Peter S. Beagle

Let's start with the animated classic The Last Unicorn.

The original source material is a remarkably beautiful melancholy fantasy novel written by Peter S. Beagle.

It is stunning.

But Kathleen Keenan shares a memory in her article that I think is going to resonate viscerally with anyone listening right now who grew up in the eighties or nineties.

We talk about the magic of movies, but for a kid in the VHS era, the magic was intrinsically tied to the physical object.

Yes.

When young Kathleen was begging for The Last Unicorn, she wasn't conceptualizing it as an adaptation of a Peter S. Beagle text.

She was commanding the physical presence of a bulky plastic cassette tape encased in a squishy plastic clamshell box.

Oh, that is the perfect transition because what happens when you age out of that wonder but you still have to live in the real world? This brings us to what I think is the most surprising, heartbreaking, and beautiful entry on this entire list.

Spot number 10, Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn, published in 1968.

It is a profound, jarring shift in tone from the books we've just discussed.

The setup is deceptively simple, almost like a fable.

And I love that kind of dance between the writer and the reader.

To quote the wonderful Patrick Rothfuss, who did a great introduction to Peter S. Beagle's Last Unicorn, he says that Reading is a dance.

You're joining the author in this exercise.

I was wondering, please tell me a little bit about that very light touch you have where you give the reader enough information, but there is so much that the reader is necessarily creating for themselves, which I think is, again, a signature of wonderful Gothic literature.

And then when I was looking at my baby book in like sixth or seventh grade, I was like, what's that? And I totally couldn't even remember it.

novel.

You know, but it's so good.

Oh, really?

We are looking at Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn, published in 1968.

Diego notes that in 1987, Locus Magazine subscribers ranked it as the fifth best fantasy novel of all time.

A massively prestigious ranking and incredibly well deserved.

We slogged through the plague ridden mud of medieval France with Christopher Buehlman asking unanswerable theological questions.

We laughed through gritted teeth with Joe Abercrombie's torturers, and we deconstructed the fairy tales of our youth alongside Sapkowski's exhausted Witcher.

We felt the quiet existential terror of a unicorn losing her memory in Peter S. Beagle's masterpiece, and we were actively lied to by an exiled executioner in Gene Wolfe's Dying World.

We examined the systemic industrialized oppression built by Brandon Sanderson, and we watched the brutal paradigm shifting consequences of George R. R. Martin's political jungle.