Katherine Kurtz
Pretty much any time my lj goes quiet, it's a sign that I'm either busy at dayjob or actually writing fiction. The last two years it's been both.
Current novel (which will be my 4th completed* novel) passed the climax and has only the denoument to go. Naturally, it's a bit hung up at this point; I've been traveling, which isn't conducive to writing.
ANYWAY, I want to point to this article on Strange Horizons, written by la_marquise_de_. I will note that I am "--E" in the comments on the article.
I'll also link to a previous time I mentioned Katherine Kurtz here on my blog (see item #5 in the list).
I used to get F&SF specifically so I could check the adverts for forthcoming books and see if another Deryni novel was coming out soon. And this was back in the day when authors rarely published more than one book a year, and usually less often than that. But I wanted to know. My friend Chris and I would walk the mile or so to the small bookstore near our high school and look for them. I don't know why it didn't occur to us to tell the bookstore people to call one of us when the next book came in--maybe that wasn't a thing in those days, and of course the only phone number either of us had was a family landline. Maybe I just didn't want to risk the message going astray. In college I would buy the hardcover at my uni bookstore, read it, then ship it to Chris. She would read it and ship it back. That's how much the two of us were addicted to those books.
From my second comment on the linked article:
All those political intrigue books? Or "I want revenge"-grimdark books?
Kurtz's children.
There is a strain of contemporary fantasy that departs from the High Fantasy stakes of world-threatening Problems. No transcendent evil, no hordes of ravening critters out to destroy things for the sake of destroying things, not even a magical cataclysm on the horizon.
We have books now that are about the contests between people. These often run to the grim (with varying shades of dark), but the focus of the stories is on the characters inside them, and what they are or are not willing to do in order to accomplish their goals.
...
Kelson and Morgan and Camber and the rest of Kurtz's Deryni characters aren't threatened by some Transcendent Evil. They're threatened by people...
Always, always, about the people. People with motivations that are incredibly familiar and relatable: greed, resentment, arrogance. And opposed by heroes who may be motivated to hang on to their own power, but generally try to use their power for the greater good (which is what makes them preferable to the opposition).
...
But the [folks] on both sides of the conflict are people. Tolkien's Fellowship faced orcs and monsters, and the enemy humans were simply driven by Sauron's pervasive eeeeeevil. Modern-day fantasy doesn't depend on that, and often revels in the clashes between old enemies who know each other personally, and circle round and round until they finally get a shot to finish their business.
Kurtz did not-quest-fantasy in an era when quest fantasy was the main thing. Quest fantasy continued to be A Thing through the 90s, and then the fashions turned again and now the big sellers in fantasy, to one degree or another, are strongly character-driven. Even when the larger plot is some world-threatening Thing, a book will spend most of its words on the protagonist's inner life, and the backstory and rivalries he/she/they has with other people.
---------SPOILERS HERE------------
In another comment on the article, I mention "the scenes between Wencit and Derry." This is a chunk in the middle of High Deryni when the Big Bad, Wencit of Torenth, has captured Sean lord Derry, loyal man to and spy on behalf of main protag Alaric Morgan. Derry is a minor lordling, a human with no magical powers (the main protags and antags all have magic). He and Morgan are totally bromantic, long before the term existed. Derry is smart and capable and loyal and relentlessly likeable in that way that only major secondary characters can be.
So when Wencit tortures Derry, we feel it. But what's amazing is it isn't bloody and nasty, none of the modern propensity of blood for blood's sake. In fact, Wencit barely sheds any of Derry's blood, just a hairline scratch. No broken bones. No starvation. Not even much in the way of roughing him up.
Wencit messes with his head. There's a long, slow build-up of mental fuckery, keeping Derry off-balance and afraid. It culminates with Wencit mentally raping him, putting controls in Derry's head. In that, Kurtz does not hold back. We get Derry's fear and despair as he begins to realize not just what Wencit did to him, but is continuing to do to him. Derry, knowing he will be used against Morgan, tries to kill himself (something he considers a profound sin, but he would rather go to hell than betray Morgan), but he can't even do that, with what Wencit has done to him.
The whole sequence is gut-wrenching. I cried like mad the first several times I read it.
What is also clear there in the subtext (the scenes are mostly in Derry's POV) is that Wencit is motivated not just because hey, here's a useful tool in his war, but because he hates Morgan and knows that making Derry betray him will hurt Morgan more than simply killing Derry. Wencit is subtle and multilayered and devious and deliciously hateful.
------------
All of that? Is what I aspire to. I write lots of characters who spend a lot of time psychologically screwing with each other, and it all comes back to that sequence where Wencit brain-fucks Derry. If I ever had to point to a moment in a book and say, "This--this is what made me want to be a writer of the sort of stuff I write," it would be this sequence.
There's lots of other awesome and grim stuff in the books, but that bit--oh, that just slays me. And I want more like it, and no one else is really doing it, and now I've written four fucking novels that are just loaded with dynamics like that. (Which now makes me worry because too much of the same thing is boring for the reader.)
So yeah, if you want books where decent people are trying to do the best they can against terrible, complex people, and often have to make very hard choices, go look up Kurtz's Deryni books.
* Where "completed" = "has a complete first draft." The quality of that draft is a different question. But I think this one is pretty good; certainly I'm writing better first drafts now. Hooray for improvement.