A tarot deck already tells a story. Fantasy writers have been borrowing it for a hundred years.
The Major Arcana runs from The Fool, card zero, to The World, card twenty-one. Read in order, the cards trace a journey: a naive traveller sets out, meets teachers and rulers, faces love, power, death and judgement, and comes out changed at the end.
That is the shape of half the fantasy ever written. No wonder so many novelists have turned to the cards for structure, symbols and magic.
Some of the books below use tarot as a game with deadly stakes. Some turn the cards into gateways between worlds. Some build their whole structure around the deck. All of them treat the cards as something more than a fortune-teller’s prop.
Last Call by Tim Powers
If you only read one tarot novel, make it this one.
Scott Crane is a professional gambler who once sat in on a strange game of poker played with tarot cards. He has no idea what he really lost that night.
The man behind the game is Georges Leon, a mobster and occultist who uses tarot magic to move his mind into other people’s bodies. Leon wants to live for ever and claim the mantle of the Fisher King, the wounded king of Arthurian myth. And he has unfinished business with Crane.
Powers takes real history, including the gangster Bugsy Siegel and the founding of Las Vegas, and weaves it into a secret history of magic. It won both the World Fantasy Award and the Locus Award, and nobody writes the tarot with more menace.
Read it if you want the cards as high-stakes gambling, ancient kingship and a game nobody walks away from.
Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny
Corwin wakes in a private hospital with no memory of who he is.
He soon learns that he is a prince of Amber, the one true world, of which every other world, including ours, is only a shadow. His brothers and sisters are scattered across those shadows, and one of them, Eric, means to take the throne.
The family keeps in touch through the Trumps: painted cards bearing each royal’s face. Stare into a Trump and you can speak to the person on it. Reach through, and you can step into their world.
This is royal intrigue at its sharpest. Every sibling is scheming, every alliance is temporary, and the cards are the only way across the board. The Chronicles of Amber runs to ten books, and the first five tell Corwin’s complete story.
Read it if you want a family at war for a throne and tarot-style cards as doorways between worlds.
The Gunslinger by Stephen King
“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
Roland of Gilead is the last of an order of knights, crossing a dying world in pursuit of a sorcerer who may know the way to the Dark Tower, the centre of all things.
At the end of the chase, the man in black sits down by a fire and reads Roland’s fortune with a tarot deck. The cards he turns over shape the whole series that follows, and the second book even takes its title, The Drawing of the Three, from that reading.
The Gunslinger is short, strange and haunting. It is King at his most mythic, and the start of one of the great finished fantasy sagas.
Read it if you want a lone hero, a dying world and a tarot reading that echoes across seven books.
Every tarot journey begins with The Fool.
The Fool, the prequel to my tarot-structured series The Ravenglass Chronicles, is free in my Starter Library, along with four more books, sent straight to your Kindle.
The Ravenglass Chronicles by Jon Cronshaw
This one is mine, and the tarot is not decoration in it. The cards are the skeleton.
The Ravenglass Chronicles is told in twenty-one novellas, one for each card of the Major Arcana, from The Magician to The World. Each story takes its shape from the meaning of its card. The Hierophant brings Kat face to face with a faith she has never known. The Hermit sends her alone into the dark beneath a city.
Kat is heir to the Ostreich Empire, and the last thing she wants to do is rule. When the rituals of the royal court give her a ravenglass blade that wakes to her blood, she begins to dream of things she cannot explain, and to ask who really killed her father. Her only guide is Witz, a talking wyvern who serves as the Empress’s spymaster and whose help always seems to come with strings attached.
The magic of the world follows the deck, too. Ravenglass blessings fall into swords, cups, wands and coins, the four suits of the Minor Arcana. If you know the cards, you will spot their imagery all the way through. If you don’t, you will simply get a coming-of-age epic about a girl learning what power costs.
The series is finished, and the complete omnibus collects all twenty-one novellas. Kat’s story then continues into the Minor Arcana with Ace of Swords.
Content note: animal death, self-harm and some dark themes. Sex happens off the page.
The Last Sun by K.D. Edwards
Atlantis was real. When it fell, its survivors resettled on the island of Nantucket and built New Atlantis, a city ruled by Courts named after the cards of the Major Arcana.
Rune Saint John is the last son of the Sun Court, which was massacred when he was a boy. He scrapes by on odd jobs with his bodyguard and best friend, Brand. Then the Lovers Court hires him to find a missing young man, and the trail leads back to the night his family died.
This is urban fantasy with a sharp mouth and a big heart. The banter between Rune and Brand is a joy, and the Arcana Courts give the world a ready-made political map. It is the first book of The Tarot Sequence.
Read it if you want tarot as a system of power, a found family and a slow-burn romance. Expect plenty of swearing.
The Greater Trumps by Charles Williams
Published in 1932, this is one of the first tarot fantasies, and still one of the strangest.
Lothair Coningsby inherits an old pack of cards from a friend. Henry Lee, the young man engaged to Lothair’s daughter Nancy, recognises it at once: the original tarot deck, which his family has been hunting for centuries.
The Lees already own a set of golden figures that move in an endless dance, one for each of the Greater Trumps. Bring the cards and the figures together, and you can command the elements themselves. By Christmas Day, Henry is willing to raise a storm to get what he wants.
Charles Williams was one of the Inklings, alongside Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, and he knew the tarot well. The prose is of its time and the theology runs deep, but nobody has made the cards feel stranger or more sacred.
Read it if you want a classic of the genre and the tarot treated as a doorway to the divine.
The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino
A group of travellers find shelter in a castle after crossing a dark forest. Each of them has lost the power of speech.
To tell their stories, they lay out tarot cards on the table, one after another. A knight, a queen, a tower, a hanged man. The other guests have to read each tale from the pictures, and the same cards turn up in story after story, meaning something different every time.
Calvino built the book from real historical decks, including the fifteenth-century Visconti-Sforza tarot. It is short, playful and unlike anything else on this list: less a novel than a puzzle box made of fairy tales.
Read it if you love the cards themselves and want to see how many stories a single deck can hold.
Poison Princess by Kresley Cole
Evie Greene has visions she cannot explain. Then the Flash scorches the earth, and the world she knew is gone.
Evie learns that she is the Empress, one of twenty-two teenagers who carry the powers of the Major Arcana. Every few centuries, the Arcana are reborn and forced to fight one another until only one remains.
This is young adult post-apocalyptic fantasy with tarot at its core. Each character’s abilities come from their card, and part of the fun is guessing who is hiding behind which trump. Be aware that the romance between Evie and Jackson is front and centre.
Read it if you want a deadly game built on the Major Arcana, with every card a player.
Why the Tarot Works So Well in Fantasy
A tarot deck is a story kit. It comes with a hero (The Fool), mentors (The Magician, The High Priestess), rulers (The Empress, The Emperor), trials (Strength, The Tower) and an ending (The World).
The best tarot fantasy uses that kit in different ways. Powers turns the cards into a game of souls. Zelazny turns them into doorways. King turns a single reading into prophecy. Calvino turns the deck into a language.
And when a book follows the Major Arcana in order, the reader gets something rare: a map of the journey before it begins, with no idea how each card will play out.
Where to Start
For tarot as a deadly game of souls, start with Last Call.
For a royal family at war and cards that open doors, read Nine Princes in Amber.
For a reading that shapes an entire saga, pick up The Gunslinger.
For a complete coming-of-age epic built card by card on the Major Arcana, begin The Ravenglass Chronicles.
For tarot Courts, banter and a found family, try The Last Sun.
For one of the first and strangest tarot fantasies, choose The Greater Trumps.
For a puzzle box of stories told in cards, read The Castle of Crossed Destinies.
And for young adult survival with twenty-two deadly players, open Poison Princess.
Start With The Fool for Free
The Fool is card zero: the traveller at the edge of the cliff, about to step into the unknown.
It is also where The Ravenglass Chronicles begins. The Fool is the prequel to the series, and it is part of my free Starter Library: five books, five doors into the Ravenglass Universe, sent straight to your Kindle.
Read the first card for free, then follow Kat through the rest of the deck.
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