The Last Unicorn

It really is.

The first is The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle.

It is widely considered one of the most gorgeously written fantasy books in existence.

The premise is deceivingly simple, right? A unicorn discovers she might be the last of her kind and leaves her protected forest to find out what happened to the others.

The prose in The Last Unicorn is lyrical.

It's almost musical.

But the thematic core of the book is defined by an overwhelming sense of melancholia.

And then another commenter, Andrew, provided a fantastic deep cut recommendation

So I think taking care of yourself and being in a place where you can feel that hope, that inspiration, that thing that made you want to write in the first place, you know, before you even thought about publishing or all the things that come with it, I think is something that helps me.

I remember when I was in my MFA program and I was feeling really down about, like, a bad workshop or something, and my sister sent me a copy of The Last Unicorn and I just started crying because it just reminded me of like, "Oh yeah, that's why I, I wanna write, is because there was a time I would read these books and just tr- be transported into this other world, and that was, like, what mattered." And not, like, what your professor says or, like, you know, whatever.

You know, it...

And nowadays it might be, like, what an editor says, what, you know, your...

Absolutely.

Peter S. Beagle's fable-like The Last Unicorn, Bernard Cornwell's historical Warlord Chronicles, Umberto Eco's dense mystery The Name of the Rose.

Christopher Buehlman's genuinely terrifying plague-era book Between Two Fires.

And Samantha Shannon's modern epic The Priory of the Orange Tree.

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.

They meet a tyrant king who sits in a barren castle, keeping a terrifying fiery black bull as a pet.

And they meet a prince who has completely forgotten how to desire anything in life unless it is framed for him as a heroic, violent quest.

The true power of The Last Unicorn is entirely in its tone.

It beats out massive thousand-page doorstoppers on this list because Beagle writes with the cadence of a fairy tale that has completely, painfully outgrown its own innocence.

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.