Adult fantasy about unicorns

This is the place for fantasy recommendations, right?

I don't read a lot of fantasy. What I do read is the mainstream popular books The Lord of the Rings, a few Discworld books, His Golden Materials and Harry Potter. Also, back around middle school I read quite a few books in the Everworld series by K.A. Applegate. (I think she's more well-known for her Animorphs series.) I also read Dealing with Dragons and maybe a sequel to it.

I did read one Redwall novel and didn't care much for it.

However, my one true fantasy love as a teen was Bruce Coville's The Unicorn Chronicles which never made it past two books. That love lead me to The Last Unicorn, which I also throughly enjoyed.

So are there any good grown-up fantasy books that deal intensely with unicorns? I especially like the idea that unicorns were once present on earth and were forced to leave for one reason or another.

I'm kind of fond of dragons, too. But the one big dragon writer I know of is Anne McCaffrey and her stuff has never interested me that much.

I like fantasy that veers away from "traditional' ideas of fantasy. I.E. Dragons are fire-breathing monsters for knights to kill. Unicorns are nice and pretty.

Please give me your recommendations to convince me that I can still like fantasy as an adult.

I don't even know where to begin. How about trying out Janny Wurts or Brandon Sanderson, both write great fantasy fiction and both sometimes stop by for a chat with us here.

Well hey, try Immortal Unicorn edited by Peter S. Beagle. It's an anthology of short stories with wildly different ideas about unicorns in each one. I don't like all the stories, but I just love about half of them.

The Temeraire series by Naomi Novik is historical fiction plus dragons.

The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley is about a princess who goes to kill dragons...

I enjoyed Song of Sorcery and The Unicorn Creed by Elizabeth Scarborough. Also, Jack Dann's edited 2 anthologies, Unicorns and Unicorns II, that have some good stories. I think Salsitz has one, (just looked it up) Unicorn Dancer, that I read too long ago to remember the story.

Oops, just deleted my message somehow.

I feel kind of dumb, now. I never even thought to look up and see if Beagle had written any more. I think I thought he hadn't?

All those other ones sound good as well.

The Acorna books by Anne McCaffrey are a fantasy/science fiction blend that strongly feature unicorns -- a much different take than Coville, but you might give it a try. They're fairly different from her dragon books.

The other books that I strongly recommend are the Magic Kingdom of Landover novels by Terry Brooks -- Magic Kingdom for Sale is the first, followed by The Black Unicorn. From your description of what you like, particularly in stories dealing with unicorns, I think you would really enjoy them. (Note that the unicorns don't come in until the second book, but I would recommend starting with the first.)

#6 - Black Unicorns? Okay, now you have me intrigued!

Just one, they lost all the unicorns but this one black one and they have to find them.

I thought of Acorna but i didn't think they were what the OP was looking for, the unicorns are bipedal humanoids with horse legs and horn.

There are some funny moments with unicorns in Fortune's Fool by Lackey

ETA: I seem to remember a Nancy Springer story about a unicorn, let's see if I can find it.

re: Acorna
Yeah, I'm not so sure bipedal unicorns are for me. That seems like it would take some adjusting to.

The magic kingdom for sale does sound interesting. Are the unicorns still part of the story after the second book? I can be a bit of a completionist. (Which may be why I generally don't read a lot of fantasy anymore.)

I read a book many years ago called The Secret Country by Pamela Dean that I remember I liked that had unicorns, but I'm not sure if I liked the sequels. My memory on it is very fuzzy.

My all time favorite unicorn stories were already mentioned, Song of Sorcery and the Unicorn Creed by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough were a couple of my absolute favorite books back in high school.

This post prompted me to go and see whatever happened to the original series. Turns out the third book is coming out this summer a full THIRTEEN years after the first one. (There was a pretty big gap between the first and second, as well.) Seems there's still another one to go, though he's already written it, I guess.

Am I the only one who thinks it's odd to write a children's series with such huge gaps? I was around eight when I read the first book. I'm turning twenty-two in less then a month, leaving me just a teensy bit beyond the recommended age.

Anyway, it just makes me wish unicorns weren't so limited to mostly young adult books. Not that young adult is bad, I just prefer the complexity of "adult" books.

I get bored with the over-complexity of adult fantasy and revel in the durn good storytelling in modern YA :)

Although I haven't seen a lot of unicorn stories recently. I think they're out of fashion...vampires and werewolves and the like, those are what's popular these days.

Can I throw in a very short Thurber piece - The Unicorn in the Garden - from Fables for our Time.

It begins "Once upon a sunny morning a man who sat in a breakfast nook looked up from his scrambled eggs to see a white unicorn with a gold horn quietly cropping the roses in the garden." It ends briefly and beautifully.

Not really fashionable now but worth looking for.

Oooohhhh. I love that story.

I'm quite silly, really, could've sworn it was Nancy Springer wrote the story I was thinking about. Turns out it was by Theodore Sturgeon, the Silken Swift which happens to be the first story in the unicorns anthology by Dann and Dozois, never mind.

#9 No, the Unicorns aren't in the other books.

Tanith Lee wrote a series - Black Unicorn, Gold Unicorn, and Red Unicorn.

Unicorns appear more in myths and Legends than fantasy really, like Alexander the great had one, and Julius Caeser and Ghengis Khan was stopped by one Confuicus was heralded by one.

#9 -- As Musereader correctly states, the unicorns are not in the other books. However, it's a reasonably short series (5, I think) of reasonably short books (no 800-1200 page tomes, in fact, I'd guess all under 400, which is unusual for adult series fantasy), so if your completest tendencies take over, it's not a major investment!

Am I the only one who thinks it's odd to write a children's series with such huge gaps? I was around eight when I read the first book. I'm turning twenty-two in less then a month, leaving me just a teensy bit beyond the recommended age.

I'm guessing the gap wasn't planned from the beginning. I'm glad to hear the next one's coming out soon, though--I'm about the same age as you, and was sad that the series was incomplete!

There's also a YA series whose long-awaited final book is coming out soon after a ten-year wait. I can't decide whether this means that it's a fantastic year for children's and YA fiction, or whether there's something wrong with the current authors.

Looking at my books, I see that I have two books tagged "unicorns" that haven't been mentioned. Unicorns aren't really major characters in them, but I'll throw them out here anyway:

Touched by Magic is set in a fantasy world. Unicorns were the source of the magic, but they went away and took the magic with them. Now an evil mage has discovered how to make magic by killing things, so the heroes have to try to get the unicorns back.

Mad Amos is a collection of fantasy/western short stories. The main character's horse is a unicorn, though he keeps the horn filed down, so no one can tell.

Nope, I'm not going there.

Roger Zelazny's Unicorn Variations . It's the title novella of an anthology of the same name.
It's collected in other anthologes too. Zelazny wrote that he conceived the story because he had to supply a story to three themed anthologies... one about unicorns, one about bars, one about chess... Well worth reading.

Also, doesn't a unicorn show up in the Amber series?

Yes, but only very briefly in the very last book I think.