I’d like some more books like Neverwhere by Gaiman, please.
Ones where a ordinary mortal walks thru some sort of gate into a Fantasy world.
Depending on how loosely you interpret “stumble” or “gate,” this is an old and common trope in fantasy literature, going back to Alice, Oz, and Narnia, among others.
The Sleeping Dragon, first novel in a series (Guardians of the Flame), by Joel Rosenberg.
Eccentric Circles? It’s not as whiz-bang as Neil Gaiman. It’s the sort of book where characters make cups of tea and mull over problems.
The main character inherits her grandmother’s cottage which unbeknownst to her abuts the faerie world and she must solve her grandmother’s murder before evil overwhelms both worlds.
You can’t (and won’t) go wrong with Brian Daley’s Coramonde books: a squad of American army infantry in the Vietnam War, plus their APV, is somehow transported to a world of dragons and wizards and castles and demons and such.
Also recommend Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, most famous for the (woefully inadequate) film of the first book, The Golden Compass.
Read all of those but Eccentric Circles, and just ordered it.
Keep 'em coming.
Not quite a fantasy world but Conquistador by S.M. Stirling has a 1946 WWII veteran finding a gate into an alternate universe where society got stuck in the ancient age. He recruits some of his fellow veterans and they decide to start their own empire.
Bifrost Guardians trilogy by Mickey Zucker Reichert.
I don’t remember if it was any good (though I guess it was good enough for me to read all three) or how my tastes now would have compared to back then. Fits the OP though.
(bolding mine)
That is a … misstatement. HDM was quite famous before being filmed, and the film’s resounding and deserved flop did not make it more famous; it probably hurt. I certainly left the theatre screaming “Don’t go in, anybody else! Save yourselves!”
There’s Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Mirror of Her Dreams and A Man Rides Through It. It’s about an ordinary - albeit very messed up - New York girl who gets sucked into a moderately magical realm via magic mirror. Lots of action, intrigue, angst and sex ensure, with an unusual mirror-based magic system. The books can be a bit of a slog at times, but they end very well - say what you want about Donaldson, but he always nails his landings.
Jack Chalker’s Dancing Gods starts with its protagonists going into a portal to a fantasy world.
Not sure if Brown’s What Mad Universe counts here, but it’s (IMHO) a must-read for sf fans.
TVTropes pages:
Unfortunately it’s probably true that any book is more famous for its movie adaptation if such exists. This is why Alan Moore gets pissed off. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was a very popular comic book series and a box office failure movie - but still more people saw the movie then read the comic book.
Faeirie Tale, Feist?
The Chronicles of Narnia
Tolkien had one of these: Farmer Giles of Ham. Shakespeare did, too, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Do you require that the ordinary mortal remain an ordinary mortal once he’s in the fantasy land? Because there are quite a few stories where the protagonist, despite being nonmagical in our world, discovers a knack for magic in the magical world.
There’s the Nekropolis stories, Matt Richter as the only self-willed zombie P.I. Let’s say the first part of his foray into the magical world didn’t go well.
Stephen R Donaldson loves this trope. You’ll find it in the The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (First, Second and Last, 10 books total) and in Mordant’s Need (2 book).
In fact, you may particularly like the Mordant’s Need books because magic in that world is primarily based on building mirrors that see through to alternate worlds. So if you build a mirror to a lava world, you can pour lava on your enemies. If you build one to sci-fi land, you summon a guy with power armor and laser rifles.
I am not sure if he really is pissed or that’s just a act. He read the contract, he signed the contract, he cashed the check.
And yes, he turned over some small later checks to other artists, but remember, this happened with From Hell, then League , then V, etc…
From wiki "In 2012, Moore claimed that he had sold the rights to these two works simply for the money; he did not expect the films ever to be made. He was simply “getting money for old rope”. To date, Moore has seen neither film…The New York Times article also interviewed David Lloyd about Moore’s reaction to the film’s production, stating, “Mr. Lloyd, the illustrator of V for Vendetta, also found it difficult to sympathise with Mr. Moore’s protests. When he and Mr. Moore sold their film rights to the comic book, Mr. Lloyd said: “We didn’t do it innocently. Neither myself nor Alan thought we were signing it over to a board of trustees who would look after it like it was the Dead Sea Scrolls.”[39]”
But he’s a very strange bird, so who know?