Make no mistake: Snakewood is grimdark. It’s grimdark and then some. Moral ambiguity infuses all the major characters, and no clear line is ever drawn between right and wrong, good and evil. Snakewood is...
Urban fantasy is a mixed-breed animal. Horror, dark fantasy, romance, hard-boiled detective fiction, police procedural – urban fantasy pairs them off, lets them get comfy, and then births its own unique lineages of weird...
Black Tea and Other Tales by Samuel Marolla is compared to ‘A box of lovely dark chocolates’ in a foreword by Gene O’Neill. Gene’s recommendation had me ready to devour the three dark and...
In The Wheel of Osheim, the final instalment of Mark Lawrence’s The Red Queen’s War Trilogy, Jalan Kendeth, lover of wine, women and slacking off somehow finds himself lost the bowels of Hell itself,...
Having not had the chance to read as many books as I wanted to in 2015, I feel like it’s been ages since an author really grabbed me by the collar and dragged me...
A Crown for Cold Silver is a fantastic first dip of the toe into grimdark fantasy for for the author hidden behind the pseudonym Alex Marshall (best online theory I could find on who that is...
Can traditional high-fantasy be grimdark? Apparently, yes. Marc Turner’s debut novel When the Heavens Fall showed me that fantasy can be saturated with magic without losing any of the grit. It manages to deliver...
The year 2015 has been a pretty damned epic year for grimdark fiction. Our team has spent the last year reading about hundreds of gritty anti-heroes fighting their way through plenty of dark worlds. In our...
Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark: A Tale of Delightful Despair Going by the shock and outrage routinely expressed by Games of Thrones fandom, one might be tempted to believe that George R.R. Martin invented gruesomeness,...
Review by Jeremy Szal An advanced-reader copy of The Water Knife was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. According to William Gibson, the future is already here. It’s just not...
