The best books that blend the real with the fantastic

This first book in The Dresden Files gets everything right straight out of the box, grounding this urban fantasy series with a likable and believable protagonist—despite the fact that he’s a professional wizard—as well as a terrific supporting cast that ranges from a chillingly urbane mob boss to a zany, pizza-obsessed fairy helper. 

Harry Dresden’s snappy, irreverent narration makes every scene pop, and—best of all—Jim Butcher’s conception of magic works. Its mechanics are easily understood, allowing its uses and limitations to drive the plot forward and ratchet up the tension. An old-fashioned hero in a modern setting, Harry Dresden set my personal bar for how to make magic feel real.

My wife first turned me on to the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series, for which I am forever grateful.  Smart, passionate and endlessly resourceful, Anita is one of my favorite characters in modern fantasy fiction. 

I like to think of her as being, if not the spiritual sister to the protagonist of my own novel, at least her great-auntie. A necromancer working in St. Louis, Anita regularly deals with the resurrected dead and the undead, as part of both her professional and (increasingly complicated) personal life. 

The slam-bang pacing of this first book in the series makes it hard to put down, as Anita gets drawn deeper into a web of lies and murder involving the local vampire community, but manages to come out on top.         

While The Lord Of The Rings will always remain my benchmark for epic fantasy world-building, there is something almost hypnotic about the ease and economy of Ursula K. LeGuin’s worldbuilding here, making it my “go to” book whenever I want to slip back into a fully-realized and authentic fantasy world without a lot of effort. 

At barely 182 pages, this tale of a young wizard trying to undo a spell gone terribly awry also stands as a thoughtful exploration of the mysterious and inextricable relationship between life and death. The world of Earthsea is described with scant prose, but every word is chosen carefully by a masterful storyteller and every sentence evokes a mood or packs an emotional punch.

Too soon, the spell is over, leaving you wishing for more.

Titanic in its scope and complexity, The Stand was my first experience of a story that took readers to the end of civilization, and to what might lay beyond. 

I was blown away by it then, and still am.  Peopled with a whole cornucopia of King’s realistic and riveting characters—whose fates were always in doubt—The Stand showed me how effective the melding of real-world settings and the supernatural could be. 

To this day, I still get chills from the scene where Tom Cullen is hypnotized, revealing his deeper nature, and shake my head in awe at the subtle and powerful writing in the little moments of personal revelation, as when Larry Underwood and Harold Lauder each finally face their personal demons. Sublime stuff. 

For me, no list of beloved books would be complete without an entry from Stephen R. Donaldson, who took my reading—and writing—to its next level after Tolkien. 

His sophisticated imagination and complex prose is on full display here, in this collection of original stories. Moving seamlessly from gritty medieval taverns to gleaming futuristic cityscapes, Donaldson takes us across the entire spectrum of science fiction and fantasy in just 366 pages, from the high fantasy tale of the title about a world with a unique concept of magic, to a too-safe utopia threatened by any citizen showing the least bit of imagination. 

“Unworthy of the Angel” is a personal favorite, blending noir elements into a story of an unusual divine messenger on a holy mission.