Without clichés fantasy?

[Big Insect]

Read all of Hawkmoon, Corum and Elric in my youth.
Eric is my type of background, and my Warhammer Oldworld army is Melniboneans. It's still a doomed Elf type race, resting on their arrogance and oast glories.
Grunts is a brilliant subversion, as is Orcs and anything Pratchett, just if I want a holiday read, I will inevitably go for something like Neal Ascher hard sci-fi (even if I disagree with his personal politics, he tells a good tale) , or Trudy Canavan or Rob Hobb high fantasy (although he still ends up with Dragons in his ship series, but in an unusual way).
BTW - if you want something REALLY very silly from Neal Ascher, try "Mason's Rats", a series 8f short stoeies, which also  got dramatised in the 'Love, Death & Robots' series too.

I'm a BIG Asher fan (as you say - disregarding his political views), especially a fan of the Prador - nasty armoured psychotic crab aliens ... what's not to adore! Will look out for the 'Mason's Rats' thing - I liked bits of 'Love, Death & Robots'. There's also an interesting idea somewhere about fantasy Conquistadores and magical central/south-american types (I nearly typed the 'Az' word then). It might have been adapted into one of the things on Amazon Prime that has that GW Space Marines mini-film in it (the name alludes me).

[Raider4]

Hmmmm ... I see ... not a Lovecraft fan 

Of the man? No, not at all. Nasty.

[Ithoriel]

Also by Mary Gentle, my apologies to her for forgetting this one, is "Ash: A Secret History."

So much more succinct than my synopsis was turning out to be:-

Amazon Review

Mary Gentle's Ash kills her first man when she is eight, and at 20 is an experienced captain of mercenaries in the small wars of the late Middle Ages--but not quite the Middle Ages we know from history. The more scholar Piers Ratcliffe works on the evidence, the more knowledge and recorded history and the rules of evidence crumble under him--this world of Visigoths with ceramic robots and of the religion of the Green Christ is nothing he knows of. Ash hears voices, but not like those of Joan of Arc--voices that give her very specific advice about the winning of battles. Married against her will to a man who despises her, but whom she lusts after; finding that the Visigoth general is her twin; coping with the day-to-day problems of battle and siege and mayhem, Mary Gentle's Ash is a magnificent creation. This long, passionate novel, blending historical fantasy with thoughtful speculative fiction, is as smart about the minutiae of medieval war-making and manners as it is about the wilder reaches of contemporary cosmology. --Roz Kaveney

[Steve J]

Well there is the Game of Thrones milieu too. But being Fantasy, you could choose anything you wanted of course!

[pierre the shy]

If you're after obscure without clichés fantasy then I would highly recommend the three Neustrian Cycle books by Leslie Barringer.

Set in Neustria (heavily based on 15th Century northern France) these novels have some magic but no non-human races and are (to me) really well written. 

Barringer worked for the BBC and published the first two books (Gerfalcon and Joris of the Rock) in the 1920's, with the concluding volume (Shy Leopardess) only appearing after WW2. They were republished in the 1970's by Newcastle Publishing Inc as part of their Forgotten Fantasy range. All three are currently avialable as kindle downloads.

[Big Insect]

Of the man? No, not at all. Nasty.

I have to say that I thought that the modern academic consensus on Lovecraft largely rehabilitated him, as:

a). a man of his times (racism and anti-Semitism were pretty rife in American society in the 1930s-1950's)

b). having been seriously wronged by a vengeful ex-wife, looking to capitalize upon his posthumous fame

c). as a man driven by extreme social anxiety (who appeared to like to play to a social audience he aspired to join or was affeered of being derided by)

d). all whilst also suffering from the excesses of an undiagnosed and badly treated sever metal illness, and often living in poverty and self-neglect

There is no doubt that some of his written work can, especially in todays light, be branded as both racist and anti-Semitic, but based upon the above points I suspect that such a label could well have been applied to a large majority of Americans, within his social circle, at that time. Not that this in anyway exonerates it, but he just happened to be one of the less than 0.01% of American that wrote about their thoughts and had them published, so we can identify him as thinking that way. There were plenty of others who (probably) thought the same and also wrote about it (privately), but they were just not published and didn't become famous.

The same applies to the fact that he is stated as being a Nazi sympathizer. Which is primarily based upon the testimony of his Jewish ex-wife, written after his death, who states that he bought, & avidly read Mein Kampf, as soon as it was published in the USA (in English in 1933). Oh course, he was not alone in this, some 7,300 copies of Mein Kampf were sold in the USA in 1933 alone, and at that time whilst Hitler's views on the Jews was well known (mainly through the reading of Mein Kampf) there was no hints of the horrors to come, until after the war had ended. Lovecraft appears to have tempered his views considerably after the war and the discovery of the holocaust.

Lovecraft's friends and close associates, and later academic historians, rigorously defend him against the more serious accusations made against him. Probably with some degree of just cause.

Anyway ... that's completely derailed that thread 

Mark

[Matt J]

I remember reading the Riftwar books some time ago. Sort of samurai types and Lizardmen iirc

[jambo1]

If you want something totally different, check out "Twilight the World of Anyaral" Some super figures and a great backstory.