The best fantasy novels that give a poke in the tropes with a sharp wit

Good Omens hit me in stages. The first stage was that it’s fun and humorous, and then stage two was the build-up of crisp satire and merciless poking fun at people who deserve it, and then it got me with the delicious blend of perfectly drawn stereotype characters that have a life all of their own. I loved the jokes, the deceptively cheerful dark humour, the jaundiced view of bureaucracies and their inherent careless momentum. The book is a grand, defiant raised finger masquerading as a mild-mannered urban (OK, rural) fantasy.

Grunts is one of my ultimate laugh-out-loud books, followed by a look round to make sure there’s no one nearby I have to explain it to. It’s a tale of the orcs after the final battle between good and evil, out of a job and in the tricky position of being on the losing side. Grunts delights in turning every fantasy trope on its head, cracking jokes I certainly wouldn’t want to explain to my mother, and at every step rooting for undeniable bad guys who were just there to do the job of fighting for the Dark Lord.

Oh, and the orcs are cursed with a cache of weapons from our world that is turning them into US Marines. I don’t know why that makes it so much funnier, but it does.

Don’t embarrass yourself - remember to pee before you start reading.

The Eyre Affair introduces a world subtly more insane than ours. The first time I met it I took in the alternate Britain where the Crimean war is still going on after seventy years, cheese is illegal, and there’s a special police department to tackle fights between opposing Shakespeare and Bacon fans, that was enough absurdity to draw me in. After that it just took me down the helter-skelter and into the “bookworld” of Jane Eyre, where the characters stand ready to perform the moment a reader starts reading. It is Alice in Wonderland with the straightjacket off and not a syringe of sedative in sight.

The Eyre Affair hits all of my buttons at once, does a little jig, and then dares me to follow the next piece of wild and surreal invention to its extreme conclusion.

I picked this up, on a recommendation, without any particular expectation, and by the time I’d reached the first murder, presented through the snarky narration, I was hooked. As a premise, it sounds quite ordinary, Peter Grant is a young police officer about to be drawn in to the tiny department that looks after all things magical, but Ben Aaronovitch invited me into a world of surprises, invention, and thrills. I have worked for large companies and for the Civil Service, so the sharp observations of office politics and police “management speak” and its perception by the frontline officers felt very familiar. Of course I also feel entirely at home in his world of Newtonian magic, psychotic puppets, and squabbling river goddesses.

Go. Read. Enjoy.

How could I not love a book that sets its tone with “My name is Bond, Shaman Bond”? 

Bond, aka Eddie Drood, has all the latest magical gadgets to help suppress the forces of magical mayhem on behalf of the ancient and powerful Drood family (and yes there’s a pun there on Druid). This is what James Bond would have been if Ian Fleming had gone easy on the Martinis and tried a few magic mushrooms instead. 

The book, and in fact the whole series, is inventive, witty, and in places outright insane, with every book title a parody of a Bond book or film. 

(Also, Mr Green is a very nice man – we met him once over pizza at EasterCon several decades ago.)