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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jester47" data-source="post: 1342301" data-attributes="member: 2238">A word about King- he is more (IMO) a suspense writer.  I personally think he is at his best when he is not writing about the supernatural.  Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption comes to mind.  About the three musketeers- The Count of Monte Cristo is not about them.  It is a self contained story.  The books of the Three Musketeers are:The Three Musketeers, Ten Years Later, Twenty Years After.  The man in the iron mask is part of Twenty Years After.  I think a stand alone novel is one where a person can pick it up, read it, and not have key story elements in another physical book.  Thus you can have several stand alone novels about discworld.  Another good example are the Chronicles of Narnia.  Each one (with one or two exceptions) works great as a stand alone novel.  The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe is really great.  Gemmel is another good example.  Also, think of the number of series that have been coming out lately IN ONE VOLUME.  Dying Earth, Lots of the TSR/WotC stuff, Eddings, Brooks, LotR etc.  Essentially, the idea is resurfacing that one story = one book.  To find out what works best for Fantasy, lets take a look at other types of Genre fiction.  Most notably Mystery and Western.  Horror too.  The statementwas made that Horror works best as a short story.  We have Dracula, Lovecrafts 2 novels, and some stuff king wrote as greatexamples of Horror novels.  We get the same with Macarthy, McMurtry and L'Amor in Westerns.  Westerns are having a hard time right now.Hold on a sec-  If you read one thing outside the genre of fantasy For Gods Sake Pick Up Louie L'Amor's "The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour : The Frontier Stories: Volume One"  These are some of the best short stories I have ever read and the writing is descriptive, effective and very well done.  Furthermore, it is susinct.  Ok, back at it- Mystery, the largest selling genre in the US does not have huge long serials.  And yet the genre was hugely developed by Arthur Conan Doyle (another greatly underrated author BTW) with Sherlock holmes.  Mystery works as novels, short stories (less so) and among those we have Self contained novels that reuse regular characters (the world being our own).  Hillerman, Christie, Braun, all come to mind.  Where horror lacks in novels, Mystery makes up and where mystery lacks in short stories, horror makes up.  Westerns follow the same pattern.  Fantasy is the only one where we see the Jordanology really taking hold.  And in truth this is an anaomoly.  A more successful model is the one shared by Robert E. Howard, Agatha Christie, Fritz Leiber, Terry Pratchet, David Gemmel, Loius L'Amour and H.P. Lovecraft (did occasionally reuse characters and he had an over riding theme in all his stories).  The model looks like this:  There is somthing that runs through all the books.  Be that a world, a character, a concept, a combination of two or all three.  Each story is contained within one book.  Shortstories abound.   For Agatha Christie, its Marples.  Pratchett its discworld.  For  Lovecraft its the Cthulu mythos.  Thats all.Aaron.</blockquote>

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