Philip Pullman’s young-adult fantasy classic The Golden Compass was published in 1995, two years before Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Both are wildly popular, but only J. K. Rowling’s series inspired a theme park. Even after 30 years, during which The Golden Compass became a trilogy, His Dark Materials, which begat a second trilogy, The Book of Dust—collectively selling something like 50 million copies—Pullman’s books retain an idiosyncratic spikiness. Rowling’s work has a glossy, optimized feel; it’s engineered for your comfort. Pullman’s epic, which concludes this fall with the publication of The Rose Field, doesn’t leach into the cultural groundwater quite so readily.

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For starters, Pullman’s world-building is spotty, probably intentionally so. Magic in contemporary fantasy is meant to function as a system, with rules and regulations, but his is wild and willful: Witches fly on cloud-pine branches; angels coalesce out of dust. His books are more permeable to the real world than Rowling’s—boat-borne refugees and climate change crop up. Not least, Pullman stakes claims; he politely but firmly declines to mince words. When Rowling wants to acknowledge her religion in her work, she does so with a few decorous, sidelong allusions to Christian faith. Pullman is an atheist, and he expresses that in His Dark Materials by killing God.

The books take place in a world not so unlike our own, except that it’s a bit more magic and steampunk. The plot of His Dark Materials is driven by the long-running conflict between Pullman’s heroine, a bold, lithely intelligent 11-year-old named Lyra, and the Magisterium, an authoritarian incarnation of Christianity. At the same time, she’s pursuing her ever-receding parents, the brilliant, amoral Lord Asriel and the delectably cruel Mrs. Coulter. Lyra, whom we first meet growing up semi-feral at the fictional Jordan College, Oxford, has a dæmon, as does every other human being in the Lyraverse: a talking animal companion/alter ego.