeling, she becomes a child slave labourer in a place that makes the titular Iron Dragons. She will escape and eventually pose as a student in the faerie high school, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the modern high school of the late 1980s, gets a bit into some bad habits, as you do at that age, sex, partying, shoplifting, you know, typical teenage stuff. She’ll even go beyond that to Faerie university to do STEM (Alchemy) all guided by the ineluctable and sinister force of the Iron Dragon. 

We’re into some very deep and for my money well executed 'fantasy as social-commentary' here along the lines of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. The Dragon factory is a shitty ununionized sweatshop, not unlike the “Special Economic Zones” in China or labour conditions in general in the tiger economies of South East Asia that were coming into greater public knowledge at the time, the high school beauty queen gets to be the top girl in her year before being Wickerman’d at homecoming, The Iron Dragon becomes the ambient corruption and environmental degradation innate to capitalist development, he has the local pixies doing their own Guerra Sucia at one point just so he can stock up on his fossil fuel reserves.

So this is clever stuff and as with the other books I’ve recommended, the clever world building is only there to add to and accentuate what is a cracking story and a good read. Taking Jane past the usual fantasy-bildungsroman trappings into adulthood is a nice touch, the relationship between Jane and the Dragon Melanchthon is one of the most interesting and memorable in literature. Its one I would be judicious in who I would recommend it to since it appears as a YA / kids book at first but really isn’t. What it is is extremely compelling and sometimes challenging, I don't want to give away the ending or anything but lets just say that there's a sequence late on which is reminiscent of the end of 2001 in being pointedly abstract and "trippy" in both the literal transportative sense and the other.

This book is also typically my answer to "if you could see any novel made into TV or a film what would it be". I would personally love to see it done with a load of animatronic puppets representing the faeries, like literally getting Jim Henson's creature workshop and Cosgrove Hall in on the production and shooting it on the sort of analogue video tapes they did all the latter's Narnia and The Borrowers adaptions to give it that '80s kids TV retro feel with only Jane and maybe the various incarnations of Testigus and the Baldwynn played by actual people. At least that's the way it comes through in my head when I'm reading it and maybe yours too if you think that sounds at all cool or interesting.

………………………………………

So that is all for the time being. The next one of these will include my favourite living author’s masterwork along with more of the best fantasy writing of modern times.