These are books that the egroup came up with.  (Much of the text below is not mine, but copied and stitched together from that group.  Anything that says "I" refers to the original writer of that comment, not the web page author.)  The goal is to help turn you on to similar writers to McKillip.  Maybe something to get you by those times between McKillip's releases...

I've linked each cover image to the proper Amazon page.  Go there and check out the customer reviews if it catches your eye.

Robin McKinley is a good place to start.  Her books are always next to McKillip's on the shelf, anyway.  The two books below are the first books of hers that I read.   The Hero and the Crown is great.  Both books have female heroes.

Barbara Hambly is another really good one.  I strongly suggest Dragonsbane.   It reads well with several wonderful spots of humor.  It
reminds me of McKillip since all the characters in this novel are well thought out and believable.  Some of the plot twists end up with the truly
unexpected happening as well, in a quite reasonable and believeable fashion as the characters begin to find things out.  She wrote some sequels to this; they aren't as good.  But a lot of her other books are very good, so try her out.  The Silent Tower and The Silicon Mage are two good ones if you can find them.

Almost anything by Peter S. Beagle...McKillip wrote an introduction to the Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietsche, but it seems to be a bit hard to find now.  The Last Unicorn is wonderful, though. 

Katherine Kerr wrote the series  Deverry, Westlands, and Dragon Mage.  These are three series of  books, but they are really just one big story. These should be read in order. The first book is Daggerspell and is one of the best. The second book is Darkspell and is probably the worst, so if you get disillusioned on this one, keep going.  (Evan: Personally, I found these so good I couldn't put the series down from the first one to the last one.  Try the first series of four books, they stand alone, and see if you like them.)

Barry Hughart's books are literary without being pretentious, joyful, amusing and delightful, with a strain of seriousness (like a minor riff in music) running through the stories. Set in an Ancient China of Barry's imagination they tell of Master Li "an ancient sage with a slight flaw in his character" and his offsider, Number Ten Ox. They solve mysteries, restore goddeses to their rightful places and create mayhem. Utterly delightful. The down side is that there are only three books, and no signs of any more.

 Tim Powers has a knack for convincing you that you've completely missed the way the world really works till now.  And then you read the next book, and he's just as persuasive, with some completely different kind of magic. He has this way of finding illogical bits of history and then explaining them.. (Bugsy Siegel was the Fisher King? Well, after Last Call, it makes sense.)

P.C. Hodgell can be a bit hard to find, but Meisha Merlin is re-releasing her first two books as an omnibus this September (called Dark of the Gods).  My experience is that people either utterly adore Hodgell's writing,  unless they find the prose too dense and can't get into it.  This tends to be similar to the occasional complaint I get about McKillip, so I think that this would be more of a recommendation for McKillip fans than anything else.  There is a awful lot going on in Hodgell's books, as in McKillip's, and if you try to skim in your reading, you can end up wondering what just happened. (I personally think it's a very good thing when you can still catch something new on the third read-through of a book.)

Hodgell is vastly underappreciated- largely due to difficulties w/ agents and publishers which led her first book to go out of print, after which no one wanted the sequel (not enough money in a sequel if new readers can't find the first half.)  She really deserves to be better known than she is.

I got a brief comment about Mervyn Peake, and his Gormenghast trilogy, collected in Titus Groan.  It was described as luscious with the quote "....and the roses were stones....".  It looks pretty interesting and I liked the quote.

A lot of folks chimed in with Guy Gavriel Kay.  The Fionavar Tapestry (a trilogy: The Summer Tree, The Wandering Fire, The Darkest Road) seems to be very well liked.   Arbonne and Tigana also got comments, with the Tigana comments being a bit mixed.

If you've missed Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series somehow, go get them.  Trust me.  I liked this series in part because it follows the main character through a significant period of time--in terms of decades, not years, so we see him age and mature quite a bit more than is normal for even a long fantasy series. And the aging and maturing is always believable.

I also have to recommend Jane Yolen's book Briar Rose.  It's sort of a fairy tale rendering of a WWII story, but that description doesn't do it justice.  It's set in modern times with a woman researching her grandmother and finding out about this whole history the grandmother had that the woman never knew about.

Mark Helprin was mentioned as well.  His prose seems to be gorgeous.

Diana Wynne Jones has a lot of followers on the McKillip list. She's weird, wacky, wonderful, and happily prolific. Her books range from very good to excellent, from funny to serious, and the old one seems to be being suddenly reissued. Perhaps in the wake of the whole Harry Potter thing, as her books are often billed as children's books (as are McKillip's). A lot of libraries have them too. Fire and Hemlock is a reworking of the Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer faerie tales.

Janny Wurts.  The Wars of Light and Shadow (starting with Curse of the Mistwraith).  Her plots twist like the worst tangle of hair... and when a little piece gets straightened and you're rereading you see all the signs...and Arithon... ahhh.  And her descriptions... well, if McKillip wasn't the undisputed #1 on my list, Janny would be.

Mickey Zucker Reichert.  The Legend of Nightfall is one of my all-time favs.  The cliche bad guy with a good heart... well, MZR does him better than anyone but Wurts & McKillip.  Her other two adult series are quite good too, but her newest y.a. is very, very fluffy.

Theodore Sturgeon... his characters are very, very human.  His stories are not the kind to leave you with a happy glowing fealing afterwards, but they make you think, and they have that feel of: wow! that so many of the earlier sf authors had.  That wow that has been replaced more and more by fancy words... don't get me wrong, I love fancy words.  But there's a time for them, and there's a time to get a story clean out, and the brunt of newer authors don't seem to be able to tell the difference.  If the words don't add anything, they shouldn't be there.

Some of Your Blood - no cover for this one.

Fantasy writers? What of the grand-master, grandfather of fantasy? The man who wrote with a quill pen? Who was a champion chess player in Ireland? Who was also known as the worst dressed man in Ireland? Who towered over all his fellows? Of course I refer to Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett (1878-1957) - Lord Dunsany. Some of his greatest works have just been re-released by Del Rey. Try The King of Elfland's Daughter, or The Charwoman's Shadow.

(Several people raved about the next one, so I just placed all their comments in since they all seemed relevant.)
One of the best books I've ever read - FORGET THE MOVIE- The Neverending Story - Michael Ende - its a classic I know but so many peole havent heard of it! Any one Ive ever leant it to has gone out and bought their own copy - the evokative gorgeous imagery , the incredible beauty of his ideas and characters  - Ive re-read it so many times.  You never want to let it go.

Aside from just not being very good, the movie stops less than halfway through the book, and while it does more or less follow the plot to there before slapping on a tacky ending, it utterly misses the point of the book.

If you do know Neverending Story- have you read his book, Momo?  A lot shorter, but also lovely.  I looked at the Amazon reviews for this book (before tracking down a second hand copy), about every other one swore the book had changed their lives.  He has one or two others translated into English, I think, but I don't remember the titles off-hand, and think they were for much younger children, anyway.  Alas, Ende died quite young, and wasn't too prolific.  (Momo seems to be hard to find, though.)

Kage Baker is working on a series about "the Company" that is well worth reading.  There are ten books planned in the series.  It's a humourous series about a time traveling  Company which is the ultimate beaurocracy of the 24th centrury.   The current books are In the Garden of Iden, Sky Coyote, Mendoza in Hollywood, and The Graveyard Game.

A.S Byatt's novel Possession is not really fantasy, but it sort of has a fantasy feel. It is a literary mystery where two modern researchers try to uncover the hidden past of two Victorian poets, one of which wrote an epic poem about Mesulina. The book is full of excellent prose, poetry, Victorian love letters, and all kinds of good stuff. It is a very sophisticated book, though not in the boringly snobbish way. I think McKillip fans will love it.

Italo Calvino is an  Italian author whose work fits into no particular genre. Invisible Cities is great (fictional time-traveling conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan about Polo's travels), but my favorite is If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, which is the story of two Readers who can only find first chapters of amazing books - and as they search, they find more and more beginnings. It alternates between the first chapters they find (warning - only the first chapters) and their search. I have no idea what this is classified as, but it's excellent and quirky and full of McKillipesque language.

C. J. Cherryh's  The Dreaming Tree includes the two books: The Dreamstone and The Tree of Swords and Jewels. More than any other book I've read, this one most reminds me of McKillip's evocative and dream-like handling of faery.  Strange and wonderful.

Louise Cooper's The Summer Witch seems to have some of the complexity and good characterization I love in McKillip's novels.

I like Susan Cooper because she weaves the fantasy elements of her books into the "real world" so seamlessly that they seem to belong there along side the yachts and motor cars. Cooper's evocation of a place is wonderful, whether the place is modern day Wales or Elizabethan England--unlike lots of fantasies that mixes the real world and the fantastic, her characters and plots can't just be plucked out of their setting and set down in Anywhere.

Very minor spoiler - The Dark is Rising series has a bit of Arthurian slant and works in the Atlantis legend, so people who like those types of stories might particularly enjoy this series.  The series has five novels, Over Sea, Under Stone, The Dark is Rising, Greenwitch, The Grey King and Silver on the Tree.

Garth Nix'a novel Sabriel has a very believable system of magic; a strong but imperfect heroine; strong evocation of place with an interesting history.

Meredith Ann Pierce- The Darkangel Trilogy (The Darkangel, A Gathering of Gargoyles, The Pearl of the Soul of the World)
Recommended for its unabashed romanticism. I always thought that McKillip's books have this air of romance (in the sense of the Romantic Movement, not in the sense of Harlequin serials): the dreamy atmosphere, the heroic quest, the lush and sometimes extravagant language. Well, Pierce's novels have the same quality, except that the writing is more spare and probably a bit less accomplished.

Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard is a retelling of Tam Lin.

Philip Pullman- his Dark Materials Trilogy is one of the best new series out there. All three books, starting with The Golden Compass, are one big story, so read in order. He has also written a series of Victorian thrillers, which are really good, especially The Shadow in the North.

Sharon Shinn's books The Shapechanger’s Wife, Archangel, Jovah’s Angel, and Alleluia Files are good.  The Shapechanger’s Wife is a typical fantasy comparable to McKillip or McKinley. The other three are a series based on a world where God is a starship set with an arsenal to destroy the world if the inhabitants don’t behave. The catch is: their civilization has forgotten it is a starship. Sounds kind of corny to me, being one who really doesn’t like science fiction, but these are some of the best books I’ve ever read. A very good way for a fantasy reader to slip into science fiction.

The Enchanted Forest Chronicles (Dealing With Dragons, Searching for Dragons, Calling On Dragons, Talking to Dragons) are fun fantasy for kids; Mairelon the Magician and Magician’s Ward are regency fantasies; and the Lyra novels are more comparable to McKillip’s work. Sorcery and Cecelia was written with Caroline Stevermer and is very difficult to find. Book of Enchantments is a collection of short stories.