I've been trying to find something to scratch the itch while waiting between George R.R. Martin's books.

the malazan series ain't it.

speaking of fantasy series, Peter Jackson decided he couldn't tell The Hobbit in 2 movies. It's now as epic as as The Lord of the Rings. Or it's his Satantango (a 7 hour movie about drunken poor people who dance, and based on a book only slightly longer than Tolkien's The Hobbit).

It'd be hard to go wrong with the Fafryd and Gray Mouser series of books by Fritz Lieber. As it's a classic of the genre, I won't be surprised if you've already had that pleasure though.

Isn't that comical though? I'm not a fan of funny fantasy.

Have you read Tad Williams or Joe Ambercrombie, MQ? I'm curious about them.

No, haven't read those, I'm not really deep into the field. Tolkien, Michael Moorcock, REH, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Lieber and a few others are as far as I've gone in the genre. Fafryd and the Gray Mouser stories do all have at least some comical element, although in many its very slight. Lieber was a clever writer, well thought of by peers like Harlan Ellison, but in no ways was he above word play for its own sake and the humor is usually on the wry side, I laughed out loud a couple times though!

I just started Gene Wolfe's New Sun tetralogy. Will probably move on to Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast afterwards.

Mervyn Peake is amazing, a real artist. Haven't read any of the others, except a little bit of Tad Williams, which as I recall was just functional genre-fantasy.

K

That was my suspicion about Williams, so thanks. The problem with this stuff is that mostly fanatics review or discuss the stuff, so it's hard to get a decent literary evaluation of it.

And I've read enough of Peake to see that he's an amazing writer.

Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn is another winner. I picked it up for 99 cents on a whim, expecting nothing because of the existence of the cheesy-looking animated adaptation, and was blown away by how surreal it was. It's pegged as YA, but it's more like a Carroll/Kafka hybrid than, I dunno, Rowling or whatnot. It has a very abstract, psychedelic quality, often reveling in nonsense without going completely off the rails, and is imbued with dark emotional undertones that feel tethered to or drawn from real life experiences, somehow. Chapter by chapter it just gets stranger and harder to predict, unraveling more like a sophisticated emotional exorcism than a playful fairytale. The writing, while not exactly disciplined, is often strikingly beautiful. And Beagle's loose, fluid, lyrical prose is a good counterpoint to the wonderfully overwrought, heavy, mossy stuff that Peake offers. I like Peake's tortured, plot-defying craftsmanship better (if I'm not mistaken, by the end of the Gormenghast trilogy, the titular character Titus Groan is still an infant), and his weird, almost Shel Silverstein-esque roster of oddball characters, but Beagle's work offers sadder, subtler echoes, cast off with skillful ease and grace. I know nothing about the writer, but I remember that LU struck me as the work of a sad man who had probably been through some very painful personal experiences. And not because of something trite like "the unicorn dies" or whatever; the whole fabric of the story vibrates with this cold, mature neutrality, and as with Peake, an absence of clear-cut heroes/villains.

K