March's recommendation: the Black Jewels trilogy by Anne Bishop. Titles are Daughter of the Blood, Heir to the Shadows, and Queen of the Darkness.
The key thing with these books is that they invert a certain set of fantasy tropes. Here, Dark = Good. Dark = Powerful. Dark = What You Want To Be. Light does not really = Evil, but it does = Weak. Magical strength is measured on a spectrum of Jewels, and White is the weakest. Black, of course, is the strongest. The inversion goes on from there, in a number of semi-random ways; three of the main characters are named Saetan, Daemon, and Lucivar, and Saetan is the High Lord of Hell. But Saetan is not Satan, and Hell is not the place where bad people go when they die; it's where powerful people go when they die, while their spirits are still too strong for them to return to the Darkness. This is all a part of a very very complicated cosmological setup that I still don't quite have straight in my head, but I find it all very interesting.
Anyone looking for themes in my recommendations may notice that Gentle, Carey, and Bishop all show a fair amount of strength when it comes to description (although Gentle's description tends to be more of the sort that will turn your stomach). Bishop has a nicely sensory style, which particularly manifests when she's describing the use of magic. I will grant, however, that while she describes some things brilliantly, others are as vague as they come. There are any number of things in these books I could not explain to you. Partly this is my fault; I know, for instance, that I failed to pay attention at the beginning of Daughter of the Blood, and therefore missed the geography lesson Lucivar gives to Jaenelle, so I went through the whole trilogy thinking Kaeleer lay above Terreille, which in turn lay above Hell, when in fact Kaeleer is between Terreille and Hell. (My logic was that "Kaeleer" clearly came from the Latin "caelum" or "sky.") But there are definitely whole segments of the setting Bishop just glosses over, and other segments that fit in rather oddly; this comes across as a non-industrial setting, and yet there are showers. I'm not sure what's run by magic and what isn't.
I suppose I should get around to talking about the plot. Without getting bogged down in explaining the social system of this world. If I can. Let's give it a shot.
The Blood are people with magical ability. Females of the Blood (oddly, Bishop uses "female" and "male" much more often than "woman" and "man") are generically called witches, and their strength varies up and down the spectrum mentioned above. Some witches are what they call Queens, which means they are, by nature, the focal points around which their society organizes. But once in a very long while, a female comes along who is not just a witch, but Witch. A Black-Jeweled Queen, more powerful than any of those around her. This trilogy is about a particular incarnation of Witch, and about what happens when she comes into her power.
One of the things that initially put me off about this trilogy is that it takes place in a type of setting that usually annoys me, namely, one where men are being oppressed (and apparently half of them are essentially sex slaves, including Daemon and Lucivar. This does, however, lead to Daemon being a very . . . interesting character. Let's just say I don't ever want him angry at me. He's been known to kill people because he gets slightly annoyed.) Anyway, I'm not a fan of settings where either women or men are in that situation. But I ended up not minding here mostly because it soon becomes clear that this is a perversion of natural Blood society. These people are, for reasons that are a mix of biology and magic, naturally matriarchal, but someone has come along and twisted that, and the good guys are on the side of putting things back the way they should be. The paper idea I got at ICFA involves exploring how Bishop sets up an idea of society which is female-centric, with female symbols, but does so while still striking a balance between the roles men and women are expected to play. That is the balance Witch is trying to restore. (I'd be interested to know the reactions of male readers to these books.)
I'm pretty sure Daughter of the Blood was Bishop's first book, and here and there it shows. While most of the time her style pleases me, occasionally she just picks the wrong word, and there are places when I think she mishandles a bit of plot. Additionally, although I did enjoy the trilogy as a whole, the ending didn't satisfy me as much as I liked. I think the reason -- and don't worry; I'm not really giving anything away here -- is that you never get the point of view of Jaenelle (Witch), and so when it comes down to the crunch at the end you don't really get the full impact of what she's doing. But a recent comment from Stone Cold (to the effect that he's not sure whether Mary Gentle is a good writer or just a good plotter) made me realize that I'm actually not that concerned with making sure my recommendations are for books that are perfect on every count. Gentle, Carey, and Bishop all have their flaws, certainly. If I had more time to read, and therefore more books to choose from in my recommendations, I'd probably try to cull a little more carefully. But at the moment, what I'm doing is recommending books that aren't your usual Tolkien-clone novelized-D&D-session fantasy -- things that strike me as interesting and fresh. Moreover, Carey and Bishop are both new-ish authors who I think should go on writing, so I'm encouraging more people to read them.
I feel, when all is said and done, like I haven't done a very good job of recommending this trilogy. For some reason, I'm failing to capture the feel of these books, and therefore why one should read them. I'm not sure what I can do to fix that, either. There's a whole wealth of stuff in them -- Queens and Warlord Princes, Black Widows and the demon-dead, Guardians and kindred and Birthright Jewels and the Offering to the Darkness and the creepy, creepy repetition of "Briarwood is the pretty poison. There is no cure for Briarwood" -- that is fascinating just to immerse yourself in, even if when you come up for air you realize you don't quite get what all of it is. Bishop's written at least one more book in this setting, and I hope she'll do more; it definitely could use more exploration. But anyway. The best I can do is to toss this incoherent ramble out there, and advise you all to pick up the first book and try some of it. Maybe it won't be to everyone's taste, but at the very least you should all taste it and decide for yourselves.