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Non-Fiction | Fiction | Movies | Music | Not Recommended

Fiction

Elves | Faery | Dragons | Other Mythicals | Magic, Dreams, Glamour | Urban Fantasy | Miscellaneous | Haven't Read Yet

There is little fiction that is really about what we could call "otherkin" (none of it by that name, that I am aware of). However, there is somewhat more that falls into the genre of "urban fantasy" (that is, tales of magic in the modern world), and of course, plenty of straight fantasy that is often germane to otherkin. Some of these make the list because of their usefulness to point to as references: "like that" or "sort of like that, but not exactly".

Elves (return to top)

• J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings; The Silmarillion; other various works set in same world (Middle-earth). Perhaps more cliche now than ever before, but still one of the grandaddies. Elves are the obvious and most common thing to relate to, but angelics might find relevance in the Valar or Maiar; the idea of humans carrying non-human blood also appears (the Numenoreans, which bloodline Aragorn is descended from, have Elvish ancestry).
• Gael Baudino, Strands of Starlight; Maze of Moonlight; Shroud of Shadow; Strands of Sunlight; Spires of Spirit. The elves in these books are described as "starlit", which is a self-description which works well for a number of elven otherkin. These books are apparently terribly hard to lay hold of.
• Wendy and Richard Pini, ElfQuest and other various works. Presents a variety of elven types, from tall, slender and artistic to small and feral, living in a variety of environments besides just the stereotypical forest. Unfortunately, the current editions of these, billed as the volumes of the "Elfquest Reader's Collection", I believe are in black and white, when what you really want is the older full-size, colour hardcovers (or at a pinch, the paperbacks, which are the original releases with better cover art, but the bindings are flimsy and they fall apart with hardly any encouragement at all. Personal experience? Why do you ask?).

Faery (return to top)

• Parke Godwin, The Last Rainbow. Imaginative interpretation of not-yet-Saint Patrick trying to spread Christianity among the small, dark Faerie (or Prydain) people. This is a small-dark-elder-race take on things, rather than faery being otherworldly or supernatural.
• W. B. Yeats, various poetry, letters, etc. (Too many possible titles to list any here.) Classic material absolutely dripping with Faery feeling.

Dragons (return to top)

• Anne McCaffrey, Dragonflight; Dragonquest; The White Dragon; other various works set in same world (Pern). (Links are to the editions I have, which are not the newest. Also, you can get an e-book of Dragonflight and Dragonquest here.) Other books tell the backstory, or stories in the same time period but about different characters, but in the "core" books the society is mostly Renaissance to early-modern in character, and the telepathic dragons partner with special humans to protect the planet from an extraplanetary threat known as Thread.
• Bob Eggleton and John Grant, Dragonhenge and The Stardragons.

Other Mythicals and Assorted Beasties (return to top)

• Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn. This is the closest to specifically talking about "otherkin" that I know of, since it involves a unicorn being turned into a human girl; she talks about the wrongness of the body, and it is mentioned that she will forget being a unicorn if she stays human too long.
• Tad Williams, Tailchaser's Song. Semi-anthropomorphized cats (in the vein of Watership Down). The bits of cat-language are wonderful, and seemed to function well as "words of power" for me in the past.

Magic, Dreams, Glamour (return to top)

• White Wolf, Changeling: The Dreaming and supplements. (The second edition, like all White Wolf games, is far superior to the first in terms of gameplay, but if you're just interested in atmosphere, it may not matter to you.) An old joke among 'kin used to be "who blabbed?" Yes, it's a role-playing game, but some of the concepts are intriguingly close to how things seem to work for some people (banality vs. glamour, importance of dreams, existence of chimaerical creatures, sidhe or Tuatha de Danann houses, freeholds and balefires...).
• C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia. Immersive fantasy.
• Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia. Children create a magical land for themselves in a nearby wood.
• Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. (Link is a boxed set of both books.) Adventures in a bizarre dreamland with creatures and plants that talk, as well as plenty of nonsense that makes sense.
• L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Similar vein to Alice, just different characters and setting. Bizarre and fantastical.
• J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan. (This particular edition is illustrated by Charles Vess, which is a Good Thing. Charles Vess also did Neil Gaiman's Stardust, for example.) Boy who decides to never grow up lives in fantasy land with pirates, fairies, and all kinds of stuff. What do you mean you're not familiar with this? (Ignore the part where everyone goes "back to reality.")
• P. L. Travers, Mary Poppins. Imaginging things and going to strange lands with your umbrella-wielding nanny is better than growing up to be a banker. Or something. (Travers actually wrote a series of books with various continuation titles, such as Mary Poppins in the Park and Mary Poppins Comes Back.)
• Neil Gaiman, Sandman. Not a single work but a sprawling series or collection of graphic novels and such, involving various other authors and artists. Modern myth and dreamlands.
• Michael Ende, The Neverending Story. Boy enters world of all human stories and dreams (Fantasia) through identifying with main character of magical book. Some urban fantasy elements. Somewhat more philosophical or "high-brow" than the popular movie.

Urban Fantasy (return to top)

• Charles de Lint. Pretty much anything, but especially: Jack of Kinrowan; Dreams Underfoot; Memory and Dream; Moonheart; Spirits in the Wires (from my own experience). He sets the bar for urban fantasy. Simply consummate renderings of faery and magic at the edge of normal perception, and hiding right in the middle of the modern world. The Riddle of the Wren is closer to being regular fantasy, but the "home base" the story starts in is a kind of alternate Earth (and the first world the heroine jumps to seems to be a far-future ruined New York, to me).
• Emma Bull, War for the Oaks.
• Michael Reaves, Street Magic.
• Laurell K. Hamilton, A Kiss of Shadows; A Caress of Twilight; Seduced by Moonlight. Features sidhe and plenty of sex scenes (*chuckle*).
• Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere. A secret magical world under the streets of London.

Weird Stuff & Miscellaneous (return to top)

• Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time; The Wind in the Door; A Swiftly Tilting Planet. (Link is to a boxed set that also includes Many Waters.) Strange tales of twisting time and space.
• William Sleator, The Boy Who Reversed Himself. Similar general basis as A Wrinkle in Time (travel through higher dimensions, and beings who live there), but a rather different interpretation.
• Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land. Mars-born human has trouble adjusting to Earthling humans.
• Robert Holdstock, Mythago Wood; Lavondyss; The Hollowing; Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn. (Also The Bone Forest, apparently extremely hard to come by, and Merlin's Wood, which is the same idea set in the forest of Broceliande in France rather than in England.) The Mythago series just doesn't fit in any one category. It's part magic-world-dreams, part urban fantasy, part other-mythicals. A magical wood spawns mythic creatures from the minds and ancestral memory of those who enter it. The books are not really a series in the linear sense (although you can place the events within them in a chronological order), but rather a collection of stories all looking in on the same wood from the points of different characters, and sometimes at different times in their lives. It's rather like the several paths into Ryhope (the wood of the title) itself.

Lastly, some suggestions which seem likely to be good, or which others have vouched for, but which I haven't checked out myself: (return to top)

• Roger Zelazny, The Amber Chronicles. (The Great Book of Amber compiles them all in one large volume.) "A treatise on the manipulation of reality." From the review at Green Man: "...Amber, a place at the center of reality. All other places are mere shadows, and can be reached only by manipulating reality, changing it bit by bit until you arrive at the place you want to be. Earth is a shadow, too, you may be surprised to learn..."
• Storm Constantine, The Grigori Trilogy: Stalking Tender Prey; Scenting Hallowed Blood; Stealing Sacred Fire. "For angelics." The Grigori are the Watchers, that is, fallen angels (loosely).
• Storm Constantine, Wraeththu and related works. Metahumans; evolving genomes from humanity.
• Patricia Kennealy-Morrison, The Keltiad: The Silver Branch; The Copper Crown, The Throne of Scone. "Tuatha de Danann in space."
• Holly Black, The Spiderwick Chronicles.
• Charles de Lint, The Wild Wood. From the review at Green Man: "It's a haunting that is peculiarly suited to an artist, to see things in one's work that one did not put there. But Eithnie's haunting grows; the creatures in her pictures step out into the world around her, and she begins to see them everywhere in the familiar woods around her home, overwhelming her with the beauty and terror of the unknown." Illustrations by Brian Froud.
• Terri Windling, The Wood Wife. From the review at Green Man: "Windling's Arizona desert comes alive with fey beings, shapeshifters small and great that are as mysterious and amoral as any European Fair Folk, yet practical and earthy and distinctively Native American in their coloration."
• Lisa Goldstein, Dark Cities Underground. From the review at Green Man: "Dark Cities Underground is a story of what ifs. What if Alice in Wonderland was a true story, but rather than Lewis Carroll being the originator it was really Alice Liddell who experienced the adventure and told the story to Charles Dodgson?"
• James A. Hetley, The Summer Country. (Get an e-book here.) From the review at Green Man: "The Summer Country evokes some of the best of Charles de Lint, with roots both in gritty urban reality, and a fantastic otherworld filled with dangers and magic. [...] In short, they're the Fae of Tam Lin, of Thomas the Rhymer, of La Belle Dame Sans Merci, the otherworldly creatures named the Fair Folk because you fear or respect them, but don't know or trust them."
• Ian McDonald, King of Morning, Queen of Day. From the review at Green Man: "Fans of Charles de Lint will delight in Enye's sword-wielding encounters with pookas and other mythic creatures in the back alleys and underpasses of modern Ireland. Anyone who has read Robert Holdstock as well as de Lint will certainly find ley lines of similarity between McDonald's "phaguses," Holdstock's "mythagos," and de Lint's "numena." Like his fellow authors, McDonald also asks serious questions about our modern, civilized world, which seems so stripped of the numinous."
• Mercedes Lackey and Ellen Guon, Bedlam's Bard. From the review at Green Man: "Even after he makes it back home to L.A., with the aid of some sympathetic friends, he finds that life is stranger than ever before. For one thing, there's an elf in his apartment. A pointy-eared, cat-eyed, too-beautiful-for-words elf, wearing Eric's best cloak and making himself at home in Eric's apartment."
• Mercedes Lackey and Rosemary Edghill, Beyond World's End. From the review at Green Man: "No one ever said it was easy to be a Bard in New York. Luckily, he's got friends and his own Bardic magic, and hopefully he'll be able to stop a three-way war between the good guys, the Sidhe, and the drug producers before it gets out of hand."
• Rebecca Lickiss, Eccentric Circles. From the review at Green Man: "That's right, Grandma Dickerson's cottage is on the border of Earth and Fairy, and is actually something of a portal for the creatures that inhabit the area."
• Terri Windling and Mark Alan Arnold (eds.), Borderland and Bordertown: Where Magic Meets Rock & Roll.Terri Windling (ed.), Life on the Border. Will Shetterly, Elsewhere and Nevernever. Emma Bull, Finder. Terri Windling and Delia Sherman (eds.), The Essential Bordertown. This is a collection of urban fantasy set in the world of Bordertown. See the review of all of them together at Green Man.
• Laurel Winter, Growing Wings. From the review at Green Man: "There's no explanation given for why Linnet or Sarah grew wings — or why any of the other winged characters in the story did. There are hints, guesses, but no facts. It is not important where the wings came from, only that they are there — and that they are as painful as they are joyful."
• Dennis Danvers, Wilderness. From the review at Green Man: "With Wilderness we are exposed to the concept of werewolves living amongst us. In fact, one is living right next door to college professor Erik Summers, one he has actually met and spoken with in regard to her status as a career student."

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