GRIMDARK BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS

hi guys so today's video is going to be a list of some grimdark book recommendations just a little heads-up before we get into it I personally have no problem recommending books that didn't work for me because I know that books our subjective taste is subjective and so therefore just cuz I didn't love something doesn't mean that you won't then love it so I will be recommending some books that weren't my favorite and that's true for the first recommendation which would be Prince of thorns by Marc Lowrance one thing that makes grimdark so appealing to a lot of people is kind of this rejection of our hero type story or our main character is squeaky clean and perfect and a lot of times what you will see then is a character who's very gray whereas with this particular story you're finding somebody who is basically a villain the story does have a series of flashback sequences so you know that we're going to almost be getting an origin story and also discovering maybe if there's more to the situation than we would expect but either way you are following a character that's basically detestable they do absolutely terrible things and I find that it's almost like if you had an entire book centered around Joffrey and if Joffrey was actually maybe a little bit deeper you are somebody who is nervous to get into grimdark I don't think Prince of thorns is for you but if you are somebody who likes gritty the grittier the better check this one out on the flip side the next one that I'm gonna talk about would be the blade itself this is the first book in the first law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie and if you are somebody who's squeamish you like the concept of grim dark and gray morality you just don't want it to be too much I would say this one in my opinion does not lean on that end I think a lot of the more violent darker things are implied or their thematic so it's more of like do things ever really change the corruption in power and powerful people does that really ever go away that sort of thing which I really like those types of concepts being explored I also like seeing grey morality explored in characters and I think that Joe Abercrombie does it masterfully I personally find it very difficult to pin down the plot of this story it's not that there isn't one but I would say the plot is not what drives the story forward it's your investment in the characters in this first one it does take a while to get to know them and so therefore it might take you a while to feel like you're really involved in what's going on but once you get to know these characters they feel so well realized and the various different characters have very different personalities you don't really care what's going on as long as you get to see what's going on around these characters that said if you are a plot driven reader then that's probably not going to be true for you if you need to know hey what are we up against where are we going it's really not laid out for you you kind of just meander and I would say even though I'm a character driven reader that might drive me a little crazy if I have no anchoring but it didn't with this one I didn't mind it next up we have Gardens of the moon and this particular one by Steven Erikson I would say it's a great contrast to the other two books I've already mentioned I almost wouldn't even think of it as grimdark upon first thought because it is so much about a bird's eye view of civilization especially civilization that has gone back and forth with different people and power different entities as a result it's not as intimate as the other books not as character-driven and weirdly grimdark to me when I think room dark I think grey morality and that's harder to see when you're looking at such a big epic scope you're seeing it more in big epic proportions but when you think about it the world is it's quite dark and you kind of see all these little pieces on a board next up we have the lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch almost every single time I see a list of the best grimdark fantasy pretty much always see lies of Locke Lamora up there very high it is more of a cheeky grim dark I say it all the time because I feel like it's very accurate but one of you mentioned that you think that lies of Locke Lamora is kind of like a Quentin Tarantino movie where you have these really ridiculous kind of funny moments and then all of a sudden you'll have the most over-the-top violence and gross stuff happening city itself is filled with a lot of people's motivations that maybe perhaps are not the most pure strangely this is actually true and not true of our main character whose name is Locke Lamora and he is a thief that's basically like his life's calling as a result of serving the nameless 13th God which is like the god of stealing and so in a way he's just serving his religion but at the same time can you justify his actions just because they're based in his religion I think that's part of another reason why this is categorizes grimdark I actually personally didn't love this story because that whole idea of it feeling like a Quentin Tarantino movie for me it created this sense of detachment but it does have flashback sequences that I think are meant to not only outline elements of the city and the culture but have you get to know Locke a lot better and so a lot of people feel like the characters are very well realized I personally did not feel that way because there's this level of almost absurdity in a sense with things happening sometimes just the luck of the characters is so extravagant so for me it just didn't quite click but it's obviously extremely well loved by most fantasy fans switching to a series that I adore and that would be the Witcher series by Andrzej Sapkowski this particular series absolutely has grey morality essentially woven into every single characters personality I also think that you see it a lot through the dialog you see the cheekiness within under Scotty's writing style and the dialogue itself there's a lot of really funny moments but it is also I think kind of solidified as grimdark because of its setting you follow these characters you have these kind of close-ups of specific characters then you have this detachment from other characters all intertwined through war the best way I can describe it while I'm not well-versed with malazan is that you get these moments that follow people who you're like who's this guy I don't care about this guy but one little conversation between this guy and someone else affects our characters and to me that feels a little bit like malazan but then the tone of the story feels kind of like first law a very interesting mix and I still would say I haven't quite found any other fancy books that feel like The Witcher story if you are unfamiliar with the set up it follows a monster hunter named Geralt there's a lot of themes about whether the monsters themselves are any worse than human beings and our human beings actually the worst monsters out there but you follow him and two other main characters ciri who is a princess Jennifer who is a sorceress next up we have a story that I have seen considered grimdark by several different lists of best Grimm dark and I never thought of it as grim dark but I think there's a specific reason why it is listed and that would be black prism by Brent weeks every single story I've mentioned so far I would say as a pretty soft magic system whereas black prism has a very very well fleshed out elaborated on magic system there it's clear rules and limitations a lot of times when people talk about the story they talk about the magic which is very fascinating it has to do with colors some people can draw on a specific color from the spectrum and have something tied to that whereas other people can draw from two maybe three then you have the prism who is essentially the most powerful being because they have access to all the colors the powers that come with that they're not only powerful in their magic but they also hold a lot of power politically I think in my mind I've come to associate these softer magic systems with grim dark and perhaps that's why I personally didn't think of it but technically all the characters are pretty morally grey and that's part of what is so appealing to a lot of people about this series because of the political power that the prism has you do have a lot of politics in the books and politics make for some pretty great reveals and plot twists that's something that a lot of the fans praised this series for but for me I didn't really want to read past book 1 because while I enjoyed the moral greatness of the characters in first law in this particular story I just I didn't like the characters enough to want to see what happened to them or to find them fascinating enough to follow and that's just a personal thing of course because everybody's going to connect or like or dislike two different characters and so for me just I just didn't like any of them I felt like I was actively kind of rooting against them when with other books that do grey morality the way I like it it's that I want to root for these characters even though I know I shouldn't and I feel conflicted and I really feel that way I was like can all these people just die already I mentioned not really feeling like black prism came to mind for me when I thought grimdark and that's true of this next one as well which would be assassin's apprentice I do not consider the scrim dark but so many other people seem to which I found shocking because our main character you have this very intimate examination of them they're kind of telling you about their childhood and it's focused a lot on the mental health of the character who feels trapped because they are the illegitimate child of a noble and in order to make sure that he never tries to take the throne for himself they keep him close and by they I mean the current people in power and he just always has his life on hold and at the whim of whatever they want his life basically sucks and he has no ability to have agency but they do allow him the opportunity to become an assassin when I thought about it I was like man I think part of it is that you grow to kind of almost feel bad for this character to pity them and you're like I just want you to be happy that you kind of are tricked because you're like but they're becoming an assassin and then when you think about it you're like wow that is that's actually perhaps the best moral grayness cuz it's not right in your face if you think about it you're like this is actually not good it's not like they're going around and just offing all the bad guys they're just offing whoever they're told to still doesn't make me think grimdark though maybe because it doesn't feel extremely violent and doesn't feel really gritty the way a lot of the other ones do so let me know if you consider it next up we have a book that I think is very upfront with it's grey morality slash being villainous and that would be vicious and vengeful by ve Schwab there are hardly any characters in this story that are good guys the set up for this story is that you are following these two best friends who are trying to find out if this myth that they've heard about is real in this particular myth is that people who essentially die and then come back very quickly they end up having powers and it's kind of just something nobody really believes it's our own world and everybody's like that's ridiculous that doesn't happen and a lot of people have never even heard about this but these two characters have and they want to see if they can do this to themselves and then you end up having a split timeline where you see them trying to do these experiments and in the future you see that they hate each other and they're trying to kill each other and you get to have a puzzle to put together to see how all this comes together a lot of the characters in this story are terrible they do terrible things for their own motivations they're like well it's me or it's that person and I like me more I don't know that person and what's really for me the thing that kind of pulls me in is that you have these very great characters and then you have some characters that aren't very gray maybe they're children and for whatever reason this character that's pretty villainous has this connection with this child character and then they feel more human and then you're like oh but can they stop being bad and then just like be the adopted parent of that child and then you're like why am i feeling these things they're terrible and they should die I love that that's what I love about grimdark is when you have those conflicted feelings I feel like I felt like that so often next up we have a promise of blood by Brian McClelland I don't really feel like the tone of the story is particularly grimdark I think it's set up is and the mystery almost set the set up of the story creates for you because right at the beginning of the story you have a French Revolution inspired set up so the main characters are the ones who assassinated the people in power and now they have taken over and they're trying to basically start a new governing body but you don't really know for a while if these characters are doing this for righteous good reasons or if maybe just maybe they're not actually any better than the people that were there before I do think that creates a very amazing pool for the reader you immediately want to find out and you also just are intrigued I personally didn't love this book because while I do think that the magic system is perhaps stronger I shouldn't say stronger I should say it's a harder magic system than a lot of the other ones on this list as a result I kind of wanted more of the rules and limitations elaborated on and I think that it kind of sat in the middle at times of being soft and being hard and so you're just kind of you sometimes find things out as they happen when it comes to the magic and I don't know I almost like needed a tutorial mode and just had everything laid out for me so that the stakes would feel higher than if I was like oh well like if they run out of this then all of a sudden their powers won't work you know that kind of dumb thing last on this list would be blood song by Anthony Ryan I really enjoy this book I would say that this does not fit grimdark because of the main character the main character is a pretty good guy it's one of those I'm telling you my life story and so you follow him from childhood and as a boy he went to this almost military school that trained him to baddest soldier fighter guy and man what they go through is intense a lot of the kids die it's crazy but it's kind of boring I'm gonna be really honest it's not super action-packed but I didn't mind because I really liked Velen a lot and I liked just sitting with him as he was learning how to forge a weapon or as he was being forced to just survive out in the wilderness those sorts of things because I loved this character so much I liked following him I also liked the friendships that were created in this school I thought those were really well done and you do follow valent as he grows into a man so then you have to see how his training has set him up for the corruption in the world and I think the the world itself is where you start to see the grayness it's where you start to see the corruption it's where you start to see the more grim dark elements and the story can be quite gritty it can be pretty violent there's of course so many other great grimdark books out there that I didn't mention so if you have any other favorites feel free to recommend those in the comments down below but anyway thanks so much for watching I hope you have a great rest of your day and I'll see you guys later [Music]

Channel: Elliot Brooks

Views: 36,526

Rating: 4.9388647 out of 5

Keywords: elliot brooks, elliot, brooks, booktube, booktuber, fantasy, grimdark, grimdark books, grimdark books recommendations, best grimdark books, top ten grimdark books, Elliot Brooks grimdark, first law, first law trilogy, gentleman bastards, lies of Locke Lamora, assassin's apprentice, robin hobby, Mark Lawrence, prince of thorns, vicious, vengeful, ve schwab, Malazan, gardens of the moon

Id: ApVQdUZhDnE

Length: 15min 51sec (951 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 05 2020