I’m not much of a fan of prose science fiction or fantasy. (My partner corners that geek market in our household.) More to my taste are books that approach those genres from an unusual direction.
Comedy is always a reliable point of entry for me. As I’ve mentioned before, I love the fantasy parodies of Terry Pratchett. Screwball comedy and great characters combine with smart parody of the fantasy genre and humanity in general. I’m particularly fond of any book in the series that features Death, which will sound really odd to anyone who hasn’t read any of the Discworld series. There are lots of them, but highlights in the series include Mort, Guards! Guards!, and Wyrd Sisters.
Christopher Moore borrows from a somewhat wider range of subject matter — vampires, Native American mythology, the Bible, ghosts, demons, etc. — but he has a similarly skewed perspective on the conventions of the fantasy novel. The best that I’ve read is probably Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal. (It’s sacrelicious!) Actually, looking through his bibliography, the only ones I haven’t read are Fluke, which my sister loved, and The Stupidest Angel, which just came out.
Gregory Maguire takes a somewhat more serious approach to his re-examinations of classic stories, and the results are usually lovely. Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister places the Cinderella story in a realistic and more layered context, making sharp observations about class and power along the way. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West sets out to redeem its title character, and damned if it doesn’t succeed. Maguire paints Oz as a hotbed of repression and political intrigue and green-skinned Elphaba as a principled outcast and agitator. Elphaba’s evolving relationship with beautiful, opportunistic Glinda is a treat. (I actually don’t recommend Maguire’s other works, Lost and Mirror Mirror, but Confessions and Wicked are both tremendously good.)
Time travel is one of my least favorite subjects for fiction, but I really love To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis. It slides past my distaste for its subject matter by cheerfully stomping all over it, punching up its baffling tendencies while lacing it with caustic social commentary. (Time travel is managed by the touchiest kind of government bureaucracy. Victorian England takes some loving swipes, too.) I keep meaning to try some of Willis’s other books.
There is one straightforward horror franchise that I do enjoy in a guilty pleasure kind of way. The books of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are generally trash, but they’re usually sly, readable trash. My favorite is Thunderhead, partly because of its setting (the American Southwest — in a cursed cliff dwelling, no less!) but mostly for its craven, quirky cast of characters. Still Life With Crows is another highlight of their output, filled with creepy, small-town secrets. Unless you have a very high tolerance for pseudo-mystical mumbo-jumbo, you really should avoid The Cabinet of Curiosities. Frequent Preston-Child protagonist FBI Agent Pendergast has a lot going for him, but he climbs right up his own ass in this outing and barely emerges alive.
At Polite Dissent, Dr. Scott talks about some of his favorite historical novels. And tomorrow, Book Week wheezes to a halt with an entirely random “authors I really, really like” wrap-up. What was I thinking when I started this? I’ll just blame Ed.