There exists in every reader a hunger as old as starlight — the longing for a tale in which darkness gathers its terrible forces, and the light, however flickering, however small, rises to meet it. We know this longing well, for it has governed our reading lives as surely as the North Star governs the wandering ship.
What follows is our earnest attempt at a map — a guide to twenty of the finest high fantasy novels and series ever built upon that magnificent, ancient scaffolding: the struggle between good and evil. We have chosen works both venerable and fresh, for the great battle is fought anew in every age, and every age produces its own splendid chroniclers.
Come, then. The shelves are deep and the hours are willing.
1. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
One does not compile a list such as this and neglect the very wellspring from which the river flows. Tolkien’s opus is the cathedral of high fantasy — vast, luminous, and built to endure. A humble hobbit carries a ring of devastating power across a world so thoroughly imagined that one can nearly smell the pipeweed and hear the Ents groaning in Fangorn.
The battle here is cosmic yet intimate: the Dark Lord Sauron commands armies beyond counting, but the fate of all things rests upon the small shoulders of Frodo Baggins. It is a story that insists, with quiet ferocity, that mercy and friendship are mightier than any blade. If you have somehow not yet walked this road, we envy you the journey ahead.
2. The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan (completed by Brandon Sanderson)
Fourteen volumes. Thousands of pages. An entire world turning upon the spindle of prophecy. Robert Jordan constructed something almost recklessly ambitious: a saga in which the Dark One strains against his prison and one young man, Rand al’Thor, must accept that he is the Dragon Reborn — destined to save the world and break it in the doing.
The scope is breathtaking, the magic system intricate, and the cast so vast you will need a glossary (one is provided, mercifully). Jordan understood that the battle between light and shadow is never simple, and his heroes pay dearly for every victory. Brandon Sanderson took up the mantle after Jordan’s passing and carried the saga to its final page with devotion and skill.
3. The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
Lewis fashioned something deceptively simple: a wardrobe, a lamppost, a faun carrying parcels in the snow. Yet behind that gentle entrance lies a world where the White Witch holds an entire land in frozen tyranny and the great lion Aslan embodies a goodness so profound it aches.
Across seven books, Lewis returns again and again to the contest between noble courage and creeping corruption, and he does so with a prose style so clean it reads like cold water on a hot day. Narnia endures not because it is naïve, but because it dares to believe that valour matters — and it makes us believe it, too, however briefly, however fiercely.
4. A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
In Le Guin’s slender masterpiece, Young Ged, a gifted and arrogant sorcerer, begins his training on the island of Roke, where the vastness of true magic — and the terrible consequences of its misuse — await.
The prose is spare and beautiful, carrying the full weight of myth with elegance and grace. Here the struggle between good and evil is not a war of armies but a reckoning of the soul, and the tale that unfolds across Earthsea’s strange seas and stranger islands is as quietly powerful as anything in the genre.
5. The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson
Sanderson has built, upon the storm-blasted continent of Roshar, a monument to the idea that broken people can still choose to stand. The Stormlight Archive is epic in every conceivable dimension — sprawling battles, an intricate magic system powered by light itself, and a mythology so layered one could study it like theology.
Yet the true conflict is always personal. Kaladin struggles against despair. Dalinar seeks to become a better man than he once was. Shallan carries secrets she can scarcely admit to herself. The evil here is ancient and cosmic, but Sanderson never lets us forget that the most important battles are fought within. Five volumes strong, each novel in the series is a storm unto itself.
6. Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson
What if the Dark Lord won? That is the delicious, unsettling premise where Sanderson begins: a world of ash and mist, ruled for a thousand years by an immortal tyrant called the Lord Ruler. Into this grim landscape steps Vin, a street urchin who discovers she possesses Allomancy — the ability to burn metals for extraordinary power. Together with a charismatic crew of rebels, she sets out to overthrow an empire.
The magic system is a marvel of invention, but it is Vin — wary, fierce, and learning to trust — who gives the tale its beating heart. Sanderson has a gift for building worlds where nothing is quite what it seems, and this is among his finest demonstrations.
7. The Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb
Robin Hobb writes with a tenderness that borders on cruelty, for she makes you love her characters and then subjects them to every conceivable suffering.
FitzChivalry Farseer — royal bastard, trained assassin, reluctant hero — is one of the great protagonists in all of fantasy. His kingdom is besieged by raiders who strip the very humanity from their victims, and the evil that festers within the court is every bit as dangerous as the evil that sails from foreign shores.
Hobb’s prose is intimate and devastating; one feels Fitz’s loneliness as a physical weight. This is a story about duty and sacrifice and the terrible cost of loyalty, and it is magnificent.
8. The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander
Lloyd Alexander drew upon the deep well of Welsh mythology and from it raised something entirely his own: the land of Prydain, where the Horned King serves the dread Arawn Death-Lord and the fate of all free peoples hangs upon the courage of an Assistant Pig-Keeper named Taran.
Across five volumes, Taran grows from an impatient boy dreaming of glory into something far more interesting, and the journey is worth every page. The companions he gathers — the irrepressible Fflewddur Fflam, the fierce Princess Eilonwy, the loyal Gurgi — are drawn with such warmth that they feel less like characters and more like old friends.
Alexander’s prose is deceptively simple, his moral vision unwavering, and the final volume, The High King, won the Newbery Medal for good reason. This is good against evil rendered with the clarity of a struck bell.
9. Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn by Tad Williams
Before the modern renaissance of epic fantasy, Tad Williams wrote this towering trilogy and reminded readers what the genre could accomplish. Simon, a kitchen boy in a great castle, is thrust into a world-spanning conflict when the undead Storm King seeks to reclaim the land of Osten Ard.
Williams builds slowly — patience is required and richly rewarded — layering cultures, languages, and histories with a craftsman’s devotion. The influence of this series on later fantasy cannot be overstated; a certain well-known author of thrones has acknowledged the debt. The battle between good and evil here is vast and mythic, yet grounded in the stumbling courage of ordinary folk.
10. Dragonlance Chronicles by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
There is a particular joy in Dragonlance — of fellowship, of companions reunited, of a world worth saving because of the people who inhabit it. Tanis Half-Elven, Raistlin the conflicted mage, Sturm the honourable knight — they are archetypes, yes, but archetypes rendered with such affection that they burn themselves into memory.
The evil goddess Takhisis sends her dragon armies against the free peoples of Krynn, and the struggle is painted in bold, vivid colours. These books do not traffic in ambiguity; they believe in heroism, sacrifice, and the fundamental decency that rises when darkness descends. Sometimes, that is precisely the story one needs.
11. The Riftwar Saga by Raymond E. Feist
Feist opened a door between two worlds and invited us to walk through. The Riftwar Saga begins on Midkemia, a richly imagined secondary world of forests, mountains, and ancient magic, and expands into Kelewan, a realm shaped by honour, intrigue, and alien beauty. At the centre stands Pug, an orphan apprentice to a magician, and his friend Tomas, a soldier’s son whose own fate will prove no less extraordinary.
What begins as an invasion from across the dimensional rift deepens into a struggle against dark forces that threaten both worlds entirely. Feist writes with propulsive energy and genuine affection for his characters, and the scope of his ambition — spanning decades and dozens of books — is nothing short of remarkable. Here is a tale where courage and loyalty are tested across the boundaries of worlds, and good rises to meet evil on a truly cosmic stage.
12. The Belgariad by David Eddings
Eddings wrote The Belgariad with the express purpose of proving that the classic quest narrative still had life in it, and prove it he did. Young Garion, raised on a quiet farm by his Aunt Pol, discovers that he is heir to an ancient line of sorcerers and that the dark god Torak must be confronted. The company he assembles — the rogue, the knight, the berserker, the princess — is as charming a travelling party as you will find anywhere.
The evil is satisfyingly cosmic, the humour is warm and abundant, and the entire five-book arc moves with the confident pace of a storyteller who knows exactly where every thread is going.
13. Codex Alera by Jim Butcher
Born, according to legend, from a bet involving the lost Roman legion and Pokémon, Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera is a six-volume saga that refuses to be as absurd as its origin story. On the continent of Alera, every citizen commands elemental spirits called furies — earth, air, fire, water, wood, and metal — except young Tavi, a shepherd’s apprentice who possesses no fury at all. What he does possess is a ferocious intelligence and a moral compass that never wavers, even as conspiracy, civil war, and an alien invasion threaten to tear his world apart.
The Vord — a hive-minded, all-consuming enemy — represent an evil so absolute and so inhuman that the fractious nations of Alera must unite or perish entirely. Butcher handles the escalation with masterful confidence, and Tavi’s resourcefulness in a world that should leave him powerless is a constant delight. The good here fights not merely with swords and furies, but with wit, compassion, and an unshakeable refusal to abandon the people who need protecting.
14. The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon
Shannon accomplished something remarkable: a standalone epic fantasy of over eight hundred pages that feels both complete and enormous. Across four interwoven storylines spanning different continents, an ancient evil — the Nameless One, a draconic force of annihilation — threatens to rise once more.
Queens, dragonriders, mages, and spies must find their way to one another across borders of culture and suspicion. Shannon’s world-building draws from Eastern and Western traditions alike, and her vision of good versus evil embraces complexity without losing moral clarity. It is a feast of a book — rich, generous, and deeply satisfying.
15. The Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini
Paolini was fifteen when he began writing Eragon, and the youthful energy of the work is part of its considerable charm. A farm boy discovers a dragon egg, bonds with the hatchling Saphira, and is drawn into a rebellion against the tyrant King Galbatorix.
The scope expands with each volume — from a single valley to an entire continent at war — and the bond between Rider and dragon remains the radiant centre of the tale. The good-versus-evil framework is earnest and unapologetic, built on the belief that courage and compassion can topple even the most entrenched tyranny. A sweeping adventure, and a splendid gateway into the genre.
16. The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks
Brooks carried the torch when the road from Tolkien’s door might otherwise have gone dark. The Sword of Shannara wears its influences openly — a small company, a dark lord, an enchanted blade — and yet it carved its own space in the pantheon through sheer narrative energy and a gift for vivid, dangerous landscapes.
The Warlock Lord threatens the Four Lands, and only the descendant of an ancient bloodline can wield the one weapon capable of defeating him. Brooks went on to build one of the longest-running series in fantasy, but it all begins here, with a quest that is unapologetic in its love of the classic struggle.
17. Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
Bardugo asked a question both literal and haunting: what if darkness were not a metaphor, but a place? The Shadow Fold — a swath of impenetrable blackness teeming with winged terrors — divides the nation of Ravka, and it falls to Alina Starkov, a nobody with a gift she never suspected, to confront the ancient evil that lies at its heart.
Drawing on Russian folklore and Tsarist imagery, Bardugo built a world of lavish palaces and desperate soldiers where light and darkness are literally at war. The good-versus-evil conflict is vivid, atmospheric, and carried by a heroine who earns every ounce of her power.
18. The Deed of Paksenarrion by Elizabeth Moon
Elizabeth Moon asked the simplest and most radical question in all of fantasy: what does it actually mean to be good? Paksenarrion Dorthansdotter — Paks to those who know her — is a sheepfarmer’s daughter who runs away to join a mercenary company, and from that rough beginning embarks on a journey that will test every fibre of her courage and conscience.
Moon, herself a military veteran, writes combat with an authority that most fantasy authors can only envy, and Paks’s growth from green recruit to seasoned soldier is earned in blood and sweat and prayer. The evil in these pages is not abstract — it is slavery, corruption, and cruelty given terrible form — and the good that opposes it is not naïve but forged in suffering. This is a story about the cost of righteousness, and it is as stirring as a war hymn sung at dawn.
19. The Licanius Trilogy by James Islington
Islington arrived with a debut that read like the work of a seasoned master. In a world where the Augurs — once-revered seers — have been stripped of power and hunted into silence, a young man named Davian discovers that his own abilities run deeper than anyone suspected. Beyond a weakening magical barrier called the Boundary, an ancient darkness stirs, and the prophecies that once held it at bay are crumbling.
Islington weaves a narrative of extraordinary intricacy — time, fate, and sacrifice are braided together with a precision that recalls Sanderson at his most architecturally ambitious — and yet the emotional core never falters. The battle between good and evil here is cosmic in scope, reaching across centuries and threading through the very fabric of time itself, but it is grounded always in the choices of people who must decide what they are willing to give for the sake of a world that may not thank them. A modern classic of the genre, and one that deserves far wider recognition.
20. The Faithful and the Fallen by John Gwynne
We end with a thunderclap. John Gwynne’s four-volume saga is set in the Banished Lands, a world bracing for the God-War — a prophesied cataclysm in which the forces of Elyon, the Maker, and Asroth, the Dark Lord of the Fallen, will clash through their mortal champions. Corban, a young man in a quiet village, is swept into a conflict of staggering scale, and around him Gwynne assembles a cast so vivid — warriors, giants, shape-shifters, and wolven — that one feels the grit of every battlefield and the warmth of every campfire.
The prose is unflinching, the battles choreographed with a veteran’s eye, and the moral lines drawn with satisfying clarity. There are traitors and turncoats, yes, and moments when the darkness seems insurmountable, but Gwynne never loses faith in the idea that courage, loyalty, and love are worth fighting for. It is epic fantasy in its purest and most exhilarating form — a war between good and evil told with conviction and heart.
Why Good vs. Evil Endures in High Fantasy
We are sometimes asked why we return, again and again, to stories built upon a bright-line contest between good and evil. The answer, we believe, is that such stories tell us something true — not about the world, with all its muddle and moral fog, but about something larger and far more noble, lying just beyond our grasp.
The great high fantasy novels do not simplify; the best of them — as this list attests — complicate the struggle magnificently. But they never abandon the struggle itself, and neither, we suspect, do their readers. Happy adventuring, dear reader. May your shelves groan with wonders.
