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Comment by barry-cotter | Hacker News Reader

Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen is a monstrous 10 book (finished) series with a huge, ancient, complex universe, a great mythos and some epic plotting. Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber is pretty dark and very well written. That's all I've got for darkdark fantasy. I can recommend everything Gaiman has written though you'd be better off starting with the Sandman, his best work.

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Personally, like your suggestion for Gaiman, I highly recommend anything written by Roger Zelazny.

If you enjoy the Chronicles of Amber, you might also enjoy Jose Farmer's World of Tiers series. Along a similar vein but dissimilar enough that it's worth the read.

If I recall my Sandman, I think Gaiman would also recommend anything (or at least some things) written by Roger Zelazny.

+1 for Amber. Much of the rest of Zelazny is good, too. I actually like Lord Of Light better, though it's a bit less approachable (in the specific sense that I picked it up and put it down a few times before getting into it).

Lord of Light is brilliant. It is also very strong stuff - dense, metaphorical, and poetic. It should probably not be the first Zelazny of anyone who's just branching out from GRRM.

To be honest, I had read so much hype about the book before reading it, that, paradoxically, I ended up not liking Lord of Light that much (it does have a very interesting premise).

On the other hand, I basically stumbled on the Chronicles of Amber - I bought the huge omnibus book because it was good words-per-dollar value, back when e-books didn't exist and I needed my books to last me my whole holidays!!

I didn't like LoL much the first time I read it. Admittedly I was also a teenager at the time. When I came back to it much later, I was more willing to engage with Zelazny's desire to play with language. I suspect I'd also had various life experiences the book speaks to; in some respects it was very much one of those 'you'll understand this when you're older' things for me.

I enjoyed the hell out of the Amber books the first time around, though!

Oh wait crap actually I am thinking about Zelazny's Creatures of Light and Darkness. Those two titles occupy the same hash bucket in my brain.

Ah, yeah, I'm presently working on that one.

That's not too far from my own experience. I didn't get more than a quarter of the way into it my first two attempts.

Agreed.

+1 for Malazan Book of the Fallen. Totally fantastic. Audiobooks are quite good, too, if you're into that. I like it on kindle since the books are so huge.

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