End of Gregory Maguire's Yellow Brick Road

With “Out of Oz,” the fourth and final novel in the sequence that began with his mega-selling “Wicked,” Gregory Maguire concludes the “Wicked Years,” one of the most audacious and successful fantasy series of the past few decades. A revisionist and very adult take on L. Frank Baum’s Oz books (with numerous cheeky references to the 1939 movie), Maguire’s masterwork belongs to the burgeoning subgenre that might be called radical American fantasy — books such as Peter S. Beagle’s “The Last Unicorn,” John Crowley’s “Little, Big,” George R.R. Martin’s “A Game of Thrones,” Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians.” The works riff on classic novels even as they offer a sharp corrective to the prescriptive uses J.R.R. Tolkien assigned to fantasy: recovery, escape and consolation.