George R.R. Martin 

G.G. Kay's novels aren't your every-day fantasy, but George Martin, in his Song of Ice and Fire series, takes things a step further. Not only does he completely dispense with the classical fantasy cliche of a boy/girl/fellowship going from an unimportant village/farm nobody's ever heard of into the wide, wide world to battle some sort of Great Evil Guy/Thing, winning treasure/fame/throne/revenge in the process, he does something I've never seen any other fantasy writer do: he kills his characters left and right. Not just the unimportant episodicals, he kills the movers and shakers of the story. They don't even die in some sort of impossibly heroic circumstances which have a great influence on the events (like Tolkien's Boromir, for instance), no, they die in all kinds of almost silly ways. By the end of the third book, most of the people from whose viewpoint the story was told are dead. Very unnerving for somebody used to never-dying good guys (Robert Jordan managed to go through 11 long books killing only one important good character, doing even that in a spectacular manner, and there are rumours she'll be coming back). There is one thing, though, Martin didn't escape from: the epic size and the handling of it. By the end of the third book, the story isn't nearly close to an end, and now he's stalling with the Book Four...