Ed Champion is a remarkable reader, critic, etc. (feel free to add to the list of how remarkable he is), and in this interview he recommends books for writers.
Ultimately, a novelist’s job — irrespective of whether she is writing speculative fiction or hard realism — is to understand how human behavior emerges from systematic consequence. If you can generate an atmosphere based on systematic consequence, then your novel will likely feel “real” even if it is set in a land populated by dancing elves or talking fruit.
For plot structure, “read Richard Stark.” For great openers, Burgess, Cain, and Murray have good examples.
I love his depiction of “systemic consequence,” but I’m not sure that it covers all of fantasy.
World-builders, of course, from Tolkien to Mieville (or from Dickens to Orwell) live or die on their sense of systemic consequences, of everything in the world seeming like it fits together more or less like our contemporary world. It mobilizes the world, which ends up feeling as real as a character. One can wish to escape to Middle Earth–or flee from 1984’s England–because they are self-consistent worlds with self-consistent cultural structures.
More imaginative, or psychological, novelists often don’t care about this. There is nothing systemic about consequences to actions in George MacDonald’s Phantastes (or even his short story The Light Princess). Nor is there much systemic about Gene Wolfe’s Wizard Knight series, despite its elaborate Medieval cosmology. (Or for that matter Spencer’s Faerie Queene, which predates and holds far more depth than both.) In these books, the knight sets forth into unknown areas, and reacts to situations which tend to have psychological meaning, but not social meaning.
MacDonald’s hero (from Phantastes) picks up a shadow at one point, and it follows him doggedly. He once observed (roughly) that “where I lay, the grass was only pressed down, but where my shadow lay beside me the grass was withered and dead.” This was not because of any systemic, exterior nature of shadows and societies. It was, simply, because that is precisely what it feels like to struggle with certain forms of doubt, or depression, or despair, when your physical existence (however bad) is far less damaging than the nagging shadow that seems to follow you everywhere.
So yes, fantasy can present systemic consequences, and most modern fantasy does in a way that equals similar non-fantastic works. But it doesn’t have to.
Good examples.