Fantasy Books for Complete Beginners Who Hate Dragons

So you want to explore fantasy, but the moment someone mentions elves, wizards in pointy hats, or yet another chosen one destined to defeat the Dark Lord with the help of a wise old dragon, your eyes glaze over. You're not alone. For every reader who dreams of Middle-earth, there's another who finds traditional fantasy about as appealing as reading a physics textbook in Elvish. The good news? Fantasy has evolved far beyond castles and quests. Today's fantasy often unfolds in cities you'd recognize, featuring characters who check their phones, catch the subway, and deal with magical problems alongside their student loans. This collection proves that fantasy can feel as immediate and relevant as your morning commute—just with significantly more interesting complications.

The beauty of contemporary fantasy lies in how it sneaks magic into the familiar. Take Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, where Richard Mayhew's act of kindness to a bleeding girl on a London street drops him into London Below—a shadowy mirror world existing in the gaps and cracks of the city above. You'll never look at a tube station the same way again. Gaiman appears multiple times in this collection because he's mastered the art of making the fantastic feel inevitable. In The Ocean at the End of the Lane, he returns to the English countryside of his youth, where a man revisiting his childhood home recalls the Hempstock women who lived at the end of the lane—and the terrifying, wondrous events that unfolded when he was seven. It's fantasy wrapped in the gauze of memory, proving that magic often hides in the places we think we know best.

American Gods takes this concept continental, following ex-convict Shadow Moon across an America where forgotten deities drive taxis and run funeral homes, scraping by on whatever worship they can gather. Gaiman collaborated with Terry Pratchett for Good Omens, which presents the apocalypse as a very British affair, complete with an angel and demon who've grown rather fond of Earth after six thousand years and aren't keen on seeing it destroyed—especially not before they finish their respective collections of rare books and vintage Bentleys. The book reads like Douglas Adams decided to rewrite Revelation after a few pints.

Urban fantasy particularly excels at grounding magic in gritty reality. Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series, starting with Storm Front, introduces Harry Dresden—Chicago's only practicing professional wizard, listed in the phone book and everything. He's perpetually broke, his love life is a disaster, and he investigates supernatural crimes while trying to keep both the magical and mortal authorities off his back. Similarly, Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series, represented here by the novella Winter's Gifts, features Peter Grant, a London copper who discovers magic is real when he takes a witness statement from a ghost. The series treats magic like just another specialist unit in the Met—with proper paperwork and everything.

Lev Grossman's The Magicians takes the "magic school" trope and thoroughly adult-ifies it. Quentin Coldwater discovers that the magical land from his favorite childhood books is real, but also that being a magician involves massive amounts of difficult study, that magical knowledge doesn't automatically make you happy, and that power without wisdom tends to end badly. It's Harry Potter meets Bret Easton Ellis, with all the existential angst that implies.

Perhaps the most unique entry is China Miéville's The City & The City, which barely mentions magic at all. Instead, it presents two cities that exist in the same physical space, whose citizens have trained themselves to "unsee" the other city. When Inspector Tyador Borlú investigates a murder that crosses between cities, the fantasy element becomes a brilliant metaphor for how we navigate divided communities, willful blindness, and the borders we create. It's a crime novel that happens to have an impossible premise at its heart.

What unites these books is their insistence that fantasy isn't about escaping reality but about examining it through a different lens. They place magic in office buildings and police stations, in friendships and family dinners. These authors understand that you don't need a medieval setting to explore power, identity, love, loss, or what it means to be human. Sometimes you just need to suggest that the old gods are working as taxi drivers, that London has a hidden twin, or that magic comes with student debt. These books offer you fantasy that feels like coming home—if home occasionally tried to eat you or revealed that your neighbor is actually several thousand years old. Ready to discover that the fantastic has been hiding in plain sight all along?