Children of the Changeling, by J. Gregory Keyes. It could be called young adult in the sense that the main characters are still in their teens (one even start out as 12 years old), but will otherwise work for all ages.
It could be made as one or three movies, or a mini-series.
What I like about it is that there are very few of the usual fantasy clichés. No elves, trolls, magic wands, magic formulas and so on. There are shamans, undead, ghosts and magical swords, but they are not the kind we are used to from the more familiar fantasy. It's a universe described as "an animistic world of elemental nature gods". One of the gods have some similarities with the norse god Loki (the mythology, not the comic book character). There is progress all the time (unlike what is seen in long series where each novel is a heavy brick), the chapters ends with a cliffhanger, and there are two parallel story lines that comes together in each of the two books. In the first novel it takes place in the north (where pale "barbarians", actually farmers, live) and in a huge southern desert city where dark skinned royals live. In the second book the two different storylines are about the protagonists and the villain. The characters are so few that it's easy to tell them apart and remember who is who, but not too few.
It's also well written.
This one could add some fresh blood and new ideas to the fantasy movies and TV-series out there.
And as others have mentioned, The Dark Tower (maybe the comic book series would work better than the novels).
reply
share