Also of interest...in flights into the fantastical

Inheritance

by Christopher Paolini

(Knopf, $28)

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The final novel in Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle will have fans “speed-reading” its 880 pages to find out the fate of the farmboy-turned-warrior Eragon and his blue dragon, said Yvonne Zipp in The Washington Post. Though the book “could have been tighter,” Paolini serves up a “propulsive plot and plenty of answers.” Parents might consider some of the violence a bit dark for young-adult readers, but “Paolini is hardly the worst offender” in that regard.

Out of Oz

by Gregory Maguire

(Morrow, $27)

By expanding the mythology behind L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, Gregory Maguire has created “a land as rich as Middle-earth or Narnia,” said Brian Truitt in USA Today. The “satisfying finish” to Maguire’s Wicked Years saga begins as a bookend to Baum’s series, with “a motley crew traveling down the Yellow Brick Road.” Eighteen years after the “Matter of Dorothy,” Rain, the granddaughter of the Wicked Witch of the West, is traveling with friends old and new in search of her long-lost parents.

The Night Eternal

by Guillermo del Toro & Chuck Hogan

(Morrow, $27)

Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro and novelist Chuck Hogan have written “the only truly worthy successor” to Anne Rice’s great vampire series, said Alan Cheuse in the San Francisco Chronicle. Their Strain trilogy, about a vampire plague that sweeps the world, reaches its climax with the evil vampire Master exploding nuclear warheads to plunge the world into permanent night. If you’re a bedtime reader, you may worry that the “light might never return.”

In Other Worlds

by Margaret Atwood

(Nan A. Talese, $25)

Years after she “ruffled the feathers of sci-fi fans” by appearing to disavow the genre, Margaret Atwood has done a 180-degree turn, said John Williford in The Miami Herald. In Other Worlds delves into the history of fantastical fiction and the origins of Atwood’s own interest in using its tools in such dystopian novels as The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake. The result is “a delightful read, full of Atwood’s well-honed prose and sly sense of humor.”