A friend brought it to my attention late last night that fantasy author Patricia McKillip passed away on May 6th, and though there is an obituary in Locus, the news sadly seems to have been overlooked by other on-line fantasy outlets.
She was one of my favourite writers, having penned well over twenty novels across the course of her career and being the recipient of several awards, including the World Fantasy life achievement award in 2008.
She’s perhaps most famous for her Riddlemaster of Hed trilogy, though for my money her best work was written between 1995 and 2010, decades in which she wrote the likes of Winter Rose, The Book of Atrix Wolfe, Song for the Basilisk, The Tower at Stony Wood, Ombria in Shadow, In The Forests of Serre, Alphabet of Thorn, Od Magic, The Bell at Sealey Head and The Bards of Bone Plain – all standalone fantasy novels that melded her distinctive poetic-prose with stories based on fairy tales, mythology, ballads and other fantasy inspirations.
As a younger reader, there was seriously nothing else like them. The cover art featured above was done by Kinuko Y. Craft, and they’re a perfect visual compliment to McKillip’s dense, ornate prose. Oftentimes reading her books was like trying to unravel a tangled knot – but a lot more fun. No matter how complicated things got, you knew you would eventually land on solid ground.
“Night is not something to endure until dawn. It is an element, like wind or fire. Darkness is its own kingdom; it moves to its own laws, and many living things dwell in it.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, Harpist in the Wind
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