The Top 10 Faerie Novels of the Last 20 Years


(in my biased opinions)

Notable other novels:
Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon by Lisa Goldstein
King of Morning, Queen of Day by Ian McDonald
Faerie Tale by Raymond Feist
Finder by Emma Bull
Moonheart by Charles de Lint
The Folk of the Air by Peter Beagle

And for fun, The Godmother's Apprentice by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, which has this wonderful quote:

The Irish tend to regard fairies and Americans in much the same way--as foreign relations with strange ways of doing things that would be laughable if they weren't rather frightening. Both are treated with flattery and courtesy for the boons they have to offer and with fear and distrust for the harm they might do. It's also well known that if you disappear into the realm of either race you're like not to return or to be very changed and much older when you do.

One can imagine stories without rational cohesion and yet filled with associations, like dreams, and poems that are merely lovely sounding, full of beautiful words, but also without rational sense and connections--with, at the most, individual verses which are intelligible, like fragments of the most varied things. This true Poesie can at most have a general allegorical meaning and an indirect effect, as music does. Thus is Nature so truly poetic, like the room of a magician or a physicist, like a children's nursery or a carpenter's shop....

A fairy-stoy is like a vision without rational connections, a harmonious whole of miraculous things and events--as, for example, a musical fantasia, the harmonic sequence of an Aeolion harp, indeed nature itself.

In a genuine fairy-story, everything must be miraculous, mysterious, and interrelated, everything must be alive, each in its own way. The whole of Nature must be wondrously blended with the whole world of the Spirit. In fairy-story the time of anarchy, lawlessness, freedom, the natural state of Nature makes itself felt in the world....The world of the fairy-story is that world which is opposed throughout the world to rational truth, and precisely for that reason it is so thoroughly an analogue to it, as Chaos is an analogue to the finished Creation.

--Novalis


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