Grimdark Fantasy Books

Grimdark is fantasy without the reassurance that your beloved hero will survive. Also, why do you even love him? He's probably awful (which is what makes the genre interesting!). In grimdark stories, flawed or outright brutal protagonists feature in stories where good and evil are hard to tell apart and violence comes with consequences. The books below focus on grimdark books with soldiers, veterans and wars in it. Start with the three classics, then pick by what you want: soldiers and veterans, big bleak epics, or antiheroes and outlaws.

Start here

Classics:

Soldiers and veterans

Grimdark about people who fight, and what fighting leaves of them.

Big and bleak

Epic scale, dark worlds and wars that swallow everyone.

Antiheroes and outlaws

Fewer armies, more knives.

On the Grimdark fantasy genre and realism

Spoiler warning: this section reveals a major twist in Joe Abercrombie's First Law trilogy.

In The Two Towers, Gimli and Legolas spend the battle of Helm's Deep keeping score. By morning the dwarf is ahead by one orc, and the two of them treat it as a friendly rivalry.¹ Joe Abercrombie, the British author whose First Law trilogy did more than most to shape grimdark, sees it differently.² "They stack up bodies and they count the number of dead," he said on the 2 To Ramble podcast. "It's fine because they're orcs, right? But if they're not orcs, that is horrifying."³ Heroic stories have always worked this way. The good guys can kill and destroy and not many viewers or readers bat an eye. The most obvious anecdote is probably Marvel. When the Hulk punches through an office tower, nobody in the cinema wonders who was working on that floor. The violence is there to show how powerful and heroic the hero is, nobody really looks at the destruction or deaths. Aragorn, as Abercrombie puts it, can kill hundreds and still end up "a sensitive lover and a positive king and a good friend."⁴ I think Abercrombie is right here because the older I'm getting the more the realism or unrealism bothers me in my fiction. "Realism is always a tough word to use in relation to fantasy, or for that matter fiction of any kind,"⁵ as Abercrombie himself has stated and he is right on that account as well.

Fiction, by its nature is somewhat unrealistic, not because it is fantastical and features magic and invented worlds, but because all fiction reduces reality to something that can be written about. Something that is portrayed through dialogue, that even when written realistically and good, is too perfect. In fiction we show readers only what they need to see. If you see a realistic scene, like a character having diarrhea, then there is a reason for that scene. It either characterizes the character or it drives the plot, or there simply needs to be a comic relief scene or we need the character to be in that situation to start off. Good writing features scenes that do character work and plot work at the same time, so realism within that framework means not that everything must be like real life but rather that a story must be as close to reality so that the fourth wall is not broken, so that a reader can continue to be immersed in a story.

The Grimdark subgenre asks what would happen if a fantasy hero isn't that much of a hero but more a flawed main character. Abercrombie calls The First Law "a commentary on heroic stories," a cautionary tale about taking them too seriously,⁶ and his most famous character makes the point in person. Before the books begin, Sand dan Glokta was a dashing cavalry officer. Captured and tortured in the war, he came home crippled and took up torture himself⁷: a hero who survived, but came home deeply damaged and traumatized. Here I have to shout out the performance of Steven Pacey, whose performance in the audio book version is brilliant.⁸ After having read the book, hearing him perform Sand dan Glokta, was like seeing the character come alive.

The genre's name is older than Abercrombie, even if he called himself @LordGrimdark on Twitter (as a joke).⁹ It originally comes from the tagline of the wargame Warhammer 40,000, "In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war."¹⁰ From there it was first an insult as it was used to refer to books that readers deemed too dark.¹¹ Some readers told Abercrombie that life isn't as bleak as this. Abercrombie finds that a strange complaint. His books were never meant as the last word on what life is like. They sit on the shelf beside a great deal of cheerful heroic fantasy and comment on the shortcomings or features of those books.¹²

Abercrombie is careful not to claim too much. Still, he argues that a book about war that ignores the world's darkness "can seem a little dishonest," and he has no more time than his critics for grimdark that "simply revels in its own filth and violence without questioning it."¹³ That leaves a fair question. If the darkness is supposed to be honest, how does it compare with the real thing? Abercrombie says he reads a lot of military history and first-hand accounts of battle to make his own wars feel authentic¹⁴, and that's a reasonable place to start. Most grimdark is set in something like the Middle Ages, but medieval wars are hard to check it against. They mostly reach us through chronicles written for kings and abbots, and the people whose villages burned rarely got a say. The Thirty Years' War makes a better test. Fought between 1618 and 1648,¹⁵ it came late enough for printing presses, letters and censuses to record what happened to ordinary people. It was also early enough that armies still marched on foot, carried pikes and swords alongside their muskets, and took cities by siege and storm. It's about as close as history gets to a grimdark war with witnesses.

Fought mostly across the Holy Roman Empire, the war began as a quarrel between Catholic and Protestant states and grew into a contest that drew in Spain, Sweden and France.¹⁶ Its most notorious moment came in May 1631 at Magdeburg, a Protestant city that had sided with Sweden.¹⁷ After a siege, Imperial and Catholic League troops under Count Tilly stormed the walls on 20 May, with his general Pappenheim leading the assault.¹⁸ Dietrich von Falkenberg, the officer the Swedes had sent to hold the city, was shot dead.¹⁹ "I believe that over twenty thousand souls were lost," Pappenheim wrote afterward²⁰, and he was on the winning side.

In 1630, more than 25,000 people lived in Magdeburg. About 5,000 survived the four days that followed, and a census in 1632 found 449 inhabitants.²¹ Fire destroyed 1,700 of the city's 1,900 buildings, although nobody seems to have intended it to spread.²² Otto von Guericke, a councillor who lived through it, noticed something worse than the killing. Once the townspeople ran out of valuables to hand over, he wrote, "the real trouble began."²³ In Rome, Pope Urban VIII congratulated Tilly for having "washed [his] victorious hands in the blood of sinners."²⁴ German gained a verb: to magdeburgisieren a place was to wipe it out.²⁵

Grimdark readers sometimes treat the genre as a modern invention, but the seventeenth century had already produced its own. In 1633, the year French troops invaded his home duchy of Lorraine,²⁶ the printmaker Jacques Callot published Les Misères et les Malheurs de la Guerre, eighteen etchings of soldiers looting, burning and being punished for it.²⁷ In the best known, the eleventh, soldiers hang from a tree like fruit while their comrades stand around watching and a priest on a ladder reads the last rites.²⁸ The V&A calls the scenes invented but "true-to-life,"²⁹ which is about as much as anyone can ask of fiction.

The first great war novel came thirty-five years later, from someone who had carried a musket himself. Taken by soldiers as a boy, Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen served as a musketeer and later as a regimental secretary.³⁰ His Simplicissimus (1668) opens with cuirassiers, heavily armored cavalry, torturing the narrator's father and burning the family farm.³¹ From there it lurches between atrocity and farce in a way that wouldn't look out of place on a modern grimdark shelf, and a review in the London Review of Books calls it "the first ever war novel."³² It also made the Schwedentrunk famous. In this "Swedish drink," victims had foul liquid forced down their throats until they gave up where the money or food was hidden.³³ The name blamed the Swedish army, which had entered the war in 1630,³⁴ but the practice belonged to anyone unpaid and hungry enough, camp followers and marauders included.³⁵

Magdeburg packed into four days what the rest of the war did more slowly. Across the whole war, the historian Peter Wilson estimates that about 1.8 million soldiers and at least 3.2 million civilians died. He also estimates that the population of the Empire fell by "at least a fifth," which he notes was proportionally "a far higher loss than that suffered in either world war."³⁶ Asked late in the twentieth century to rank their country's disasters, Germans put the Thirty Years' War ahead of both the Nazi era and the Black Death.³⁷ I can't think of a grimdark novel that kills a fifth of its world, and I suspect any that tried would be accused of overdoing it.

So if grimdark is too dark, history hasn't noticed. What it shares with heroic fantasy, more often than either would like, is the idea that violence belongs to someone impressive. Swap Legolas's tally for a torturer with the best lines, or a warlord who says what everyone else is too squeamish to say, and the scoreboard is still there; it just keeps a different score. Abercrombie has met the readers this produces. Bayaz, the wizard at the heart of The First Law, is "very obviously the villain," he says, and still people tell him, "Man, I love Bayaz, he's so great."³⁸ The Thirty Years' War had very few charismatic villains. Its armies were enormous and rarely paid on time, so they lived off whatever country they were standing in, by levy when they could and by theft when they couldn't.³⁹ The soldier pouring filth down a farmer's throat wasn't a sadist with a tragic backstory; he wanted to know where the grain was. Nor was anyone particularly in control. The fire that gave German its word for total destruction seems to have spread by accident.⁴⁰ That wouldn't have surprised Abercrombie. He studied psychology, and the part he focused on, he told 2 To Ramble, was "human reliability and human error."⁴¹ He also says that much of military history is "a history of failures and disasters and mistakes more than it is a history of success."⁴² Neither the hero with the scoreboard nor the villain with the best lines quite fits a war like that, which is rather the point.

Glen Cook seems to have understood this. His Black Company novels, starting in 1984,⁴³ follow a band of mercenaries through a long, dirty war. Cook served in the US Navy from 1962 to 1972, for a time attached to a Marine Force Recon unit, and left it a month before it shipped out to Vietnam.⁴⁴ His characters, he has said, are "real soldiers," and the series "doesn't glorify war; it's just people getting on with the job."⁴⁵ That is closer to Magdeburg than any dark lord, because there the job was the problem.

If you'd like your fantasy to take that job seriously, pikes, muskets and unpaid wages included, that's where pike-and-shot fantasy comes in.

From the author of this site

FAQ

Sources

• Book descriptions: the site's book catalog, built from publisher pages and reviews for each book.
• The essay's sources are in its footnotes.

Notes

1. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Two Towers (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1954), book III, chapters 7–8 ("Helm's Deep" and "The Road to Isengard"): Gimli finishes on forty-two, Legolas on forty-one. See also "The Final Tally," Tolkien Gateway, https://www.tolkiengateway.net/wiki/The_Final_Tally. ↩

2. The First Law trilogy: The Blade Itself (2006), Before They Are Hanged (2007) and Last Argument of Kings (2008), all London: Gollancz. Abercrombie gives the 2006–2008 dates himself in Joe Abercrombie, interview by Richard and Austin, "Grim Themes & Characters w/ Joe Abercrombie," 2 To Ramble, episode 192, YouTube, at 11:58. ↩

3. Abercrombie, 2 To Ramble #192, at 35:23–35:46. ↩

4. Abercrombie, 2 To Ramble #192, at 35:46–36:04. ↩

5. Damien Walter, "Grimdark, What Is It? Joe Abercrombie in Discussion with Ahimsa Kerp," damiengwalter.com, 8 March 2015, https://damiengwalter.com/2015/03/08/grimdark-what-is-it-joe-abercrombie-in-discussion-with-ahimsa-kerp/. ↩

6. Abercrombie, 2 To Ramble #192, at 11:08–11:35. ↩

7. Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself (London: Gollancz, 2006). Glokta's service as a cavalry officer, his capture and torture in the Gurkish war, and his work for the Inquisition are set out in his early chapters. ↩

8. Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself, unabridged audiobook, narrated by Steven Pacey (London: Orion, 2010). ↩

9. Abercrombie, 2 To Ramble #192, at 1:31:14–1:31:54. ↩

10. "Grimdark," Dictionary.com, https://www.dictionary.com/browse/grimdark. ↩

11. Walter, "Grimdark, What Is It?". Abercrombie remembers the word as "an out and out piss-take, an insult for stuff that was ridiculous." ↩

12. Abercrombie, 2 To Ramble #192, at 1:19:47–1:20:27. ↩

13. Walter, "Grimdark, What Is It?". ↩

14. Abercrombie, 2 To Ramble #192, at 36:27–36:50 and 36:57–37:12. ↩

15. "Thirty Years' War," Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/event/Thirty-Years-War. ↩

16. Peter H. Wilson, "Europe's Apocalypse," BBC History Magazine, May 2018, https://www.pressreader.com/uk/bbc-history-magazine/20180517/281642485936003: the Holy Roman Empire was "the conflict's main theatre," and foreign powers intervened, "first Denmark from 1625–29; then Sweden from 1630; and finally France after 1635." ↩

17. Peter H. Wilson, The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 467: the city "duly agreed a Swedish alliance" after Christian Wilhelm's return in July 1630. On the Swedish landing on 6 July 1630, "Memorial stone to Gustavus Adolphus," European History Online (EGO), https://ego-ploneui.uni-trier.de/en/mediainfo/gedenkstein-fuer-gustav-adolf. ↩

18. Wilson, Thirty Years War, 468: Tilly "launched his final assault at 7 a.m. on Tuesday 20 May," after Pappenheim had distributed a wine ration to the besiegers. ↩

19. Wilson, Thirty Years War, 467 (Gustavus sent Colonel Falkenberg into the city) and 469 (Falkenberg "died relatively early on"); Otto von Guericke, account of the sack, trans. Julie K. Tanaka, in "A Local Apocalypse: The Sack of Magdeburg (1631)," German History in Documents and Images, https://germanhistorydocs.org/en/from-the-reformations-to-the-thirty-years-war-1500-1648/a-local-apocalypse-the-sack-of-magdeburg-1631: "Falkenberg was shot." ↩

20. Hans Medick and Pamela Selwyn, "Historical Event and Contemporary Experience: The Capture and Destruction of Magdeburg in 1631," History Workshop Journal 52 (2001): 23–48. Wilson, Thirty Years War, 470, gives "around 20,000 defenders and civilians" dead. ↩

21. Wilson, Thirty Years War, 468 (a population of "around 25,000") and 470 (around 20,000 dead; "a census revealed only 449 inhabitants in February 1632"). ↩

22. Wilson, Thirty Years War, 469: the wind fanned the fires, "destroying 1,700 of the city's 1,900 buildings"; "it seems certain the conflagration was an accident, especially as the whole purpose of the siege was to capture the city intact." ↩

23. Otto von Guericke, account of the sack of Magdeburg, trans. Julie K. Tanaka, in "A Local Apocalypse: The Sack of Magdeburg (1631)," German History in Documents and Images, German Historical Institute Washington, https://germanhistorydocs.org/en/from-the-reformations-to-the-thirty-years-war-1500-1648/a-local-apocalypse-the-sack-of-magdeburg-1631. ↩

24. Ludwig von Pastor, Geschichte der Päpste, vol. 13, part 2 (Freiburg: Herder, 1928), 999. The line echoes Psalm 58:10. ↩

25. Cathal J. Nolan, The Age of Wars of Religion, 1000–1650 (Westport: Greenwood, 2006), 561–62. ↩

26. Christchurch Art Gallery, Jacques Callot, La Pendaison: "In 1633, Louis XIII's France invaded the Duchy of Lorraine, ravaging its capital Nancy and the surrounding countryside," https://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/collection/86-43/jacques-callot/la-pendaison. ↩

27. Jacques Callot, La Pendaison (The Hanging), plate 11 of Les Misères et les Malheurs de la Guerre, etching, Paris, 1633, Victoria and Albert Museum, https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O115422/la-pendaison-the-hanging-print-callot-jacques/. ↩

28. V&A, La Pendaison. ↩

29. V&A, La Pendaison: the scenes "were invented by the artist" but are "true-to-life in their depiction of battles and atrocities." ↩

30. "Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen," Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/print/article/246236; Jeremy Adler, "Time to Rob the Dead," London Review of Books 39, no. 6 (16 March 2017), https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n06/jeremy-adler/time-to-rob-the-dead (kidnapped at 14, a musketeer, and in 1648 secretary in Colonel von Elter's regiment). ↩

31. Jeremy Adler, "Time to Rob the Dead," London Review of Books 39, no. 6 (16 March 2017), https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n06/jeremy-adler/time-to-rob-the-dead; Grimmelshausen, Simplicissimus, book I, chapter 4, in A. T. S. Goodrick's translation, excerpted in German History in Documents and Images, https://germanhistorydocs.org/en/from-the-reformations-to-the-thirty-years-war-1500-1648/ghdi:document-5459. ↩

32. Jeremy Adler, "Time to Rob the Dead," London Review of Books 39, no. 6 (16 March 2017), https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n06/jeremy-adler/time-to-rob-the-dead. ↩

33. Grimmelshausen, Simplicissimus, book I, chapter 4, in A. T. S. Goodrick's translation, excerpted in German History in Documents and Images, https://germanhistorydocs.org/en/from-the-reformations-to-the-thirty-years-war-1500-1648/ghdi:document-5459, where it is translated as "a Swedish draught." ↩

34. "Memorial stone to Gustavus Adolphus," European History Online (EGO), Leibniz Institute of European History, https://ego-ploneui.uni-trier.de/en/mediainfo/gedenkstein-fuer-gustav-adolf: Gustavus Adolphus landed at Peenemünde on Usedom with 13,000 men on 6 July 1630. ↩

35. Wilson, Thirty Years War, 833: Pastor Martin Bötzinger recorded being forced to swallow the "Swedish draught, filled with manure," and civilians "joined raiding parties, behaving as badly as soldiers." On unpaid soldiers living off the land, Peter H. Wilson, "Europe's Apocalypse," BBC History Magazine, May 2018, https://www.pressreader.com/uk/bbc-history-magazine/20180517/281642485936003. ↩

36. Peter H. Wilson, "The Thirty Years War: In a Nutshell," Rorotoko, 23 April 2010, https://www.rorotoko.com/micro-interviews/20100423-wilson-peter-on-europe-tragedy-history-thirty-years-war-1. See also Wilson, Thirty Years War, 787 and 791. ↩

37. Peter H. Wilson, "The Thirty Years War: In a Nutshell," Rorotoko, 23 April 2010, https://www.rorotoko.com/micro-interviews/20100423-wilson-peter-on-europe-tragedy-history-thirty-years-war-1. ↩

38. Abercrombie, 2 To Ramble #192, at 1:22:35–1:23:16. ↩

39. Peter H. Wilson, "Europe's Apocalypse," BBC History Magazine, May 2018, https://www.pressreader.com/uk/bbc-history-magazine/20180517/281642485936003. ↩

40. Wilson, Thirty Years War, 469: "it seems certain the conflagration was an accident"; "Many of the troops were out of control." ↩

41. Abercrombie, 2 To Ramble #192, at 37:20–37:38. ↩

42. Abercrombie, 2 To Ramble #192, at 1:29:25–1:29:40. ↩

43. Glen Cook, The Black Company (New York: Tor, 1984). ↩

44. "Cook, Glen 1944--," Something About the Author (Gale), via Encyclopedia.com, https://www.encyclopedia.com/children/scholarly-magazines/cook-glen-1944: "U.S. Navy and Navy Reserve, 1962–72; served with Force Recon unit, 3rd Marine Battalion." ↩

45. Donald Mead, "Interview: Glen Cook," Strange Horizons, 17 January 2005, https://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/interview-glen-cook/. ↩