Jane Mailander's Waning Grey captures the lighter atmosphere of the films with consumate skill (I'll read anything she writes, in any fandom.) and creates something which is both real, beautiful, and very, very slightly camp in the way film Batman should be. Jane St Clair takes a different view with the Authority fictions Knight After Night and Pulling Your Bat Out Of The Fire, which capture Batman's otherness and distance with style.

Angst and misery in comic-based fiction do it for me. M J Lee's paired A Song of Innocence and A Song of Experience cut right down to the bone. And I loved Lachesis' short, Power Suit. On the romantic side, James Walks With Wind's The Best Laid Plans is simple and very neat.

Gen? I recommend you head over to AJ's The Family Archives right now, by far the biggest and most beautiful het Batclan archive on the web.

E. Kelly produced the most stylish piece of writing noir with Fall to Grace, an epic in itself. Jody Revenson's Oracle and Nightwing (archived on TFA) is a great piece of adult erotica. And what can you say about Smitty, Syl Francis and Chicago? Go on, read just one of the Potatoverse stories, or the Friends series...better yet, read September, a multi-textured, multimedia epic. SKH's Best Girl, First Girl, Only Girl, is a beautiful piece of storytelling, and Syl's JLA/Titans: Invasion! is a novel that should be optioned by DC right now. Finally, Benway's In The Blood (UPDATE - seems to be off the web. Beg, borrow or steal a copy, if you can) is disturbing, evocative and intelligent, one of the stories that remind me why I read batgen. One of these days Benway will have a site for his own fiction - and it will be glorious.

Arcives:
Walking The Plank
Instained Fingers
Skyehawke


There's a tradition of absolutely gorgeous novels available on the web, but these are stories that, for various reasons, I'll re-read. I need to acknowlege Mairead Triste's A Choriambic Progression (HP/SS) which pulled me, kicking and screaming, into the fandom, but further investigation provided Shiradine's beautifully paced and written Artemisia Absinthium, a joy to read for its phraseology alone. Diannan's White Chocolate tears my heart out, every time, and the sequel Dark Chocolate puts it back together (and reminds me, in no bad way, of Jan Siegel's Witch trilogy). Dolores Crane's Closing Time - whoa - hits hard, one of those stories you'd give your eye-teeth to have have written, and her Crucius is a intelligent, beautiful piece of prose. Also Therese Ann Wymer's Clipped Wings, with its original, stark premise.

For quality of writing, I was absolutely bowled over by Alexandra Dane's Peripheral Vision. I have read little to compare with this in any fandom. It's astonishing. Read.

For pure comfort fiction - romance and humour - I'll read Diane Williams, Dementordelta and Aucta Sinistra.

The one WIP which I'm reading, obsessively, is Ac1d6urn's Price of Magic. Now, normally, I avoid WIP's like the plague, and I have an unreasonable loathing of fiction posted to Livejournal, but this one - this one is worth it.

Archives:
The Seventh Dimension
hl_flash, for news

There is so much good fiction in Highlander that trying to sort it in any terms is impossible. I can only say, these are my favourite stories and writers, in a fandom where so much is good.

I'll read anything by Aristide and Mairead Triste, angst-ridden, occasionally violent fiction with an edge of black humour. MacGeorge is prolific and spectacular, writing fiction which should be canon. Killa's style (and the two most outstanding WIP's in Highlander): Amand-r's mixture of horror and adventure, esjay's evocative, lengthy plot-driven epics: Becca Abbot, whose Forsaken is one my favourite feel-good fictions. All of these are splendid writers. Oh, I could go on for ever here: zen&nancy, Cinel Dunant, Devo, Taselby, Chris Powers, (Phoenix Fire and Fool's Gold, plot with style: what a writer this woman is) Taz, Carenejeans.. All I can say is that these are the stories that I really love.

Lanning Cook's Sacred Trust. This is such an amazing piece of writing. It's one of those stories that must have been planned and patterned, a fomat of opposites and oppositions circling and resolving in elegant and exact prose. I love the way Lanning Cook sets image against image, ideal against reality, character against character: creates a completely believeable villain and allows him to point up both evil and redemption. (not to mention setting up Joe's disability and his acceptence of it against..well, you'll just have to read it.) There are so many good moments: Amanda throwing tins at the barge, Joanna and Richie tormenting the watchers with anonymous telephone calls, Duncan..not..throbbing...Set aside a day and read it slowly, with chocolate.

Loch Ness. And Then Some. Again, a lengthy plot driven fiction, alternating flashbacks to Europe in the 1940's and present day. It's a miracle of writing, lovingly detailed and entirely believeable. This is what the published Highlander novels should have been like: the existence of a piece of writing this good can justify fan fiction all by itself.

And another plot driven fiction, on an alternative note. Dargelos' White Rabbit (seems to be off the web again, blast) takes distinctly different slant on Methos' history. Dargelos writes so well, edgy, real fiction: this is a woman who's been there and knows what it smells like. I'll read everything she writes, from the humour of her Merry/Pippin short to the extended angst of the Oz series Damaged Goods. White Rabbit takes the image of Methos' 1960's band The Old Dead Guys and runs with it, with such style. I'm not going to mention plot. Just read it.

How can I not mention Kat Allison again? Frankly, everything she's ever written on Highlander. Once. I find her gut-wrenchingly honest, come away thinking, yes, this is how it was, how can it not be like this? and then I can't bear to re-read...

C.Decarnin for the uncomfortable, sexually explicit And Hades Followed Him and The Deep. Consensual SM warning, almost startlingly pornographic: but then she produces Seeds, which is a gem of a story with virtually no sex at all...

Taselby writes hard hitting, edgy fiction: her Sedimental Journey is my personal favourite Duncan/Methos love story. The Book of Lost Days is possibly her best known piece of Highlander fiction, but I've never managed to read it more than once, it's that kind of good.

Sylvia Volk, who writes Methos and Duncan with humour, authority, and a singular, intelligent and informed vision. Every story she writes is a masterpiece (although I still can't work out the blasted Watcher CD. I'm hoping it's a work in progress, but the odds are I'm just not clever enough). I could be completely wrong here, but I see, not my own blatent borrowing, but just the echoes of Francis Crawford laughing behind Methos' back. If you read Dunnett, you'll love Sylvia Volk: she has the same involved, emotionally intense, concentrate or you'll miss it style.

And finally. Unovis.
When I grow up, I'm going to write like Unovis.

toft_froggy's String Theory. A McKay/Sheppard AU, where John is the son of a famous violinist and McKay a conductor. What really made this story was the discussion and writing of a passion for music: for the musically illiterate here, it was an amazing depiction of the emotion and structure of classical music. An astonishing piece of writing, fantastic.

synecdochic's freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. This is...well. 23 pages of comments, and deserved. Set well after the series ends. Again, a story with ideas - in this case, physics, and teaching. These is a gut wrenching piece of writing that hits the mind as well as the heart, hard.