Bad-ass female warrior? There are several of them. Yeah, it’s damn wicked grimdark fun.Ī relative newcomer to the grimdark ranks, The Crimson Empire fills its narrative with every grimdark trope out there. Just imagine a world where madness equals magical power to change the world around you? Said power able to be used for both good and bad according to your sanity. Michael Fletcher’s exquisite madness is on full display in this grimdark beauty.

Without any further babbling by myself, get ready to be filled with grimness, grittiness, and dark despair because THE TOP 25 GRIMMEST GRIMDARKS are below!Ģ5. This list is what I got, surprising as it is. Once I had all this data, I ran the numbers through an equation to give fair weight to both the rating and the number of ratings on Goodreads. To accomplish the task of ranking all these great books, I first gathered together a list of all the grimdarks I could find (taking into consideration the opinion of others on what is and is not a grimdark), then gathered the overall series rating from Goodreads, as well as making note of the total number of Goodreads ratings for each book. So many in fact, I decided it was time to compile a list of the best of the genre. And I’ve read more than a few of these great grims. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire to Joe Abercrombie’s The First Law to Mark Lawrence’s The Broken Empire, the shelves are covered with finely written tales of flawed characters who live and fight in world filled with ultra-realistic violence, brutality, and overwhelming cynicism and disgust for the human condition. With all that being said, there can be no doubt that grimdark is a large part of fantasy these days. Many of the critics believing grimdark is a nihilistic rebuke to the more inspirational Tolkien-type fantasy, where there was an ingrained optimism that good would triumph over evil and humans wished to be enlightened grimdark putting forward the contrary view that there is no right, and even if there is, no person can ever actually accomplish it. Others descriptions of grimdark fantasy focus on its cynical outlook, disillusioned mentality, and penchant for more fighting, more blood, more violence than classic fantasy. The word was inspired by the tagline of the tabletop strategy game Warhammer 40,000: ‘In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war.‘ “ a sub genre or a way to describe the tone, style or setting of speculative fiction that is particularly dystopian, amoral or violent. So lets try to define exactly what I mean by grimdark before I start listing the “ Top 25 Grimmest Grimdarks“. But reading the term and understanding what it means and, even more importantly, which books fit into the category are two entirely different things. Grimdark is a subgenre of fantasy which most readers have heard of.

A Cruel Wind by Glen Cook