Hello all. I am wanting to start reading deeply into the Grim-dark fantasy genre and am looking for suggestions, including cornerstone books that the genre has built itself on and books that do something new/different in regards to the genre.
Any suggestions with male protagonists, LGBTQ+ representation, and/or magic systems present are a bonus.
I should probably provide a description of my understanding of “grim-dark” – please correct me if I’m wrong/have the wrong genre in mind. What I believe grim dark settings have are lowish magic systems, a sense of impending/general doom (much like the feeling an apocalypse/wilderness lone-survival setting would give. Example: the village will not be able to eat this winter, etc), and it does not feel like the protagonist/those they care about have plot armor (death can and will happen at any time regardless of the audience’s perception of character importance).
Thank you in advance for any recs!
by hugoursula1
3 Comments
First Law Trilogy
The Black Company
Malazan Books of the Fallen (heavy magic though)
Broken Earth Trilogy
The Raven’s Shadow trilogy
The Witcher books may be a good fit! Geralt is the main character and almost no one likes him even though he is super strong and fights gnarly monsters that rip people apart. The netflix show was good too and it has a pretty similar vibe to the books.
The first two are more like short story collections and some of them are super dark.
If you don’t mind reading webnovels I recommend [Worm](https://parahumans.wordpress.com/). It’s a really grimdark superhero/villain story. At first the story goes slowly but it gets the doom vibe over time and becomes more depressing and hopeless.