Fairy Tale is one of the most satisfying books Stephen King has written in ages. If you haven’t read him in a long time, or ever, you probably think of him as a horror writer. That is accurate but incomplete. The man’s been writing professionally for over fifty years. He’s written fantasy, science fiction, Westerns, thrillers, literary fiction, historical fiction, mysteries, and probably some other fiction genres I’m forgetting, to say nothing of his nonfiction cultural criticism. Or On Writing, which endures as one of the best books for writers and would-be writers.

Fairy Tale presents us with Charlie, a boy whose mother dies young and whose father responds by diving into a bottle. Despite growing up under these difficult circumstances, by the time he’s a teenager, Charlie is a decent kid—the sort of kid who stops to help when he discovers an old man in distress, even if that old man has a reputation for being an asshole, even if his dog is rumored to be vicious.

I don’t want to spoil the plot, but this is an adventure story with a magical realm and a princess and a great evil that Charlie must defeat. And I am only slightly ashamed to say I cheated and looked to the last few pages to find out if the dog survived.

I read A Practical Guide to Conquering the World, a nominally fantasy novel by K. J. Parker, pseudonym of Tom Holt.

I love K. J. Parker to an unreasonable extent. I’m not really capable of objective criticism with his books. Sorry if you were looking for that here.

As is typical, this book is fantasy in that there geography and the cultures are made up, but there’s no magic. It’s about people in an approaching-Industrial society who make war on one another.

After something like fifteen years of my intense Parker fanhood, I think I’ve figured out why I like him so well. It’s his prose style. It’s witty and droll. Every sentence, every paragraph is an exercise in deadpan delivery. I would give my left kidney to write like he does.

The hero of this book, if that’s what you’d prefer to call him, is a professional translator. It’s not that he has political aspirations, but when he realizes a young woman is slated for execution due to a mistake in translation, he intervenes. And the young woman happens to be a princess from one of the distant, savage tribes.

Parker excels at world-building. He’ll happily go on a tangent chock full of details about the intricacies of bow design or the how the clearing of a forest affected a region’s agriculture and economy.  It ought to be tedious but isn’t.

This was a delight as an audiobook. Ray Sawyer isn’t great at female voices, but one, no one will ever accuse Parker of passing the Bechdel test, and two, the characters aren’t the main point of Parker’s novels. Sawyer’s the perfect narrator for the book because his reading is bony dry. He deadpans his way through the whole novel.

Apart from Stephen King, who is a category unto himself, my favorite horror writer is Christopher Buehlman. I read The Daughters’ War (2024) and immediately chased it with a reread of the sequel, The Blacktongue Thief (2021).

Both are sword-n-sorcery dark fantasy novels. The Daughters’ War follows Galva, a duke’s daughter marching into battle with the goblins. Most of the fighters in this war are women, since the goblins killed or maimed the men in previous wars. Her unit uses war corvids, an untested  new weapon concocted by wizards with a knack for experimental biology. Each woman fights with two of these giant murder birds.

Galva reappears in The Blacktongue Thief, set nine years after the events in The Daughters’ War, though now the point-of-view character is Kinch, a professional thief. They travel together, reluctantly, to find a missing princess. And this time the baddies are giants.

There’s no shortage of books with these familiar elements: goblins and giants, wizards and witches, quests to find missing princesses. But Buehlman’s novels are far better than most of what’s out there. His prose is what I aspire to. His characters become real people to the reader, and the plot takes you places you do not expect, with thoughtful world-building and vivid settings.

Nikki Garcia does a terrific job reading The Daughters’ War, particularly in some of the battle scenes. Her narration stirred my blood and made me want to hit something. And Buehlman narrates The Blacktongue Thief. In his other career, he is a stage performer, and it shows. His reading is incredible.

Since moving to Minnesota in May, my pleasure reading has dropped way off. Things have been bananas, especially with the ongoing mold problem in my basement. I don’t know when I’ll get back to weekly book talks. Occasional book talks, that’s more realistic.

Departing from her signature mind-bending science fiction novels, e.g., The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Claire North turns to Greek mythology in Ithaca.

This is the story of a city populated by women and old people and very few children, because the men have been absent for years, waging war against Troy and/or sleeping with island witches.

When skirmishers attack Ithaca, it falls to the women to save the city. This is difficult for Penelope, who must be quiet and empty-headed, lest she give the impression that she means to wrest power from her husband Odysseus, never mind that he’s been gone for years without so much as a postcard.

Complicating matters, Penelope’s cousin Clytemnestra just murdered her awful husband Agamemnon, and now she has arrived in secret in Ithaca, seeking refuge.

North has a gift for words. She writes characters who stay with me for years, and while battle and action and drama are plentiful, she is a contemplative writer, giving care to details and inner thoughts even as the raiders attack.

If you’ve enjoyed the outstanding Greek retellings by Natalie Haynes and Madeline Miller, Ithaca will be up your alley. And if you enjoy audiobooks, Catrin Walker-Booth is a captivating narrator.

I draw a distinction between good writing and good storytelling. Not every author is good at both, and commercial publishing favors the latter. Plot-driven books sell better than language-driven.

Personally, I look for strong, competent prose. I don’t need ornate language or undreamt-of metaphors, but I will stop reading for mechanical clumsiness: overusing dialogue tags, slipping artlessly into comma splices, beating that subject-verb-object triple play for every dang sentence.
Adrian Tchaikovsky delights on both counts, writing and storytelling. He’s best known for his Children of Time series, but I got started with Elder Race, a quick read with excellent audiobook narration by John Lee.

It’s a perfect genre blend of fantasy and science fiction. An overlooked younger princess goes on a hero’s quest to find a wizard to save the realm from a demon. The wizard is in fact an anthropologist second class, living out whole centuries in suspension while he waits for his fellow scientists to retrieve him from his outpost.

It hits all my favorite notes: thoughtful internal character development, adventure tempered by human politics, magic clashing with technology. And no goddam romance. Sorry—but I don’t like love stories in my fiction. That’s a tender spot for me.

The depressed and lonely weird wizard dude with literal horns growing out of his forehead, thanks to futuristic body mods, does not end up with the courageous and beautiful young woman. Like they don’t even flirt. It’s wonderful.

There are any number of reasons why you might not like a genre. I just explained why I don’t like romance novels, so I’m in no position to hector anyone about not reading science fiction or fantasy. But if the reason you abstain is because you’re only familiar with shoddier examples, I’d invite you to give speculative fiction another go. This one will only take a few hours of your time.

After seventeen years, I’m rereading Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, and I hope you’ll consider joining me. These are books that will make you feel better. You will leave them knowing more about yourself and other people, and you will feel less pessimistic about everything.

I’m reading these in chronological order, which is why I’ve got Color of Magic up first, but that’s not where I recommend people dive in. With more than forty books in the series, there are a ton of great entry points, since few of the books depend on familiarity with prior entries. I do think the stand-alones are less intimidating, perhaps. Small Gods is my standard recommendation.

But let’s not sweat the details. If you’ve never read Pratchett and you were waiting for a sign, hello, here it is, the universe would like you to read a Discworld book.

The Color of Magic introduces us to the greatest city on the Disc, Ankh-Morpork, and its least talented wizard, Rincewind. Until I moved to a state with unjustly few characters allowed for license plates, my license plate read WIZZARD in homage to Rincewind. In some ways he is my favorite Discworld character, not because he is the best, but because I imprinted on him like a duck.

I’m not doing anything like a coherent plot summary, but that’s not the point. No other author’s death has affected me more than Pratchett’s. That’s what his books have meant to me, and so many other people, but I am afraid if I keep on in this vein I will sound like a religious fanatic.
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Occasionally I’ll be discussing these books on Sundays (the new Day of the Week for these weekly book talks), or they might come midweek if I’ve got another book to discuss on Sunday. But I will write about each one. I intend to read a bit of Pratchett each day until I have finished the series, however many months or years that takes. 

I talked about Nghi Vo's fantasy series The Singing Hills Cycle a few months ago. The books follow a cleric named Chih, whose religious order focuses more on history than faith. In this third entry, Into the Riverlands, Chih is once again traveling the land, looking for stories to collect. If you haven't read the first two, that's fine. Each novella stands independently.

Vo's prose style is quite good, and her storytelling is masterful. You don't know the details of the plot, going in, but you recognize right away that you're in for a good story. It's a blend of adventure and magic with a setting that recalls the hinterlands of Imperial China, only gayer. Vo's characters express a variety of genders and sexual orientations. And while there are lots of sections with fast action and tense battles with bad guys, the book has a contemplative feel. By which I mean I cried several times.

I had planned to do horror books throughout the month. I started a new-to-me writer, Gemma Files, but there was heavy gun violence in the opening chapters, and this was not the week to read that.

Instead, I'll mention T. J. Klune. I've only read two of his books so far, but each one has been the emotional equivalent of hot cocoa and fat lazy cats. The only reason I'm not immediately reaching for another is that I'm trying to pace myself, one per year.

The House in the Cerulean Sea is a fantasy novel and queer romance about finding family when you feel unwanted. Under the Whispering Door is a fantasy novel and queer romance with a redemption arc. You know that warm feeling you get inside when Scrooge looks out the window on Christmas morning, wondering what day it is? Same emotional payoff here.

For books that will inform you or give you ideas for addressing a social problem...how about Isabel Wilkerson's Caste? I've read extensively about race and racism, and hers is one of the best. It's a long book and a longer audiobook, but it flew by, which is not something I often say about meticulously researched social histories.

Though best remembered for Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury wrote across many genres and for many ages. The Halloween Tree (1972) is a horror/fantasy Young Adult novel that I probably would have enjoyed as a kid. Alas.

One Halloween, a group of eight boys find themselves taking a spooky tour across space and time to learn the origins of Halloween, which [insert convoluted, unconvincing plot explanation here] is necessary to save the life of the ninth boy, Pipkin.

Bradbury lavishes praise on Pipkin, using over-the-top descriptions to paint him as the best possible boy to have ever walked the earth. I was reminded of Melville's ultra horny descriptions of Billy Budd. There is nothing sexual in Bradbury's portrait--I cannot point to any one line or paragraph that is inappropriate--but taken together, I felt uncomfortable about the intense scrutiny and effusive compliments directed toward an adolescent.

Maybe someone else who's read this book can let me know if I'm being too sensitive.

So I can't really say I recommend it. Kirby Heyborne did a great job narrating, though, considering there were ten characters and none of them were women.

The Empress of Salt and Fortune is a hell of a good book, the first of a series of four historical fantasy novellas by Nghi Vo. You know from the start it's going to be good because the main character is an archivist. As a cleric, Chih is responsible for recording oral history. Their interviewee is an older woman, Rabbit, who recalls attending the empress in her youth.

Some people are good writers and some people are good storytellers and the overlap of those two groups is not as big as you might expect. Vo does both things right. The style of the prose is pitch-perfect. The rhythms and inflections make you feel like you're sitting by the fire. The plot is palace intrigue and adventure and scheming.

It's hard not to compare Vo to Becky Chambers, who also writes a speculative fiction series of character-driven novellas with a nonbinary protagonist, starting with A Psalm for the Wild-Built. I was also reminded of Leigh Bardugo's fable-inflected prose.

Or you could compare it to Friend Green Tomatoes. A member of the younger generation interviews an older woman who recalls her friendship with another woman. They struggle to survive in a world run by abusive men, and you can never fully decide whether they were friends or lovers. (That's the movie. It's been decades, but if I recall correctly, their relationship in the movie was ambiguous and their relationship in the book was Yep We're Lesbians Now).

This hit all the right notes. I need to finish listening to Cindy Kay narrate the rest of the series (I'm in book 2 currently) so I may have to skip next week's book talk. Actually yeah, that's a good idea regardless. I'm traveling to North Carolina for a few days next week, so it's a convenient time for a break. Everyone enjoy the first day of decorative gourd season!