Robert Holdstock died today. His books, which I read my senior year in high school, were instrumental in laying a foundation for my first attempts at genuine, authentic spirituality. He wrote vision-quests spectacular where his heroes and heroines delved into a real and fantastic landscape simultaneously composed of the individual psyche and the entire well of the human collective unconscious reaching to the most primordial centers of humanity’s existence.
When I first read Lavondyss, it grabbed hold of me immediately. Holdstock’s prose is hypnotic and mythic: he played word-melodies on the absolute deepest chords of the psyche. I have recently re-read a few of his books, and his work continues to influence my present spiritual development.
If you have not read Holdstock, you should. The world will be poorer without him.
Sailing to Byzantium 
I hadn’t heard of him before today, but doing a teensy bit of research turned up lots of talk about being among the handful of fantasy authors whose work is a worthy successor to the Tolkien legacy. High praise.