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MATT'S OCCASIONAL WRITING BLOG

My Three Faves of Fae

My upcoming release, Yonder & Far: The Lost Lock, revolves around the fae (fairies, fair folk, wee folk, fey ... you get the idea). Not the spritely little brogue-tongued critters that Arthur Conan Doyle chased after. No, the fae in Yonder & Far are more akin to their more ancient conceptions: incomprehensible and dangerous beings who move among humans in mysterious ways. As a genre, fantasy has borrowed heavily from the accumulated store of folk tales, poems, epics, and stories of the fae. The Yonder & Far series is no exception.

 

So I thought I'd list my three favorite novels that feature the fae.  

 

#3 Faerie Tale by Raymond E. Feist: Growing up, I happened across this book in a bookcase in our house. Underneath the seemingly generic title is a dark and compelling story that I finished in a week. Ever since, I've been on the lookout for river stones that have had their middles worn through (which I've had no more luck finding than a four-leafed clover).

 

#2 The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly: Dark but heartful, I very much enjoyed this tightly paced novel.

 

#1 Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susann Clarke: 782 pages of historical fantasy delight--and at the end, I wanted more. The premise is simple enough: 2 gentlemen usher in the return of real magic in England at the height of the Napoleonic Wars. But that magic is, in many ways, tied to the fae, who are as wild as they are wicked. The book is infused with richly imagined scholarship, including more than a hundred footnotes to the prose (some readers found them discursive, but I loved them). In many respects, Yonder & Far is something of an American tip-of-the-hat to Ms. Clarke's imagining of what would happen if the fae became tangled up in our history.

 

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