Last Song Before Night and 6 More Standalone Fantasies

Ilana C. Myer’s lovely, lyrical debut, Last Song Before Night, is the great white whale of modern fiction: a standalone fantasy novel. While Myer has built a world of poets and magic rich enough to be explored many times over, the resolution for her central character, Lin, who aspires to be the first female poet, reaches its conclusion without cliffhanger or uncertainty. For those who can reel off a list of fantastic fantasy series—and, as we know, it’s not difficult to do—this kind of brevity and finality is a breath of fresh air.
Of course, Last Song Before Night isn’t standing alone as a standalone. Here are a few works of fantasy with the same elements of mythos and character complexity that you can also work through without the commitment of mandatory sequels, trilogies, or series of still-indeterminate length.

The Golden Key, by Melanie Rawn, Jennifer Roberson, and Kate Elliott
As in Last Song Before Night, the arts are where magic lives in The Golden Key. In Tira Virte, it’s painting, not poetry, that’s the star of the show. This combined effort by an accomplished fantasy trio follows two families: the do’Verrada royals and the Grijalva clan, whose artwork is a bit more than meets the eye. The narrative spans hundreds of years, but throughout, births, deaths, and marriages are all recorded in paintings, not documents. The why is very much explained by the sorcery the Grijalvas can perform with their paintbrushes.

Tigana, by Guy Gavriel Kay
As is their way, two sorcerers invaded the nine city-states of the Peninsula of the Palm and conquered them with relative ease—well, all but one. Tigana fought to the end, killing the son of Sorcerer No. 1, Brandin of Ygrath. Predictably, Brandin was perturbed, and set out to not only punish the people of Tigana, but to raze it from existence. Royals were murdered, cities were destroyed, books were burned, and the city’s name was magically removed from the world. Twenty years later, the children of Tigana, whose very identity was stolen from them, are ready for revenge. The book is as much about that quest as it is about the damaging effects of having your world ripped from you, down to its very essence: its name.

The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle
We couldn’t very well make a list of standalone fantasy and not include this sweetest and Woodstockiest of entries. If you need a healthy dose of whimsy, then please join this unicorn in her quest to find the rest of her kind. Her companions include a magician who can’t really always magic and the wife of a bandit leader. At one point she is transformed into a human woman. An important propellor of the plot is a talking butterfly. Do I need to keep going?

The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison
Addison’s pitch-perfect standalone is as much about real-world problems like court intrigue and the intractable nature of politics as it is about the fantasy elements. Then again, her main character is the half-goblin heir to the throne of an elven empire, so it fits snugly in its genre home. Maia, who has spent his 18 years living in exile, returns home to not only the burden of ruling a land that does not respect him, but the disconcerting news that his father and brothers weren’t killed in an accident, but by intentional sabotage. What makes all of this more spellbinding is the fact that, at a time when many modern fantasy heroes  are, well, flawed—Maia is a genuinely good person. Wow.

American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
Gaiman could teach the capstone course on containing wholly realized fantasy worlds within one, accessible novel. Stardust? Neverwhere? They don’t need sequels—though I would not complain, Neil!—to be effective. Nothing shows this mastery better than American Gods, a book suffused with enough mythology to outshine a religious studies text. You’d think being released from prison would be a great day for Shadow, but the news that his wife has died in a mysterious car crash sure dampens the mood. As does the journey across America with a mercurial ancient God that the daring British author sends him on.

The Craft Sequence, by Max Gladstone
Yes, yes, I know it’s a technically a series, but each installment in Gladstone’s urban fantasy can be read independently without any loss of satisfaction. Each story is so multilayered, good-humoured, and unconventional, reading its predecessors and successors is unnecessary for enjoyment—though, once you read one, you will want to read them all, unless you despise pleasure. This is a world in which the old gods are dead and necromancers stroll into their office jobs with briefcase in hand. Just about any slice of life Gladstone chooses to explore stands on its own as fascinating.
What standalone fantasy do you recommend?