Thomas Burnett Swann’s The Tournament of Thorns (1976) is a compelling medievalist fantasy that mixes in folk horror and offers a sharp critique of Christianity in the time of crusades.
Tag: Pub Decade: 1970s
Reading “Lady of the Bees” by Thomas Burnett Swann
Thomas Burnett Swann’s Lady of the Bees (1976) offers a direct political and ethical response to modernity by way of its inventive fantasy retelling of the mythological founding of Rome, casting that key moment in “Western civilization” as a tragedy.
Reading “Land of Precious Snow” by Thaddeus Tuleja
Thaddeus Tuleja's Land of Precious Snow (1977) is a fantasy-adjacent historical fiction novel about religious and spiritual experience, disaffection with modernity, and an American adventurer seeking new meaning in 1890s Tibet—a novel that captures counterculture's dissident feelings toward life in postwar America.
Ballantine Adult Fantasy: A Reading Series
This is the landing page and index for my Ballantine Adult Fantasy (BAF) essay series, a lengthy quest to (re)read all of the novels published by Ballantine Books as part of their effort to court readers and create a market for fantasy in the wake of Tolkien’s mass market success in the mid-1960s.
Genre Fantasies 