Looking for some (dark?) fantasy book recommendations

No, just that you may be blind.

I think it’s you who may want to get their eyes checked. I was the first person to suggest the Dark Tower series. I then said:

I can’t believe no one else has said anything about The Dark Tower series. No King readers here or did nobody enjoy the series?

Nowhere else (I’ve just checked, for the 3rd time now) have the words “Dark Tower” been posted.

Ah. I did miss that, you are correct. I don’t see why you would expect other people to talk about them when you have already suggested them, though. It’s redundant.

Yes. But he read your second comment as “why hasn’t anyone mentioned the Dark Tower series”, and had already filed way in this thread reading cache that someone had in fact mentioned the Dark Tower series, like everyone else has done. He did not include the fact that you had brought up the comment because he did not file the information away.

People here have read and liked (and disliked) the Dark Tower series. Nobody cares that you brought it up twice.

What the hell are you going on about? It was a quite simple and innocent comment that I initially made expressing my surprise that no one else had voted in favor or against the series since I thought it was a fairly popular one. That was it, no further analysis required.

I explained the misunderstanding (Malkav posted in the mean time). I’m sorry, I thought people would be able to infer the parts I didn’t explicitly state. I can break it down further if need be.

I think Vance is an excellent recommendation, but if the genre in question is dark fantasy, why go with Science Fantasy Vance and not full on Dark Fantasy Vance with the Lyonesse books - Suldrun’s Garden, The Green Pearl and Madouc. Dark, fey and wonderfully Vance, these surpassed the Dying Earth stories as my favorite Vance. There are some great moments in these when you’re pretty sure you know where the story is going, and then it most certainly doesn’t.

Ok, except for the Dragon Masters and the Last Castle (these are both longish short stories or shortish novellas). Those will always be the top of Mt. Vance.

The Lyonesse books are some of my favorites of all time. The odd thing is that I’m a huge Vance fan boy, but I thought Lyonesse was remarkably different in tone compared to almost all of his other books, and superior storywriting in every way.

After the first book, the Dying Earth becomes much more comic-picaresque than dark.

The first two Lyonesse books are amazing high fantasy, but I don’t know if I’d call them dark. (The third book is a throwaway.)

The Book of the New Sun is pretty dark, from its petty beginning to its cosmic ending.

Things don’t really get darker than Elric, which I haven’t read since my teen years and fear would be way too melodramatic now.

I would recommend the first two Gormenghast books, Titus Alone and Gormenghast, which are really one enormous fantasy Gothic novel. Not really heroic, though.

Honestly, your previous post was borderline incomprehensible, in terms of some very odd wording and sentence construction. I’m not surprised Blips was a little confused.

My recommendation is for a weird old book by Philip Jose Farmer called Dark is the Sun. Half the time it feels like Farmer was high when he wrote it, but the book is interesting enough to be worth it. Far future post apocalypse, technology nearly indistinguishable from magic, pretty decently dark. I suspect it’s out of print but maybe you can find a copy.

Finch was awesome and very noir.

H.

You shut your pretty mouth. Madouc is awesome. Maybe it has been a little while since you’ve read them, but you might remember a few surprising and grim things that happen through the course of the books. Modesty (and spoilers) prevent me from mentioning those particular things. It seems to me that dark fantasy might mean Fantasy + Sociopaths (ie Game of Thrones) to some folks.

Regarding Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books - I think you’re completely right that they are dark, fantastic and completely worth reading. I’m obligated to point out that the first two are Titus Groan and Gormenghast. The third one, Titus Alone, was apparently finished posthumously by Peake’s widow and isn’t close to the other two. There’s a neat bit at the end of Titus Alone, but it really isn’t worth slogging through to get there.

Sadly, you’re also right about Elric. I’m rereading them via the recent collections (which are sadly in chronological order of writing, rather than the internal story history of the six old DAW paperbacks) and the drama is very, very melo. Emo long before there was emo. My fourteen year old self loved them so very much, but I can’t see myself pushing on past this first volume.

Glen Cook is writing a new series of books that’s reminiscent of the Black Company, starting with Tyranny of the Night.

Pretty much all of Guy Gavriel Kay’s work would qualify. The last book of his I read, The Last Light of the Sun was certainly grim, what with all the “blood eagle”-ing.

Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood if you’re willing to get off the adventuring-fantasy path.

Tolkien’s tragic Children of Hurin is excellent.

Gene Wolf’s Book of the New Sun is also very good, albeit technically science fiction.

Moorcock’s Elric books are light reading and yet dark, and his prose style is stellar. Not as good character/story wise as the above stuff overall though, in my opinion.

Completely agree about Finch. If someone was going to start reading Van der Meer, I’d suggest starting with City of Saints and Madmen, then Shriek: An Afterword, and then the terse and hard boiled Finch. There are several things set up in the earlier books that come to a magnificent, fungus soaked conclusion in Finch.

What I remember is this: in Madouc they’re wandering through the woods and they meet some random old guy searching for his lost youth. He accompanies them for maybe a couple chapters and then says he thinks he sees his lost youth and runs off through the trees, never to appear again.

Compare that to The Green Pearl, when the one guy takes the form of a “syaspic feroce” or something like that to accompany the kidnapped child through the other world with the green sun. Holy fucking shit.

Madouc and the last Araminta book both blew their trilogies completely. When I read Vance’s autobiography last year I finally find out why: he went blind. He’s been totally blind for more than 20 years now. He tried a computer program that read his text back to him, but later he simply dictated. It crushed me to read this, but it definitely answered a question I’d had all that time.

I never read any Game of Thrones, believe it or not. All I know that that there used to be a guy who posted on Qt3 named Tyrion Lannister, and I gather that wasn’t his real name.

Totally agree; thanks for correcting what I posted. (When I read this I thought pfffft, I didn’t say Titus Alone.)

Bummer.

Just finished reading Incarceron, by Catherine Fisher, and its sequel Sapphique, while on vacation. Technically classified as “young adult,” but it’s like the Phillip Pullman books in that it’s well-suited for all ages. Definitely a great “dark fantasy” read (more science fantasy than straight fantasy), about people trying to escape from their hellish existence inside a vast, living prison.

Ken Scholes Psalms of Isaac series isn’t exceptionally dark but it’s a pretty good read. It’s your neo-classical multiple POV converging/diverging story lines set in a semi-novel fantasy world with mechanical men, blood magic, assassins, dream prophecies, etc. I’ve struggled a bit to remember all the plot points each time I’ve picked up a new book but it’s had some nice twists and turns. Lamentation is the first book. I think I first heard about it here on QT3.

As previously mentioned, Glen Cook’s Instrumentalities of the Night series is excellent. Just finished that recently and really enjoyed it. Still hoping to get some more Black Company…Port of Shadows or A Pitiless Rain.

Working on Malazan now. Good stuff.

Bakker, Abercrombie, GRR Martin and Moorcock is currently my dark fantasy quartet of awesomeness. For some reason I couldn’t get into Steve Erikson or China Mieville even though I should, based on who other writers I like.

In contrast to his earlier novels, I like that Vance tried to write more from a female character’s perspective (Ecce and Old Earth, Madouc) in his last two trilogies. While it would have been nice to read more tales of Aillas kicking ass, Madouc was a nice coming-of-age story, and it tied up the trilogy nicely, with Torqual, Shimrod, Desmei et al in Murgen’s workshop struggling over Joald.

And Ys crushed by Joald’s arm? AWESOME.

I thought it was mediocre after the first book, then just getting worse as it went on till it degenerated into garbage. But hey, didn’t feel like shitting all over something somebody else liked.

But then you had to bring it up again and I couldn’t resist. Otherwise lots of great suggestions in this thread.