Looking for some (dark?) fantasy book recommendations

Books, comics, TV, music
61

I’m halfway through K.J. Parker’s Engineer trilogy, and it fills most of your criteria:

Difficult to say, given that I’m not done, and don’t want to spoil anything, but so far I haven’t felt like anyone is definitely going to make it out alive.

  • preferably no black and white, but grey characters, each with their own motives and no absolute good and evil (of course some characters can be that or some enemy faction etc., but I’d like some grey areas)
    The primary protagonist’s reasoning creates some massive gray areas, and I’m not sure if I’d even consider him a good person or not.

Two of the secondary protagonists are Dukes of their respective kingdoms. One is a nice person by anyone’s measure, but a terrible leader. The other is not a very nice person, but is considered the best ruler his country has ever seen. It reminds me of the distinction George R. R. Martin made in an interview once between being a good person, and being a good politician. But the juxtaposition between the two characters approaches the question in a completely novel way.

  • can be low or high-magic worlds, but in my experience these aforementioned aspects are mostly found in the lower-magic fantasy works
    No magic at all so far. Technology and engineering its place, but in an Antikythera mechanism kind of way, rather than a steampunk one. I know that doesn’t sound like it would work, but it does.
  • i also like some grittiness
    There’s a battle seen from the loser’s point of view, and the sort of ugly fighting I associate with Abercrombie.
62

Not Dark Moon. Never Dark Moon.

63

I wouldn’t recommend it. There’s pretty much nothing in it that hasn’t been done better by Bakker (homosexuality in a fantasy setting), Erikson (civilization vs. nomad cultures), Martin (who started the dark fantasy trend) or Abercrombie (who manages to put some thought into all the violence and grittiness in his books).

64

Wait. Martin /started/ the dark fantasy trend. What, with Game of Thrones, published in 1996?

65

I could see it being argued that he’s responsible for epic fantasy’s current “grittiness”, but I’m more persuaded by this argument.

66

I’m not saying he started it all, just that he started the trend. Nowadays there isn’t a new epic fantasy book released that doesn’t try to be morally ambiguous and involve medieval political feuds.

67

The 1001 Nights. Does not get darker than that. I suggest the Burton Annotated version. The footnotes are a great source of understanding and add to one’s appreciation.

68

The big problem with the Burton version is that it’s mostly made up garbage. I recommend the Halawi translation.

69

I have heard that before…what is wrong with the Burton? A bad translation? Apocryphal?

70

In that timeframe, in order to sell, popular books basically needed a certain amount of sex. So Burton solved this problem by adding 10 volumes of it.

Not that the thousand nights has no sex in it. But Burton just kinda randomly inserted orgies wherever possible.

71

I haven’t read the Assassin’s Apprentice series, but the Liveship Traders series was excellent. Not sure it counts as ‘dark’, but it was a very interesting setting.

72

Paul Kearney’s Monarchies of God series.

73

In my initial post, I forgot to mention J.V. Jones’s Sword of Shadows series. It fits most of OP’s requirements.