10 Great Fantasy Books That Are Under 300 Pages

10 Coraline

By Neil Gaiman

Coraline, a terrifying children’s movie based, slightly inadequately, on Gaiman’ by Coraline’s unparalleled stop-motion animation director Henry Selick. The book, though, which I read to my daughter when she was four – three, even, over her shoulder – spurts Stephen King-ish blood on every page, the stuff of tyro horror. Here the character of Coraline – how do you make these names up? – figures out the Other Mother is up to her cloven hooves in brimstone much quicker, so there’s less of the wish gone a-wrong theme. She was bored, but she would have been kidnapped by the Other Mother anyway; she left well enough alone.

And its dry presentation of the situation belies its creeping unease as the other characters say things that get creepier and creepier until – BAM! We’ve been thrown a substantial plot twist. Readers experience much of the sarcasm with which the book frames itself in the descriptions of various characters and the psychogeography of the scene, all filtered through Coraline’s awareness and impressions; meanwhile, the trepidation and patience she needs to exhibit are emphasised in slightly different ways in the book. The film builds on several plot points, adding dozens of characters Coraline realises is its own, distinct thing.

9 The Colour Of Magic

By Terry Pratchett

There are too many reading orders of Pratchett’s Discworld books, where the a half-dozen or so different starting points, and a smattering of contained subseries that follow self-contained sets of characters. For those that want something brief and sweet, though, it is easy to go back to the beginning, with the first Discworld published: The Colour Of Magic, in which a highly, uh, incompetent wizard named Rincewind ventures on his genre-defining quest in what is now a timelessly funny and bitterly satirical setting still insanely popular with Discs operating on the backs of four elephants atop a giant turtle.

Anyone familiar with the author knows that the journey will be whimsical and hilarious.

Pratchett hoped that Discworld would ‘do for the classical fantasy universe what Blazing Saddles did for Westerns’. The Colour of Magic begins the seven-book Rincewind subseries. When Rincewind is hired as a guide by an even more incompetent clerical apprentice, the book finishes with a cliffhanger. Anyone who has read a Pratchett cover knows the ride will be whimsical and funny.

8 Vampires Never Get Old

Edited By Zoraida Córdova & Natalie C. Parker

Vampires Never Get Old: Tales With Fresh Bite, its first fantasy anthology series, each featuring a different supernatural creature, has vampires as its theme. With a collective author roll-call of bestsellers, Vampires Never Get Old is promoted with the tagline ‘Welcome to the evolution of the vampire – and a revolution on the page’. The collection of 11 short stories is historical, feminist, body image and LGBTQ+, all with the message that vampires are not to be messed around with – which is exactly what some of these characters would like to be.

Ideal for anyone seeking welcoming takes on Dracula and a twist on a vampire trope, after all those Twilight TV show reboot announcements – here was something new and exciting in a genre that (briefly) became very oversaturated and badly tainted. Yet these short stories were unlike anything I had read previously and represented something inviting, useful and much-needed, in under 300 pages. Readers interested in this one could move on to Mermaids Never Drown: Tales to Dive For.

Faeries Never Lie: Tales to Revel In, the third Untold Legends (released September 24, 2024)

7 Matilda

By Roald Dahl

Roughly a quarter of Roald Dahl’s children’s novels are shorter than the 300 pages expected of any rapid, genre read I’ve never been satisfied by a book I’ve devoured before bed. In the end, Matilda is still one of Dahl’s best novels, and ultimately a bittersweet underdogs predicament is children, facing an in adults: helplessly looking up at adults, but unable to tear them down or even scare them off.

The universe in Dahl’s books nearly always conspires when children grow up too fast: adults are unfair, but children are given the agency to become stronger and work against this. The evil authority figures in Dahl’s books deserve it: that’s why cruel children are rewarded and made more cruel, while good children have their virtue recalibrated. Dahl’s universe is a fairy tale, but the universe he depicts is not: it’s hyper-capitalist.

Matilda has a near innate intelligence (and then a supernatural one, but she works for both), she is a great reader and works at her telekinesis to become good at it. She nurtures a love of books and learning and learning people everywhere, some kind, even in their wicked world. And – last but by no means least – the book Matilda is the book by Dahl’s quirky writing that every child should read, simply because the musical based on the book was a worldwide phenomenon.

6 Piranesi

By Susanna Clarke

Piranesi is an abstract, classical-feeling novel that will have you chewing it over in your mind for days after you turn the final page. The narrator – an enigmatic character called Piranesi, after Giovanni Piranesi, the 18th-century Venetian architect who was famous for his depictions of imaginary architecture – lives in a mysterious house called the House, and tracks quite methodically everything that happens there. When a stranger appears in the House, Piranesi begins to investigate the House’s phenomena and learns the disturbing truth about his own origin.

Piranesi is structured heavily around those ideas about personhood forged in captivity (for a well-discussed analysis by The Washington Post’s Ron Charles, Piranesi seemed to echo the experience of lockdown: its 2020 publication date means that it was probably conceived before the worst of the peak of the pandemic, however). Of course, The Discovery’s reward in Burroughs’s story, as in Piranesi, is somewhat weakened by the structure of the novel, which recycles territory already emotionally invested over the cost of discovery. Piranesi is a slim book but it is far from a middleweight read.

5 The Phantom Tollbooth

By Norton Juster

Unlike Matilda, The Phantom Tollbooth is overtly about learning and mental engagement. Through a magical tollbooth that unexpectedly shows up at his house, a bored boy named Milo ends up in a land where words and numbers are manifest entities. One king argues for the superiority of reading and writing, while another argues for numeric capability. They exiled their younger sisters Rhyme and Reason originally because the princesses said both were valuable.

Milo knows exactly what he has to do – to rescue the princesses and take them home – and a mission like that has all sorts of symbolic meanings. A lot of cod-clever prose appears in The Phantom Tollbooth – as when Milo’s guardian personages represent petty politicking behind a charade of ‘rhyme and reason’ and a need for very precise facts. The world beyond the tollbooth clamours because it has many fascinating things still to offer Milo, and he returns home to a world very different than the one from which he set off.

4 The Honey Month

By Amar El-Mohtar

Amar El-Mohtar was sent a box of samples of honey, and in response produced a thematic anthology of short stories and poems each based around one variety of honey: The Honey Month. These are *short* stories: over half are a page or less. Most are two or three pages, but all are brief. It’s a highly pleasurable, seductive sort of brief value, elicited by a short reading experience gathered around the flavour, colour and odour profile of each honey.

The Honey Month is incredibly clever and sweet as honey.

El-Mohtar translates each honey into an amorous, or familial, or even human-ecological romance. The Honey Month remains a kind of soft porno anthology — after all, this is a subjective exercise in the basic matters of food and sex with stuffed-toy anthropomorphism and a faerie here and there. But The Honey Month is a clever and honeyed work.