The Great Reread Project Mark III - The Letter H

I elected to go with Jim Hines’ The Stepsister Scheme for my H reread.

The first published work I remember from Jim Hines was Jig the Goblin. It’s probably still the series for which he is best known, although that could now be his current Libriomancer series.

I decided to do something a little different with The Stepsister Scheme, it’s actually the first entry in a 4 volume Princess series. As earlier in the reread project I’d tried to read the whole series, even though the books were relatively self contained, and wound up with less than successful results (I even got rather tired of Alan Dean Foster’s Spellsinger series when I reread the whole thing a year or two ago, and that was even after I didn’t bother with the author’s inferior attempt to resurrect the series some years after the original was completed) with Jack L. Chalker’s Dancing Gods series and John DeChancie’s Castle series, yet only electing to read the first book of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files was the way to go, I came out of it still liking Harry Dresden, I thought I’d only reread the first book of the Princess series.

The Stepsister Scheme is an entry in the ever growing subgenre of fairy tale retellings or reimaginings. Hines’ is largely a comedic writer, so a lot of this is played for laughs. It centres on 3 famous fairy tale princesses: Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty (as Hines uses the Livio Basile version of Sleeping Beauty as his source, she is called Talia. In fact Cinderella is given the name of Danielle), and largely covers what took place following ‘happily ever after’. The main character is Cinderella and the stepsister of the title is one of hers attempting to take revenge for the events at the end of Cinderella, Snow and Talia aid and abet their fellow princess in her attempts to recover her prince (his name is Armand in this, and he’s such a peripheral character in the original stories that I don’t think he was ever given a first name before) from her wicked stepsister. Although the story features 3 of the best known and most loved Disney Princesses, Hines does not use the Disney versions of their stories. The cover and their adventures inside kind of put me in mind of the fairy tale princesses if they’d actually been reimagined as Charlie’s Angels, this is an image that is reinforced and grows in the following books (Hines also wrote: The Mermaid’s Madness based on The Little Mermaid legend, Red Hood’s Revenge – based on the Little Red Riding Hood story and The Snow Queen’s Shadow, which contains elements of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen).

I did like all of them when I first read them (the chase of Hansel and Gretel in the opening of one was a particular highlight), but decided to just read The Stepsister Scheme and leave it at that. So how did it go? Did the suck fairy visit? Yes and No. I enjoyed it for the most part, but found it rather uneven. I think the best way to tackle it is list some goods and some bads.

Good:

The image of the princesses as independent women in charge of their own destinies and able to look after themselves without relying on the male heroes

The pegasi (I love flying horses)

Fairytown was a lot of fun

Snow White (the narrative tends to sparkle whenever she enters it)

The action is well written

Cinderella’s use of animals to help her

Bad:

The character of Talia (I get that bad things happened to her, but she was a major downer for most of it and more obnoxious than tough)

The naming of Cinderella (I understand that in the context of both Hines’ story and the original legend, the name was intended as an insult, but Danielle just didn’t work for me)

There’s a bit of a reliance on someheretofor unknown magic, usually worked by Snow, to get the heroines out of a fix, it’s not total deus ex machina, but it comes close

The portrayal of most male characters as incompetent or stupid, quite often both (I know the book is all about girl power, but at times it goes a little far to try and hit the reader over the head with the message. I doubt a book that did the opposite published in today’s market would be well received, in fact it probably wouldn’t be published in the first place)

As I said the story was at times a little uneven and hard to swallow. It quite often veers from flights of fancy to a situation of high tension and it was hard for me as a reader to easily reconcile that.

So it balances out. Overall it was a solid entry in the reread project, but I is looking like being a strong entry, even if it’s fantasy credentials are extremely wonky.

Fantasy Authors and Books A - Z (G)

The cupboard was looking a bit bare early on. I could only find one real standout, but a think and a sane of the bookshelves gave me some inspiration, and here are the G authors. I think they cover a fairly varied range of topics, too.

Parke Godwin - January 28, 1929 - June 19, 2013. Not a lot of people really know about Parke Godwin, and in these days of high profile authors, he was very much the opposite. He wasn't just a writer, and had worked as a radio operator, research technician, an actor, an advertising man, a dishwasher and a maitre'd. Really the full gamut of jobs that often seem to be attributed to authors after they're published. He was active from the early 1970's, however the 1980's is when his career really took off. His short story The Fire When It Comes won the World Fantasy Award for novellas in 1982 and it was also nominated for the Hugo. He's best known for his reinterpretation of the Arthur legend in Firelord and Beloved Exile in the 1980's. The Last Rainbow is sometimes referred to as the 3rd volume of that series, but it's a separate novel about the Saint Patrick legend. The only thing it really has in common with the other 2 is the presence of the mythical Prydn. The Lovers: The Legend of Tristan and Yseult published in 1999 under the pseudonym of Kate Hawks is another of his novels to deal with the Arthurian mythos. He also had some success with versions of the Robin Hood legend in Sherwood and Robin and the King. He was the guest of honour at the 2011 World Fantasy Con. In 2012 he had problems with a declining short and long term memory and had to be placed under care. Parke Godwin passed away in 2013 at the age of 84.

It was a no contest when I had to think of my favourite Parke Godwin novel. Firelord won hands down. It's not only my favourite Godwin book, and my favourite Arthur book, it's one of my all time favourites. I often describe it as Arthur as he never was, but probably should have been. It reimagines Arthur as a Briton chieftain at the end of the Roman power in Britain. There's almost no mention of Merlin in it, and it reads as quite historically accurate, which I suspect it was in most parts. One exception is the Prydn, these were an invention of Godwin's. They seem to be what the people of the British Isles based their legends of the little folk on. The way Godwin writes about them, they're some sort of missing link, who have always inhabited the British Isles, even before anyone else settled them. They predate the Celts and the Romans. Morgana le Fay is Prydn, and at one point Arthur is one of her husbands, they practice polygamy, but only women are allowed to have multiple husbands. It's just such a wonderful epic story full of all that makes the Arthur legend such an enticing and exciting one. Godwin's take on things is different, but it's one that stays with the reader long after they close the book.

Further and related reading: Godwin has plenty on his catalogue, as well as his quasi historical epics there are science fictional works like Waiting for the Galactic Bus and it's two sequels (The Snake Oil Wars and The Snake Oil Variations), they're more satirical than anything, and rather like the works of Douglas Adams (Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy) use humour to poke fun at modern American pop culture. The second of the Arthur novels (Beloved Exile) follows Guinevere after the fall of Arthur and details the end of the age of legend and the rise of the Angles and Saxons. While The Last Rainbow is also set in a very early Britain and is often thought to be part of the Firelord series, it isn't. It's about Saint Patrick of Ireland, and covers the years before he went to Ireland, and details his experiences with the Prydn. Godwin was also interested in the Robin Hood legend and wrote two books on that as well. He uses the name Robin Hood, but they take place just after William the Conqueror came to England, not during the reign of King John.

Arthurian fiction is almost a subgenre unto itself. It of course begins with Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory. That started and popularised the legend and everything else came after it. T.H White's The Once and Future King is one of the best known retellings, and it was some of that book that Disney adapted into their animated version The Sword and the Stone. The 1980's seemed to see a resurgence in Arthurian fiction and in that decade as well as Godwin's Firelord, there was Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, which retold the legend from a feminist perspective. Stephen Lawhead's Pendragon Cycle first came out in the 1980's, it was completed in the '90's. Popular historical novelist Bernard Cornwell wrote The Warlord Chronicles which are a mixture of historical fiction and Arthurian legend.  There's so much written and so much to choose from that it's an impossible task to list it all in one blog post.

William Goldman is better known as a screenwriter than a novelist, and not many of his films feature fantasy, but one very important entry does. He first achieved success in films with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which netted him his first Academy Award. He followed that up with the commercially successful The Hot Rock, The Stepford Wives and The Great Waldo Pepper, he then adapted The Marathon Man from his own novel and garnered another Academy Award for All The President's Men. A Bridge Too Far and Heat were also commercial successes, as was cult classic The Princess Bride, which was also adapted from his novel, and is far more different than The Marathon Man was from the source material. He had further success with Misery,  A Few Good Men (he consulted on that), Maverick, The Chamber and Good Will Hunting, which he also consulted on. As he's aged, he's slowed down, mostly working on works from Stephen King (he's been involved with at least 4 films made from works by Stephen King), and his last project was Wild Card, also based on his novel, in 2014.

There are more than a few people who don't realise that The Princess Bride was a novel before it was a film. It's a really clever idea from Goldman, and while the film itself breaks the 4th wall, the book takes meta to a whole new level. Goldman invented a different persona for himself as the author of the book. He gave himself a wife who was a psychiatrist (he was married for 30 years, but I don't think his wife was a psychiatrist) and a son (Goldman has two children, both daughters). He then invented a fairy tale written by someone called S. Morgenstern. He claims that his book is that fairy tale, but with all the boring bits removed. He went to great lengths to actually make this appear as real as possible, to the extent of inventing the mythical country of Florin, from which Morgenstern hailed, as well as the fictional Goldman's ancestors, which was how he got told the story in the first place. In anniversary editions of the book he claimed that he had wanted to adapt Morgenstern's sequel Buttercup's Baby, but was unable to do because the writer's estate had wanted Stephen King to write the adaptation (this may be a reference to Goldman's own success with adapting works written by Stephen King). The story itself is the classic fairytale and peopled with the characters that suit that story: the vengeful swordsman Inigo Montoya, the loyal, strong giant Fezzik, the beautiful, plucky, but distant princess, the lovelorn Wesley, who pulls double duty as the Dread Pirate Roberts, and the villains: Count Rugen, the six fingered man, who also killed Inigo's father, and the sneering Prince Humperdinck. It's just great fun and by reading the novel and seeing the film you get a more complete experience.

Further and related reading: Goldman only wrote two fantasy novels, but he does have other work in print aside from The Marathon Man. He got his start writing novels, his first book The Golden Temple came out in 1958 and it wasn't until the late 60's that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid launched him into the upper stratosphere as far as screenwriting went. Magic, which came out after  The Princess Bride (it was originally published in 1973) is horror. There was an unusual piece called The Silent Gondoliers in 1983, which is also written under the S. Morgenstern pseudonym, and it too is fantasy.

Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next novels break the 4th wall in the way that characters enter other works of fiction, not seeming to realise that they themselves are fictional. Jim Hines' Magic Ex Libris series also has characters pulling items from fiction, and he also references his own work by having his main character make a pet of the fire spider Smudge, who first appeared in the same author's Jig the Goblin series.

Kenneth Grahame - March 8, 1859 - July 6, 1932. You wouldn't think that a man who wrote one of the most loved and whimsical books for children of all time, would have spent most of his working life as a banker, but Kenneth Grahame did just that. By the time of his retirement in 1908, Grahame had spent all of his working life at the Bank of England, and he had risen through the ranks to become the institution's secretary. His retirement allowed him to pursue his real passion, which was writing. Even when at the bank he had contributed stories to various London periodicals. A number of the stories were collected and published in Pagan Papers, The Golden Age and Dream Days. Rather like Richard Adams and Watership Down, The Wind in the Willows began it's life as stories that Kenneth Grahame told to his young son, Alastair and it was actually the boy's headstrong nature that was transformed into many people's favourite amphibian, the reckless, boastful, wasteful idler Mr Toad. Unfortunately young Alastair was plagued by health problems throughout his life and committed suicide on a railway track while an undergraduate at Oxford (Grahame himself had wanted to attend Oxford, but financial pressures forced him to forgo this for his banking career). Grahame lived for 12 years after his son's death and will be forever remembered for the bedtime stories he told the boy.

There could be no other book than the much loved The Wind in the Willows. It's a lovely book, and you get that same sense of lazy summer days spent by the river, just enjoying life, when you read it. It's not all about that either, with the made adventures of Mr Toad and the confrontations between the wealthy amphibian and the band of villainous weasels that covet his wealth and lodgings in the sumptuous Toad Hall. It's a book about friendship and pastoral life. It pokes gentle fun at the society of the day and the people that inhabited it. It made timeless heroes of the likes of Ratty, Mole and Badger. A book to be read for the fun of reading.

Further and related reading: Grahame was not prolific and much of his short fiction before The Wind in the Willows really hasn't lived on. One possible exception is The Reluctant Dragon, which appeared in the Dream Days collection. Like The Wind in the Willows, it was also adapted into a film by Disney. I don't think I've seen the animated version, I can only hope they did it better justice than they did with The Wind in the Willows. In the 1990's William Horwood wrote a series of sequels. Horwood was already known for his Duncton Chronicles (Watership Down with moles) and other books featuring animal protagonists by that stage. 

Two novelists that are known for writing books that feature animals as the main characters, and ones that act and dress like people of the day are Beatrix Potter, and she predates Grahame by a few years, so may have proven to be an inspiration of sorts. The other author that springs to mind is Brian Jacques with his long running Redwall series of books. I also should mention Alan Dean Foster's Spellsinger series, although that takes place on a secondary world where animals are the dominant life form.

Ken Grimwood - February 27, 1944 - June 6, 2003. Ken Grimwood worked mostly in radio, while he wrote fiction on the side. He mostly edited news, but the success of his 1987 novel Replay allowed him to move into writing full time. Grimwood had 3 published novels under his belt by the time Replay broke through in 1987, it also won the World Fantasy Award in 1988, beating out some impressive competition, including Stephen King (Misery), previous winner John Crowley (Aegypt), Tim Powers (On Stranger Tides), Orson Scott Card (Seventh Son) and Clive Barker (Weaveworld). Grimwood continued to write after Replay, developing an interest in the environment. He unfortunately died of a heart attack at the tragically young age of 59, and was working on a sequel to Replay at the time of his death.

I'd actually passed Replay over on more than one occasion, it always looked like a science fiction book. The cover above is one of the best I could find. It's suffered from some truly horrible covers. It's a fantastic book. It's rather like Groundhog Day or even the time travel show Quantum Leap. The book's protagonist keeps dying at the age of 43, no matter what precautions he takes, and is doomed to restart his life 25 years earlier. He keeps trying to live it differently, to make a difference, to himself sometimes, to the world in others, and has just about given up when he meets a woman who has the same curse. It's not a normal novel, either about time travel or in terms of fantasy, but it is one that once you've started is hard to stop reading. The film rights were sold, and it's a great premise for one as TV shows like Quantum Leap and films like Groundhog Day and Back to the Future have proven, but it was never made, and as that all took place nearly 30 years ago, I think it's unlikely that it ever will.

Further and related reading: Ken Grimwood has 5 other books of note: Breakthrough,  Two Plus Two, Into the Deep, The Voice Outside and Elise. They're all different in terms of what they speak about and over the genres that they cover. Replay is the only genuine fantasy though. 

It's rather hard to recommend anything like it because I haven't ever read anything else that quite matches it. The idea behind the TV show Quantum Leap was similar, but that was straight science fiction. The 2nd Back to the Future Film could almost be accused of ripping it off, because the protagonist of Replay does on more than one occasion use his knowledge of future events to make himself a very wealthy man, although I think that instalment of Back to the Future probably owes more to It's a Wonderful Life than Grimwood's book. One that does spring to mind is Wesley Chu's science fiction The Lives of Tao, which gave me a rather Replay as I read.

That's it for the G's. I'm looking forward to the H's, because while I can only find one genuine contender it's one of my real favourites.

Favourite Fantasy Authors and Books A - Z (C)

C, yes we're at C already, where does the time go? I did the B's last week, so the C's follow them, because that's kind of how I roll and it makes everything much neater.

Contemporary fantasy author Jonathan Carroll gets us off to a start this week. The author has made his home in Austria since the 1970's, although most of his work seems to predominantly set in his homeland of USA. He made his debut in 1980 with The Land of Laughs, which seems to be his best known work and quite possibly the most commercially successful, although he is quite highly regarded, especially in Europe, and is regularly nominated for various literary awards. His work is rather hard to classify, although it seems to fit best into the contemporary fantasy (not to be confused with urban fantasy) category and this occasionally sees it shelved in the 'literature' section of the bookstores. He's written 17 novels as well as a number of short stories and has had those also published in collections. He was quite active and prolific during the 1980's and 90's, but has slowed down since that. His last published work was Bathing the Lion in 2014.

I'd picked up and put down The Land of Laughs a number of times before 100 Must-Read Fantasy Novels prompted me to give it a go. The covers did tend to attract me (although not the ones with the pit bull on them. I find that one of the most unattractive dog breeds there is), however what I read about it seemed to suggest that it had literary pretensions. 'Literature' and I get along about as well as science fiction and I do. I think I may be a philistine. The Land of Laughs surprised me. Initially it reads rather like Dead Poets Society crossed with some of John Irving's work, and then the dog speaks and everything else you read just goes out the window. The story largely follows the protagonist Thomas Abbey and his self proclaimed girlfriend Saxony Gardner as they research the famous children's author Marshall France for a biography they plan to write. The further they look into the reclusive author's life and origins, the more they realise that his books weren't just flights of fancy. Carroll wrote about France and his work so well, that I was almost prompted to find out if he was a real person and I was rather disappointed to realise that neither the author or his books had never existed in the real world. Reading about the author's life for this post actually made me wonder how much of the book was autobiographical in tone. There do seem to be some similarities between Thomas' upbringing and background and that of Jonathan Carroll himself.

Further and related reading: Jonathan Carroll has written a number of novels and short stories and from what I know about them they do explore a lot of the same themes and have similar tones to The Land of Laughs. As I said in the bit about the book itself the early part of it does remind me of John Irving, especially if John Irving wrote fantasy. A key part of The Land of Laughs is fictional concepts becoming real. That particular idea is quite evident in other works. I actually found that The Land of Laughs had a lot in common with Lev Grossman's The Magicians. The magical college of Brakebills reminded me a lot of the upper class preparatory school that Thomas taught at, although others have referred to Brakebills as Hogwarts university, and in The Magicians the main characters also visit the and of Fillory which was part of a children's series that they read, although Fillory is a fairly thinly disguised version of C.S Lewis' Narnia. William Goldman's The Princess Bride (the book as well as the film) also looks at a fictional work being presented as one that actually did exist, the conceit of the book being that it's an abridged version of an actual fairy tale written by the non existent author S. Morgenstern.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson - 27 January, 1832 - 14 January, 1898, or as the world better knows him Lewis Carroll. Lewis Carroll was one of those rare multi talented people. While best remembered for his writing he was also an extremely accomplished mathematician (in fact he spent most of his life teaching mathematics at Christ Church College in Oxford), he was also a logician (that's quite evident in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland), a keen photographer and an Anglican deacon.

He wrote a number of short works and poetry (it is in fact poetry that was first published under his now famous pen name) before Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1865, although he had been writing it for a number of years in various forms. The book started as stories that he used to tell the youngest daughter of a family friend; Alice Pleasance Liddell, and she is in fact the Alice at the heart of it (although Dodgson always denied that she was the only model for Alice). In 1871 he published a sequel Through The Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, it was somewhat darker, which reflected Carroll's view of life at the time, his father died in 1868, which plunged him into a depression that plagued him for years. In 1876 he published an epic nonsense poem called The Hunting of the Snark. He didn't publish for years after, but did attempt a comeback of sorts in 1895 with the two volume Sylvie and Bruno, the story of fairy siblings. It remained in print for many years, but is considered a lesser work.

Charles Dodgson or Lewis Carroll died in 1898 of pneumonia, which followed a bout of influenza. He is buried in Guildford at the Mount Cemetery.

When discussing Lewis Carroll in a list like this there can really only be one work and that is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It is probably one of the finest, if not THE finest, examples of nonsense literature ever produced, and it's lived on throughout the years. In both it and it's sequel it contains many logic and mathematical puzzles as well as social commentary, but aside from that it can be enjoyed by both children and adults alike as an enchanting story about the silliest, but strangely charming, world one could ever imagine. I read it first as a child and then again as an adult and every time I find something new and different to look at and it works on a different level for me. It's completely timeless and I don't think it will ever go out of fashion or lose it's popularity as it relates so well to nearly everyone that reads it, no matter their age.

Further and related reading: if you read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland than you must also read Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, if for no other reason than it contains the poems Jabberwocky and The Walrus and the Carpenter. There is of course also The Hunting of the Snark and Sylvie and Bruno. If you do intend to read the Alice stories then you absolutely have to get ones that are illustrated by John Tenniel, other illustrators have done it, but no one else quite captures the spirit of the stories and the characters in the way Tenniel did. It's been filmed on a number of occasions, the Disney animated version is best known, and while the artwork is quite stunning and a feast for the eyes, and they knew better than to mess around with the dialog it's really a bit of a mish mash of the two Alice books and doesn't make a lot of sense as one narrative. A lot of people did like Tim Burton's 2010 live action film version starring Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, I wasn't one of them. The less said about it, the better. Wonderland seems to be public domain, and any number of authors and advertisers have appropriated the idea and the characters. Alice and her many Wonderlandian friends can be found wandering about the various Disney theme parks on any given day. There's a chain of pancake restaurants here in Australia called The Pancake Parlour that use Alice and Wonderland to advertise. Some of the Wonderlandians, or rather their offspring, have found their way into the Mattel doll line of Ever After High, and novelist Shannon Hale made liberal use of the setting for her final book in the Ever After High trilogy (Wonderlandiful World). The real life model for Alice, was a key character in Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series, and Melanie Benjamin's fictional biography of the real Alice Pleasance Liddell, Alice, I Have Been. There's a never written 3rd Alice adventure featured on a bookshelf in one of the background scenes of Neil Gaiman's Sandman graphic novel, that may have been the artist's inspiration, but it is a very Gaiman type of thing to do. Tad Williams also had a Wonderland reality in his Otherland series. American writer and film producer Frank Beddor wrote a series called The Looking Glass Wars which is clearly inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice books, even lifting it's title from the second of them. I could go on listing books and authors that have been influenced by it all day, that's how important and influential a work it is.

Angela Carter - 7 May 1940 - 16 February 1992. Carter is best recognised as a magical realist. She was ranked 10th in The Times 2008 list of 50 greatest British writers since 1945.  Her first novel, Shadow Dance came out in 1966. I know her for a collection of reworked fairy tales, The Bloody Chamber, which appeared in 1979. Two of her fictional works were adapted for the screen, The Company of Wolves (1984) by Neil Jordan, which was based on two of the reworked stories in The Bloody Chamber and The Magic Toyshop (1987) based on her novel of the same name. The author was extensively involved in the film making process in both cases. Angela Carter died in 1992 at the age of 51 after developing lung cancer. At the time of her death she was working on a sequel to Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

The Bloody Chamber is a collection of short fiction. All the stories in it are reworkings of well known fairy tales. If anyone ever thought that fairy tales were only for children The Bloody Chamber should dispel that illusion. In most cases the clue to what story she's doing is in the title or clearly evident by the contents, but not all, as she quite often adds elements that many readers are unaware is even contained in the original story. For the record the stories are: The Bloody Chamber (Bluebeard),  The Courtship of Mr Lyon (Beauty and the Beast) the clue to that one is in the title. The idea of the Beast being rather leonine is far from new or unique, even Disney's version looked like a lion, The Tiger's Bride (another look at Beauty and the Beast),  Puss-in-Boots (Puss in Boots), Carter's intention here was to just have fun and write a genuinely comedic story, it's rather needed as the rest of the collection is rather bleak without a lot of what you could term happily ever after endings, The Erl King (the Erl King legends), the Erl King is a rather demonic sort of elf, he's not heard about much these days, but I was aware of him from a poem my mother knew, he was also in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer,  The Snow Child (there were a few influences, but it's most likely a rather obscure variant on the Snow White legend), nothing like Disney at all here, and you definitely don't want to tell this one to children, The Lady of the House of Love (I'd never actually heard of this, but it was apparently based on a radio play that Carter herself wrote called Vampirella), given it's origins it is unsurprisingly a vampire story,  The Werewolf (Little Red Riding Hood), a different look at the legend, which casts Little Red Riding Hood as the villain, The Company of Wolves (Little Red Riding Hood) Carter clearly had her favourites and Little Red Riding Hood is one of them, this is a closer adaptation of the original and it was later made as the film of the same name, the final story was Wolf-Alice (another variation of Little Red Riding Hood with references to Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There), it looks at a view of the world through the eyes of a feral child.

It's not easy reading for the most part, but it is well worth doing and it helps one to remember that most fairy tales have far deeper meaning and were not really intended as bedtime stories for children. In some ways The Bloody Chamber kick started the current fascination with variants on fairytales and is responsible for an ever growing sub genre.

Further and related reading: most of Carter's fiction (10 novels, 6 collections of short fiction of which The Bloody Chamber is one, and 5 children's books as well as screen plays, dramatic work and radio plays, Vampirella was one of those, as well as the articles she wrote in her capacity as a journalist) tends to concern itself with her feminist views and continually challenge the reader to see beneath the surface of the words on the page. Angela Carter isn't responsible for fairy tale retellings, but she did give it a healthy kick along. It's a virtual sub genre of it's own these days. Urban fantasy author Seanan McGuire had a good look at it in Indexing. Jim Hines gave the old fairy tales a new fun spin with his comedy series featuring 3 butt kicking fairytale princesses in his Princess quartet. The prolific Mercedes Lackey dabbles in it with her Elemental Masters and Fairy Tale series. The idea behind the graphic novel Fables by Bill Willingham is that fairy tales live among us, the TV shows Once Upon a Time, and Grimm to a lesser extent, work off the same basic premise. The Ever After High books based on the line of dolls concern themselves with the offspring of various fairytale characters. One of the most Carterish entries is Sarah Pinborough's Fairy Tale series comprising Poison (Snow White) Charm (Cinderella) and Beauty (Sleeping Beauty), and all that really only scratches the surface on a sub genre that seems to continually growing. Of course you could also track down and read a collection of Grimm's and Perrault's originals.

Susanna Clarke was an overnight sensation that took about 10 years to happen. She first started work on Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell in 1993, but it was not published until 2004. The book became a huge sensation. It crossed boundaries and it seemed everyone bought it. It really kicked off when Clarke's now husband, but then writing teacher, Colin Greenland sent one of her short stories called The Ladies of Grace Adieu to his friend Neil Gaiman. Gaiman loved it and from there it found it's way to editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden. Clarke herself was unaware of this until Hayden called her and offered to publish the story in his anthology Starlight 1. The anthology won the World Fantasy Award for best anthology in 1997. Clarke continued to publish short fiction in various anthologies (Starlight 2 and 3) over the next few years and one of them Mr Simonelli, or the Fairy Widower was shortlisted for a World Fantasy Award in 2001. The massive Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell came out in 2004 and was an almost instant bestseller. In 2006 Clarke published a collection of stories set in a similar alternate world as her huge hit, called The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories. It was well received overall, but people did want something more substantial like Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. That was the last novel length work from Clarke. She says that she is working on a sort of sequel to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, but with 9 years since The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories, and over 10 since Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell I wouldn't hold my breath.

Given that Susanna Clarke has only published two books and one of them was a collection of short stories I didn't really have a lot to choose from. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell absolutely took the fantasy world by storm when it was published in 2004. It scooped the pool of fantasy awards in 2005 and it even won The Times Best Novel of the Year award. What made all this more stunning was that it was a  debut. This wasn't really repeated until last year when Anne Leckie's gender bending science fiction novel Ancillary Justice did much the same thing when it came to the genre awards.

I didn't really like Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell when I first read it and couldn't see what the fuss was all about. It took a second read for me to appreciate exactly what Susanna Clarke had done. The book still polarises readers between those who love it and those who simply don't get it.

It isn't that easy a book to love really. Mr Norrell is extremely unsympathetic as a central character and I didn't much like Jonathan Strange either to be totally honest, although he's easier to like than Norrell. What I loved about the book was this separate story that she had going on in the footnotes. Terry Pratchett is known and loved for his footnotes, but his are amusing little asides, Susanna Clarke's set out a history that never existed. The world that Strange and Norrell inhabit isn't just a Georgian England in which magic works, it actually makes sense that it does and there's an entire history which explains how it works and why it works and that it's history is very different from the one that we know and learn about. That's the real achievement of the book for me. It was something quite extraordinary that Susanna Clarke did there.

Further and related reading: it may be possible to find copies of the anthologies that Susanna Clarke contributed to when she was working on Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, but I don't think it would be easy. If you liked the debut then The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories may be up your alley. Alternate histories are a sub genre of their own, but there aren't many like Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. I can think of a couple of examples though. Naomi Novik's Temeraire series is close. It has way more action than Susanna Clarke's alternate history about magic, although it does share an era. Novik's twist on it is that dragons exist and they were instrumental in helping the British defeat Napoleon. It's been described as Patrick O'Brian with dragons. The characters do act and speak using the same faux Georgian that Clarke's characters do, so it's a bit Regency romance with dragons, too. Caroline Stevermer and Patricia C. Wrede wrote a trilogy called Cecelia and Kate, which is about two cousins who navigate their way through a British regency era where magic exists and they know all about it. The first of the books (Sorcery and Cecelia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot) was originally written in 1988 and republished in 2003, when it was followed by The Grand Tour or The Purloined Coronation Regalia in 2004 and The Mislaid Magician or Ten Years After in 2006. They took it a step further than Susanna Clarke and wrote the first book in an epistolary style. Where I found Susanna Clarke's faux Austenish style complete with misspellings a rather irritating gimmick, it seemed totally natural in the Stevermer Wrede collaboration. There's also Mary Robinette Kowal's Glamour series which is set in a Regency where magic works, they tend to be more a Regency romance in style than Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

Carlo Collodi - November 24, 1826 - October 26, 1890. Collodi's name isn't instantly recognisable, but his best known creation, a wooden puppet called Pinocchio is. Before turning his talents to children's literature, Carlo Collodi (his actual name was Carlo Lorenzini) had already gained some notoriety in Italy as one of the founders of the satirical newspaper Il Lampione. He published a number of books and sketches which were satirical and political in content, before his first children's work which was a translation of Perrault's French fairytales. The work that gave him enduring fame originally appeared as a serialisation in an Italian magazine for children and the author died in 1890 unaware of the fame that awaited his creation.

Pinocchio is the only one of Collodi's works that has any enduring fame. It's worth noting that the original book is very different to what a lot of people think of when the name is mentioned and that tends to be Walt Disney's 1940 animated version. The Pinocchio in the book is less likeable than Disney's version. The author was a Florentine and even now in Florence they're very proud of the long nosed marionette and various representations of him appear everywhere. Despite the differences from the Disney film I prefer the original. It has a magic and an edge that the cartoon simply didn't. There are no cute cats or goldfish and Jiminy isn't actually named, he's an actual cricket who can talk, but Pinocchio kills him fairly early on and his warnings about disobedience and hedonism help the wooden boy develop a conscience. The idea that there are unscrupulous characters like the Fox and the Cat lurking around every street corner to lead young boys astray is actually rather scary really. In Collodi's original Pinocchio was hanged at the end of the 15th chapter, but his publishers managed to convince him to introduce the blue or turquoise haired fairy to help him out. It's a reminder that even in the 19th century with all that had gone before people could still add to the pantheon of fairy tales.

Further and related reading: Pinocchio is a modern fairytale along with things like The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and The Wind in the Willows and deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as those classics. Nothing much else of Collodi's has survived, and it was very different in tone to this fairytale. The character has been used in all sorts of film and other media adaptations from Disney's 1940 film to the rather obnoxious versions in Shrek and Bill Willingham's Fables. I can't readily find anything else that is quite like Pinocchio, but in some ways it does share something with Mary Shelley's science fiction classic Frankenstein in that it's about something inanimate that is given life. Seanan McGuire explores the concept to a certain extent in her Velveteen books in which the titular character is a super hero whose power is animating toys like teddy bears, but they don't have free will in the way that Pinocchio did. The concept also appears in Pixar's Toy Story films as well as a great many stories by children's writers like Enid Blyton where the toys have a life of their own once the owners are asleep or out of the house.

So that's the C's. Next week we explore the D authors.

Favourite Fantasy Authors and Books A - Z (B)

Last week after doing the A's I promised you the B's, so here they are.

I'll kick it off with Clive Barker. Barker is better recognised as a horror author than a fantasy one, and even his best known fantasy works (Weaveworld and Imajica), tend to be more classified as dark fantasy. Clive Barker actually began his career as a film director in the 70's (something that he still dabbles in today) and only had his first book, collections of short horror stories published in The Books of Blood in the mid '80's. He followed that up with a number of novels, one of which; The Hellhound Heart, became the film Hellraiser (directed by Barker as he felt other screen adaptations of his work had not done them justice). At about the same time Hellraiser hit screens, he also published one of his best known works, Weaveworld. Barker is still writing and working in films, although most of his work in both mediums tends to be more horror than fantasy related, the novel Imajica is one notable exception.

Even in 1987 it was hard to find anything particularly unique or ground breaking in fantasy. That's what Weaveworld is, though. Once people realised it wasn't a horror novel, despite the author's reputation, it made it's way into the read lists of fantasy followers, it also got a fair bit of popularity as a mainstream novel. I haven't seen another story quite like it. It concerns the Seerkind, and how in their attempts to keep themselves and their people hidden from the non magical world which they called The Kingdom of the Cuckoo, they created a world called The Fugue, and wove it into a rug. An entire magical world contained within the weave of a hidden carpet. They're hiding from an avenging angel that they call The Scourge, who seeks to exterminate them. Two young people; Cal Mooney and Suzanna Parish, come in contact with the rug ,and are then drawn into a mad and dangerous adventure, both in and out of The Fugue, in which they are pursued by The Scourge, the ruthless sorceress Immacolata and the charismatic, but venal salesman Shadwell.

It's not just the idea, which is extraordinary, that sets Weaveworld apart from so many other works, but Barker's prose, which can be achingly beautiful and otherworldly all at the same time. His conception of faerie (which is really what The Fugue is), was so real, and at times I wondered if Barker was actually writing down a dream he'd had. It was fittingly nominated for the World Fantasy Award in 1988 (it lost out to Ken Grimwood's equally astonishing Replay, that must have been a very strong year), and was both a commercial and critical success.

Further and related reading: Clive Barker has a fairly extensive catalogue, although only Weaveworld, Imajica and possibly The Thief of Always (written for younger readers, but also intended to be cross generational in appeal), are fantasy, and even they contain as many horror elements as they do fantasy ones. The rest of his work is largely horror, and none of it relates to Weaveworld, which is a standalone novel. I can't think of anything else that contains a vision like Barker's of the world within the carpet. There is Terry Pratchett's The Carpet People, but that's about a race of people so small that their world is a carpet, not a people that wove their world into one. Raymond Feist's foray into dark fantasy produced Faerie Tale, which has a similar feel to Weaveworld at times, although it tends to remind me more of Stephen King. Tad Williams has a different look at a fairy world in his standalone The War of the Flowers, and C.S Lewis used a similar concept of entering a world other than our own through mundane objects like wardrobes and paintings in his Narnia series. It's also hard to go past Catherynne M. Valente's Fairyland books for brilliant prose and a mind bending vision.

L. Frank Baum (the L stands for Lyman) May 15, 1856 - May 6, 1919. Baum had a rather chequered career, working as a poultry farmer, operating a theater, storekeeper, journalist and salesman, before achieving immortality as the author of a much loved children's book in 1900 with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. He had published plenty during the years when he made his living other ways than writing, but only The Wonderful Wizard of Oz met with much commercial success. Following the success of his first Oz book, Baum went on to write 13 sequels. In addition to the Oz books, he also penned 9 fantasy novels and numerous other novels, short stories and scripts. While he had great success as a writer, Baum's real love was the theater, and even in his lifetime he made a number of attempts to expand Oz beyond the printed page. There was a modestly successful stage adaptation in the early 1900's, although a follow up based on Baum's book The Marvelous Land of Oz, titled The Woggle-Bug for the stage, flopped. A musical version of Ozma of Oz did well enough in Los Angeles, but he couldn't convince producers to try it in New York. The Patchwork Girl of Oz (one of Baum's favourites amongst his own work) was made into a silent film in 1914. At one point L. Frank Baum announced plans for an Oz amusement park (which would have made it one of the worlds first, if not the first, ever theme parks), but nothing ever came of it, and it may have been one of the author's flights of fancy. He started his own film production company in 1914, but it wasn't greatly successful or productive, although Baum didn't lose a lot on it as he didn't invest much of his own money, unlike other failed ventures such as The Fairylogue and Radio Plays. The failure of that, combined with the stress of running the company, transferring it's ownership to his son Frank Joslyn Baum, and the fact that at the time Oz seemed to have become box office poison, contributed to L. Frank's rather early death at the age of 65.

I'm not as enamoured of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as many other fans are. It is however an important book in the evolution of the genre. Baum's intention was to write an American fairytale, something for the modern age, and he accomplished that with Oz, which is indentifiably, unmistakably American and the inclusion of characters like the Scarecrow and especially the Tin Man stamp it as something of a new age. He wanted to remove the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy from the story, although he did still have to include a witch. It's a brisk tale and moves along well, unlike some others though I don't personally think it has that cross generational appeal, it doesn't hold up that well to me on a reread as an adult. The opener and it's sequels did achieve plenty of popularity when they were released, and they're wonderful tales for children, but I'm unsure if it and they would have endured if it were not for MGM's 1939 film. Oz does seem to hold a particular fascination for American authors in particular, and this can possibly be explained by the fact that it was a truly American fairytale.

Further and related reading: first of all there are Baum's 13 Oz sequels, as well as the 26 written after his death, mostly by Ruth Plumly Thompson, but also featuring contributions by John R. Neill (who illustrated many of Baum's Oz books),  Jack Snow, Rachel Cosgrove Payes, Eloise Jarvis McGraw and her daughter. Fantasy author Sherwood Smith also wrote 3 Oz books that are recognised by the L. Frank Baum Family Trust. Eric Shanower and Skottie Young have been producing lavishly illustrated graphic novel adaptations for Marvel Comics. I'd avoid Philip Jose Farmer's Barnstormer in Oz, it's written for adults, and Farmer tended to provide graphic descriptions of both sex and violence in many of his books (A Feast Unknown was originally published as erotica). There have been many screen adaptations of A Wonderful Wizard of Oz, best known are MGM's 1938 Judy Garland film, the animated Journey Back to Oz (1974), featuring the voice work of Judy Garland's daughter Liza Minelli, the all African American The Wiz, originally a stage musical and then a film, as well as the recent The Great and Powerful Oz. Gregory Maguire's Wicked (the story from the witches point of view) was also adapted into the highly successful stage musical of the same name, and there has been talk about a film, Maguire's also written 3 sequels (Son of a Witch, A Lion Among Men and Out of Oz). In 2013 John Joseph Adams edited the anthology Oz Reimagined, which contained Oz stories by writers like Seanan McGuire, Tad Williams and Jane Yolen among others. Williams' Otherland series had a computer generated world based on Oz as one of it's many simulations.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz isn't the first of the modern fairytales, nor was it the last. Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio and Lewis Carroll's Wonderland books predate it. J.R.R Tolkien's The Hobbit is very much a modern fairytale as is Alan Aldridge's The Gnole and Catherynne M. Valente's Fairyland books about the heartless young September.

Now when I say that the above picture is of Terry Brooks I can hear everyone groan. Bear with me, and I will explain why he's here. Brooks was a practicing attorney when The Sword of Shannara was published in 1977, while the book met with plenty of critical derision, many claiming that it was a shameless rip off of The Lord of the Rings, it achieved commercial success, and Brooks wrote two sequels, which were vastly different from the original, and therefore also quite different from The Lord of the Rings. Plenty of readers believe that the second Shannara book The Elfstones of Shannara was a far superior book to the first one. Once he had a trilogy under his belt, Terry Brooks moved into the world of comic fantasy and wrote a number of Landover books, he was also continuing to add to the Shannara canon while doing this. Since the publication of The Sword of Shannara, Brooks has covered that world from all angles, writing sequels and prequels. Despite the criticism he's received, he has remained a popular author, and has been doing that full time for many years, and he's even got new Shannara novels slated for release in 2015 and 2016. Every so often talk about a TV show based on the books pops up, and that's happened again with the success of HBO's Game of Thrones and Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit films, however nothing solid has ever come about. There used to be a very active fantasy discussion forum on Terry Brooks' website, but that's since wound up, he does however still maintain a presence at http://www.terrybrooks.net.

This was the one that started it all: The Sword of Shannara. It is often referred to as a Tolkien rip off and it's hard to argue that it's not highly derivative when you can find direct analogues to many of the characters, places and events in the book to The Lord of the Rings. However when it came out in 1977 if you wanted to read epic fantasy you had a choice of The Lord of the Rings...or The Lord of the Rings. I read The Sword of Shannara after The Lord of the Rings, and to be totally honest I had more fun with The Sword of Shannara. It wasn't that I didn't enjoy The Lord of the Rings, or that I couldn't see the similarities and I was probably reading it with the occasional 'I see what you did there' as I went, but as a fairly stock standard fantasy adventure The Sword of Shannara is a damned good read, put the negatives aside and just focus on the positives, and you'll have a good time. Also just to highlight a large difference, to the best of my knowledge The Lord of the Rings is not set on a post apocalyptic Earth, which The Sword of Shannara is. I'm one of those people who prefers The Sword of Shannara to the sequel, but then again that may be because Elfstones doesn't have Panamon Creel in it, and he was always my favourite character. The Sword of Shannara opened up the epic fantasy sub genre, it came out about the same time as Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series and paved the way for things like David Eddings' Belgariad and Raymond Feist's Magician, showed publishers there was a market for this sort of thing, and that turned epic fantasy from a very small niche to a thriving sub genre of it's own.

Further and related reading: there is of course Terry Brooks' many sequels and prequels, still coming out, as well as his non related Landover books, he's also written some non fiction (generally about writing as a craft), and did the novelisations of the films Hook and The Phantom Menace. Similar works to The Sword of Shannara? Well there is of course The Lord of the Rings, which inspired it. Talking about Tolkien rip offs, there's Dennis L. McKiernan's Mithgar series, which began life as a sequel to The Lord of the Rings. Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant, which made it's first appearance about the same time as The Sword of Shannara, I've never taken to the Thomas Covenant books, and I can't for the life of me understand why they escaped some of the same criticism levelled at Terry Brooks when they're every bit as derivative. Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorn is a little like a Tolkien homage, while managing to be fresh and original at the same time. Robert Jordan's massive Wheel of Time series is also another epic fantasy giant and also has the dystopian feel that Brooks mined in The Sword of Shannara, and later it's prequels.

Mikhail Bulgakov - May 15, 1891 - March 10, 1940. During his own lifetime Mikhail Bulgakov was best known as a dramatist. Prior to devoting his work to the theatre he trained as a doctor, and served in the Red Cross in that capacity during the First World War. He was badly injured twice and became addicted to morphine to kill the pain of his injuries. He quit the drug permanently in 1918, and later wrote a book (Morphine) about that period of his life. Following his work for the Red Cross on the front he went back to Russia, and in 1916 became the provincial physician to Smolensk province. He spent two years there and later wrote about the experience in A Country Doctor's Notebook (an adaptation of this was filmed in 2012 as A Young Doctor's Notebook, starring Daniel Radcliffe and John Hamm). He opened a private practice in his hometown of Kiev, and whilst there witnessed no fewer than ten coups. He was drafted into the army as a physician and found himself in the Northern Caucasus, he became ill with typhus and barely survived. This was where and when he started working as a journalist.

Following this illness he abandoned his career as a doctor and became a writer. Joseph Stalin developed a liking for his work (seeing one of his plays 15 times) and personally protected him and found him work, despite having banned some of his earlier plays. He attempted to emigrate a number of times, but permission was always refused on one ground or another. He began work on his most famous work The Master and Margarita in 1928, while continuing to work on other things, he kept a lot of his work hidden, because of repercussions and critical reception (rarely kind) and the bureaucracy that prevented nearly all of his plays from being staged, as well as the refusal to let him leave the Soviet Union, combined to make him strained and unhappy. He died in 1940, with the work for which he would become best known unpublished.

While Mikhail Bulgakov wrote a number of works that contained science fictional or fantastical elements it is for The Master and Margarita that he is best remembered. The book circulated in samizdat form for many years following the writer's death, but was not properly published until 1966 by his widow, who is believed to have been the model for the Margarita in the title. Bulgakov actually burned part of the manuscript and had to rewrite it from memory. It was written as a critique of Soviet society at the time Bulgakov wrote it and the literary establishment at whose hands he personally suffered. It's not really a linear novel, dealing with meetings between Satan and critics and poets debating the existence of Jesus Christ and the Devil. It has a human sized anthropomorphic gun toting cat (Behemoth) who is a favourite of those who read the book. There's also a marvellous description of a fantastical party. It has a story within in a story portraying the interrogation of Christ by Pilate and the crucifixion, this is the piece being written by the Master of the title. There is a reference in the book by the Master to the burning of the manuscript, so the Master is like a number of Bulgakov's main characters, semi autobiographical. It's one of the most original and fantastical books anyone can ever come across. It's also believed to be the inspiration behind the Rolling Stones hit Sympathy for the Devil.

Further and related reading: for a long time the only of Mikhail Bulgakov's works that was available in an English translation was The Master and Margarita, and even then you had to get a good translation. Now I believe that a number of his works, especially A Country Doctor's Notebook, can be found. They're very different to The Master and Margarita, though. I honestly haven't read anything else quite like it, although he has inspired a number of writers, most notably Mick Jagger for Sympathy for the Devil, and Salman Rushdie has admitted that it was an inspiration for The Satanic Verses.

My fifth and final of the B authors is Jim Butcher.  At the age of 25 Jim Butcher created Harry Dresden as an exercise for a writing class. I believe that story is published in the collection Side Jobs, and the character and idea is very rough when compared the more polished version for which the author has became famous. He wrote the first book of The Dresden Files, was lucky enough to find an agent who represented similar authors and work, and the rest as they say is history. Harry has since starred in 15 books, as well as the aforementioned Side Jobs, and all of them have made the NY Times list, generally at number 1. There was also a criminally short lived TV series starring Paul Blackthorn as the Chicago based Wizard for Hire. Butcher ranged outside of his genre of urban fantasy to produce the epic fantasy The Codex Alera, which was something he'd wanted to do as a kid, but was also connected to a bet he'd made with some fellow authors. He completed that in 6 books. The Dresden Files are ongoing, although the author has tried to cap it at about the 20 book mark, not sue if that's still the plan, though. There is a steampunk novel The Cinder Spire due out in 2015. He can be found on the web at http://jim-butcher.com and he also tweets as himself, Harry Dresden and Molly Carpenter (at one point Harry's apprentice).

I'm breaking one of my own rules here (what rules? There are no rules!) about including multiple books, or unfinished series, but I can kind of get away with it. The Dresden Files are all largely self contained, except for Changes, which was continued in Ghost Story, and while there is an overarching story, hence the author saying it will cap out at around book 20, they can mostly be read singly without necessarily having to have read what came before or after. However if you read one, you'll want to read more, because they are highly addictive. I can't really pick a favourite, so I'm putting the series as a whole here. It really did a lot to put urban fantasy on the map and make it more accessible and acceptable to readers, especially those who equate it with paranormal romance, which in a lot of cases is erotica with added vampires and werewolves. Over the course of the 15 books, Harry has battled with and against vampires, werewolves, shapeshifters, wizards, witches, fairies, pixies, police and mob bosses, that's just a sampling mind you. One book actually featured him riding the skeleton of a T-Rex. What they are is fun and adventurous, and in a world filled with morally ambiguous anti heroes, Harry is a guy that you're not ashamed to want to succeed, because while he does sometimes make the hard decision, he's always trying to do what is the right thing. In terms of style, its fairly utilitarian, it gets the job done without making a fuss, it's kind of Gandalf if he'd been written by Raymond Chandler.

Further and related reading: I mentioned Jim Butcher's other writing outside of The Dresden Files, with The Codex Alera and the upcoming The Cinder Spire, which I believe is also the first of a series.

Because The Dresden Files are urban fantasy and that's a thriving sub genre, readers are almost spoilt for choice. I originally came to The Dresden Files via Simon Green's Nightside series, which I liked, but wasn't mad about, and then other readers recommended The Dresden Files as being similar, but better. Green did 12 of those, and I tend to think they're more like Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere than The Dresden Files, but ymmv. Jim Butcher's original agent also represented Laurell K. Hamilton, and the early books of her Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series do bear some resemblance, Anita was a little like a female Harry, although after a few books they became more about sex than story, and now they seem to be a collection of who Anita's sleeping with held together by the thinnest of storylines. They've created a little sub genre of their own called Vampire Porn. Benedict Jacka's Alex Verus series is a little like a British version of Harry Dresden, he even cheekily references the series in the first book (Fated), only I found the protagonist fairly unlikeable, and he wasn't anywhere near as funny as the author seemed to think he was, and they were also very derivative, there's a fine line between being similar to and derivative, and Fated crossed it. Kevin Hearne has had some success with his Iron Druid series, about the 2,000 year old Atticus O'Sullivan, although after the first couple of books Atticus seems to mainly battle various pantheons of Gods, and his continual comedy monologue kills the tension and can become rather repetitive and unfunny after a while. The closest thing I can find to Harry is Seanan McGuire's October Daye stories, the first book was very similar in tone to The Dresden Files, while being something very different of it's own (no vampires or werewolves, the Cait Sidhe are kind of werecats, though), it just had that same faux hard boiled detective feel to it, the big difference between Toby and Harry is that Toby's half fae and spends most of her time investigating mysteries that involve the fae community of the San Francisco Bay Area. Mercedes Lackey's underrated and little known Diana Tregarde series is also something to consider if you want something like The Dresden Files, Diana refers to herself as a practicing witch, and she battles vampires, Gods and witches, there's only 3 books however, with no plans for more.

I've managed to cover dark fantasy, modern fairytales, epic fantasy and urban fantasy with those 5 authors. I wonder what the C's will bring.