Oh dear - I promised somebody I would read a Goodkind book (Wizard's First Rule) but after months of struggle I had to admit defeat, because I had still only managed about four chapters and the thought of reading any more of it made me almost cry with boredom.
Yes to Zonah on Pratchett and Diana Wyne Jones. Although Terry Pratchett is touted as a humorous writer he is so much more than that - at his best he is also both creepy and profound, with wonderfully good characterization.
For example, try this from "The Fifth Elephant" - Commander Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is talking to his dwarf forensic pathologist about the customs of the hard-line traditionalist dwarves in the quasi-Eastern European country Uberwald (Discworld dwarves are unisex so the term "knockerman" would include women as well).
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'…Tell me… those robes some of the dwarfs were wearing. I know they wear them on the surface so they're not polluted by the nasty sunlight, but why wear them down there?'
'It's traditional, sir. Er, they were worn by the… well, it's what you'd call the knockermen, sir.'
'What did they do?'
'Well, you know about firedamp? It's a gas you get in mines sometimes. It explodes.'
Vimes saw the images in his mind as Cheery explained…
The miners would clear the area, if they were lucky. And the knockerman would go in wearing layer after layer of chain-mail and leather, carrying his sack of wicker globes stuffed with rags and oil. And his long pole. And his slingshot.
Down in the mines, all alone, he'd hear the knockers. Agi Hammerthief and all the other things that made noises, deep under the earth. There could be no light, because light would mean sudden, roaring death. The knockerman would feel his way through the utter dark, far below the surface.
There was a type of cricket that lives in the mines. It chirruped loudly in the presence of firedamp. The knockerman would have one in a box, tied to his hat.
When it sang, a knockerman who was either very confident or extremely suicidal would step back, light the torch on the end of his pole and thrust it ahead of him. The more careful knockerman would step back rather more, and slingshot a ball of burning rags into the unseen death. Either way, he'd trust in his thick leather clothes to protect him from the worst of the blast.
Initially the dangerous trade did not run in families, because who'd marry a knockerman? They were dead dwarfs walking. But sometimes a young dwarf would ask to become one; his family would be proud, wave him goodbye, and then speak of him as if he was dead, because that made it easier.
Sometimes, though, knockermen came back. And the ones that survived went on to survive again, because surviving is a matter of practice. And sometimes they would talk a little of what they heard, all alone in the deep mines … the tap-tapping of dead dwarfs trying to get back into the world, the distant laughter of Agi Hammerthief, the heartbeat of the turtle that carried the world.
Knockermen became kings.
Vimes, listening with his mouth open, wondered why the hell it was that dwarfs believed they had no religion and no priests. Being a dwarf _was_ a religion. People went into the dark for the good of the clan, and heard things, and were changed, and came back to tell…
And then fifty years ago, a dwarf tinkering in Ankh-Morpork had found that if you put a simple fine mesh over your lantern flame it'd burn blue in the presence of the gas but wouldn't explode. It was a discovery of immense value to the good of dwarf-kind and, as so often happens with such discoveries, almost immediately led to a war.
'And afterwards there were two kinds of dwarf,' said Cheery sadly. 'There's the Copperheads, who all use the lamp and the patent gas exploder, and the Schmaltzburgers, who stick to the old ways. Of course we're all _dwarfs_,' she said, 'but relations are rather… strained.'
'I bet they are.'
'Oh, no, all dwarfs recognize the need for the Low King, it's just that…'
'… they don’t quite see why knockermen are still so powerful?'
'It's all very sad,' said Cheery. 'Did I tell you my brother Snorey went off to be a knockerman?'
'I don't think so.'
'He died in an explosion somewhere under Borogravia. But he was doing what he wanted to do.' After a moment she added, conscientiously, 'Well, up to the moment when the blast hit him. After that, I don't think so.'
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IMO the best Diana Wynne Jones novels are Fire and Hemlock - in which both you and the heroine spend much of the book unsure whether the fantasy element is real or just in her imagination - Hexwood, which is about time and memory and freedom and cruelty and is sad and complex and full of memorable characters; and The Homeward Bounders (in which human history turns out to be a rôle-playing game played out by sinister energy beings).
The best fantasy book I have ever read - quite possibly, the best book of any genre I have ever read - is an obscure book called The Blue Tree by Mary Fairclough. If you have to, sell your house to get hold of this book. I think it fell through the literary cracks because, being fantasy in the 50s, it got classed as a children's book and it really isn't. It's set against an unusual background - rural Persia at the time of the Crusades - and is the sort of book in which almost every line and scene is quotable and burns into the mind, without seeming at all contrived. I first read it 15 or 20 years ago and it's infested my head ever since.
Other favourites - of course The Last Unicorn by Peter S Beagle, which is another story in which everything is memorable and mythic without seeming at all artificial, and full of vivid characters and humour. This must have been one of the first mainstream fantasy novels which was fluid and fluent and domestic in scale rather than epic and formal, and is still one of the best.
Almost anything by 1950s children's fantasy author Nicholas Stuart Gray - creepy and witty by turns. The Seventh Swan is probably the best but they are nearly all good. It was Gray who was responsible for my favourite quote about matters psychic, viz.: "Them as believes nothing is seldom disappointed. But they do miss a lot of action."
The Face in the Frost by John Bellairs. Although the story revolves around a very obvious plot-coupon and is resolved by a plot-voucher, the setting is evocative, the horrors are highly original and the idea of making the main characters two garrulous old men is refreshing: that kind of comfortable, long-term male friendship is an area of human experience which is often overlooked these days. And the writing-style is delicate and transparent, like a watercolour (whereas so much fantasy reads like an overworked oil-painting).
A 1960s children's animal fantasy called An Edge of the Forest by Agnes Smith. This faded into obscurity because it was printed by a tatty little low-grade publisher but it really is a very well-written story and again, quite creepy. The heroine is a young black lamb whose mother has been killed by a dog, and because she had been told that death lived in the forest she asks every animal she meets there "Are you death?" and the question shames a young leopardess, likewise orphaned and black, out of eating her and into trying to protect her (this is not as farfetched as it sounds btw - there actually was a recent case of a lioness adopting an antelope calf). One of the things that most sticks in my mind is the snake whose blessing to all and sundry was "May your path be smooth and may you never disturb me." IMO it's on a level with Watership Down (another classic animal fantasy of course), though intentionally with slightly more of a "fairy-tale" feel.
Anything by Barbra Hambly, especially Magicians of Night, the second Sun-Cross book. Magic which feels real and hard-edged and not at all flowery or forsoothy; in this case combined with a lot of good historical research about the Occult Bureau of the SS.
Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorn quadrilogy (The Dragonbone Chair; The Stone of Farewell; To Green Angel Tower parts I and II). Williams takes what seems to be Tolkein's universe a thousand years later and on another continent, and in many respects does it better than Tolkein. In particular he is brilliant at conveying characters who are thoroughly alien and yet vividly individual within their alienness - whereas Tolkein's elves were all fairly uniform, generically elvish rather than individual. [But I found William's Otherland series, and Tailchaser's Song, rather boring.]
In SF - CJ Cherryth's five-book Chanur series. Political thrillers set in a vividly realized culture and technology, told through the eyes of a felinoid alien, they are perhaps the most physically evocative books I've ever read. They make you feel as if you are really living in that world and story, to the point where the first time I read them I realized I felt peculiar not to have fur. [It wasn't just me - I loaned them to a friend and she started growling at people.] Again the aliens are at once alien and individual, and the technology feels used and lived-in and as if it might actually work (or fail to work, in some cases).
And lastly, The Final Reflection by John Ford. This is a Star Trek genre novel about Klingon culture, and TV-derived genre novels tend to be pish: but this one intersects aired Trek only peripherally (being set about 50 years before Kirk et al) and deserves to be read simply as an interesting and original portrayal of an alien culture seen from the inside. It's full of subtle cultural touches which are not made explicit. For example Ford's Klingons are warlike and paranoid and regard humans as weak and trusting: yet the Klingon culture is so hung up on the idea of dividing the universe into what they see as warrior cultures (strong, good) and slave cultures (weak, bad) that they are actually quite naive in some ways. There's a little grey jelly-fishy race in it called the Will-All, which is short for "We are the people who shall control all possible realities," a name which would freak out most humans on principle: but because the Will-All are soft and grey and individually harmless, and just disintegrate and die if you try to torture them, the Klingons dismiss them as a slave race and beneath contempt. Klingon ships routinely capture the much more primitive Will-All ships and escort them home for research, and they assume that the fact that only about half these escort parties make it back to base is just coincidence. Reading between the lines it is clear that the Will-All are trawling for Klingons, setting up primitive ships as bait to catch much more advanced ones and then flogging Klingon technology and military secrets to the Klingons' enemies: but you have to work this out for yourself, because it's told from the Klingon viewpoint and *they* still haven't worked it out by the end of the book!
there are fantasy aspects to a lot of his works, obviously, but a few are outright fantasies.
