Review: Dragon Hunters by Marc Turner
Here be dragons. Need I say more? Dragon Hunters is the second book in Marc Turner’s debut fantasy series The Chronicles of the Exile, but features new characters and a different setting within the...
The Odd Hopefulness of Grimdark
In today’s social-media-saturated world, a lot of what we see are the highlights of people’s lives, and it’s easy to feel inadequate when confronted with the reality of one’s own life in comparison to...
REVIEW: The Forgetting Moon by Brian Lee Durfee
The Forgetting Moon by Brian Lee Durfee is a fantastic new addition to the grimdark fantasy landscape, and is the beginning to the Five Warrior Angels series, which promises to be an epic adventure....
Review: Swarm and Steel by Michael R. Fletcher
Swarm and Steel, Michael R. Fletcher’s new standalone novel in his Manifest Delusions world, is a horrific book. I don’t mean that in a negative way, quite the opposite. It is one of the...
Barbarians or Philosophers? What Psychology Has to Say about Grimdark Fans and Their Dark Obsession
We grimdark readers and writers are often written-off as the dark creatures hiding in the caves of fantasyland, eager to feast upon depictions of horrible gore, morally reprehensible characters, and pointless violence. Why would...
Review: Acts of Caine series by Matthew Stover
For me, reading Heroes Die, the first book in the Acts of Caine series by Matthew Stover, was like being an archaeologist and discovering that Ancient Romans had flat-screen televisions. It’s one of the...
Review: Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames
Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames is the sort of book that sets out to make you laugh, and then accidentally makes you care along the way. In a world similar to D&D’s...
The Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off and the Evolution of Publishing
Chances are you’ve heard of the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off (or SPFBO) at some point in the last two years, a contest where 300 self-published authors submit their novels to ten blogging sites who review...
Game of Thrones: The Show vs the Books
Warning: spoiler alert. With the seventh season of Game of Thrones nearly finished, and now well beyond the source material, the show is a distinctly different beast from the books. For the first couple...
5 Grimdark Fantasy Covers We Love
“Never judge a book by it’s cover” is perhaps the least-heeded advice to have ever been given. Of course we judge books by their covers. It is, after all, the first impression we get...