The best witty, weird, and wild rides in fantasy fiction

I stumbled on a used paperback copy of Martha Wells’ first book shortly after it came out in 1993. I was hooked on page one, which begins with a group of musketeers breaking into the home of a foreign sorcerer. From the moment of our main protagonist’s second line, “The point of it is to go and be killed where you’re told,” I knew I was going to adore this book.

The witty: Basically, everything from the banter to the convoluted court politics. The weird: brilliant use of magic that runs from wallpaper that tries to murder our heroes to one of the best faerie castles ever written and beyond. The wild: Constant action filled with double crosses, family drama of the murderous sort, and affairs of state and the more sordid kind. In recent years, Martha has received well-deserved attention for her Murderbot works, and I am incredibly happy to see a writer whose work I have loved from the first minutes I started reading it getting her just rewards. 

As a general rule, I don’t like time-travel novels, but I love this one. In Anubis Gates, Tim creates a perfect looping paradox in which our literary historian protagonist finds himself traveling back to the period of his expertise and discovering that every critical beat of his subject matter is both exactly as he learned it and a complete surprise that could only have happened through his own direct intervention.

Talking plot would spoil a beautiful and perfectly constructed puzzle full of mystery and revelation. Tim is a master of interweaving actual historical research with the fantastic, illuminating and personalizing the former while rendering the latter unreasonably plausible. Tim’s writing is always beautiful and clever, and that shows in both the prose and the clockwork precision of the plot.

Weird touches every paragraph of this book from the stilt-walking evil harlequin, Horabin, through the spoon-size boys in their eggshell fleet, and on to the true identity of the poet who supplies the central mystery. The wild runs deep and rich as the story takes broken, thwarted characters and transforms them into what they were always meant to be.

Nina is an absolute master of making things weird in ways that feel utterly natural to the world she’s writing. This starts on page one with ghosts hassling a school janitor about the impending death of two more students, and it never gets one bit less strange.

This is a book about living as an outcast, toxic family, homecoming, found family, and how sudden and unexpected love can be. On the wild side, it’s also about shapechangers, spellcasters of several varieties, ghosts, spirits, the Walking Dead, flying cars, and so much more. Every page is packed with magic, meaning, and the gentle wit that marks all of Nina’s work. If you haven’t read anything of hers, you’re missing out on one of the subtler masters of the genre, and I would recommend this as a great place to start.

When I read this at 17, I bounced off it, surprising since I'd loved every previous Zelazny. It wasn’t until a reread in my thirties that it finally clicked, becoming a favorite book by a favorite author. In retrospect, I didn’t yet have the depth of experience to see beneath the surface simplicity to the brilliantly conceived complexity visible to the reader with a bit more knowledge and breadth of literary background.

Wit shines on every page, from dialogue to description to an offbeat chapter-a-day structure highlighting each night in a most singular October.

The wild includes plenty of murder and mayhem as a cast of sorcerers that includes Dracula, Rasputin, and Burke & Hare are all colliding in a struggle for the power to shape the world through the once-a-century Lonesome October.

The weird stretches from the story of a most sympathetic serial killer to the way it's told through the eyes of the familiars with a charming talking dog centering the action and adds in cameo appearances by Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Frankenstein. 

I read this straight through the day I found it, staying up way past my 13-year-old bedtime. The next day I sweet-talked my grandmother into taking me back to the bookstore to get the sequels. Morgon is an unlikely hero, gentle, practical, a farmer, and a master of riddles…wait a second.

Maybe he’s not so unlikely after all. The book begins with a family argument about the crown under his bed. It turns out Morgon won it in a murderous riddle game with a dead king. He's a man who can't stop asking questions and seeking the answers, no matter the cost, and that very bad habit leads him across the realm in a wild and deadly game of riddles against unknown and ancient enemies. McKillip's prose is witty and beautiful, and so is this book.