You were drawn to how O'Malley follows the towering, centaur-like stranger from a Black Sea steamer toward the Caucasus, feeling the tug of a realm older than reason. In The King of Elfland's Daughter, Alveric brings Lirazel out of Elfland into the fields we know, and the pull of her true home becomes irresistible. The book's luminous scenes—Alveric's moonlit hunt with a rune-forged sword, the parliament of Erl longing for magic—echo that same mythic threshold you loved, where the human world brushes the hooves of legend.

If the pantheistic current that carries O'Malley east—past the skeptical doctor and into a landscape that feels alive—was your favorite thread, Mythago Wood will seize you. Steven Huxley returns to Ryhope Wood and discovers "mythagos": beings like Guiwenneth, born from the forest’s deep memory. As O'Malley senses an older consciousness in mountains and steppe, Holdstock's wood molds time, love, and identity, turning the natural world into a living mind that answers human longing with its own.

If Blackwood’s language—those rapturous passages where O'Malley feels the great Being of Nature breathing through wind and rock—was what captivated you, Lilith offers a similarly exalted cadence. Mr. Vane steps from his library into a visionary realm guided by the enigmatic Raven, encountering Mara, the sleepers in the House of Silence, and Lilith herself. The sentences glow, the imagery is devotional, and the journey reads like a hymn—much as the Caucasus becomes scripture for O'Malley’s soul.

If O'Malley’s inward pilgrimage—leaving the doctor’s rational comfort for a surrender to the All—moved you most, Siddhartha distills that metamorphosis. Siddhartha seeks wisdom through austerity, love, and commerce, but finds it sitting with the river and listening with the ferryman Vasudeva. Where the centaur awakens O'Malley to a single, living presence in sea and mountain, Hesse renders the same realization in the river’s voice: everything flows, everything is one.

If following the mysterious stranger from the Black Sea into the Caucasus felt like stepping off the map of the everyday, A Voyage to Arcturus pushes that sensation into the cosmos. Maskull, urged on by the uncanny Nightspore, travels to Tormance where new senses awaken, landscapes embody ideas, and figures like Surtur and Crystalman challenge his soul. As O'Malley sheds the doctor’s skepticism for a vaster truth, Maskull’s odyssey strips reality to its blazing core.