Best Dark Fantasy Books

Dark fantasy books are those that contain elements of the horror genre. Terrifying monsters, horrible people and awful violence are all a must. In dark fantasy worlds, the shadows hold unknowable horrors, and a grisly death is just around the next corner.

What differentiates dark fantasy from horror is the intent. Horror has the intent to scare the reader, while dark fantasy usually does not. Dark fantasy stories are also set in fantasy worlds (and this includes urban fantasy, where magical worlds hide in the cracks of our own), while pure horror is more often set in the mundane world with a few supernatural elements. The protagonists of both genres are different as well. While a horror protagonist might often be a normal person victimised by supernatural forces, a protagonist in a dark fantasy story will usually be a part of the supernatural world themselves.

All this considered, genres aren't cleanly divided into different boxes. There's a continuum, and dark fantasy covers stories that fall into other subcategories as well, such as grimdark fantasy, or gritty fantasy. These subcategories share many similarities, and many books, and their meanings are often hotly debated.

Here are our picks for the Top 25 Dark Fantasy Books, and why they each made the list.

Matthew Cropley is a fantasy fanatic who has a particular love for the darker, grittier, more morally ambiguous side of the genre. His fiction and non-fiction can be found in Dimension6, Sword and Sorcery Magazine and Grimdark Magazine.