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Where to Start in Fantasy: Five Paths for New Readers

Not sure where to start in fantasy? Five reading paths for new readers, from magic systems and adventure to character, prose and grit.

Search for where to start in fantasy and you will usually get the same handful of books.

Mistborn. The Name of the Wind. The Way of Kings. A Game of Thrones. Then probably Mistborn again, in case you missed it.

They are all worthwhile books. But fantasy is far bigger than any one list of obvious starting points.

The right place to begin depends on what you want from a story.

Some readers want magic with clear rules and clever pay-offs. Some want characters they can live with for thousands of pages. Some want a crew, a journey, and people who feel like friends by the end. Others want sentences that make them stop and read them twice.

And some want fantasy that understands violence has a cost.

I read more than I write, and after years of reading fantasy I do not think there is one correct entry point. There are different routes into the genre.

Below are five of them.

Each path has three books: a place to begin, a next step, and a book that opens things up further. Pick the one that sounds closest to what you want right now.

Do not worry too much about choosing perfectly. Read the first book. Give it a hundred pages. You will know soon enough whether it is for you.

None of these paths is more valid than the others. The only thing that matters is finding the kind of fantasy that makes you want to carry on.

Path 1: I Want Clear Rules and Clever Worldbuilding

This is for readers who want magic to make sense.

You want rules, limits, consequences, and climaxes built around information that was there all along. You want to understand how the world works well enough to spot the answer before the characters do.

Start with: Brandon Sanderson, Mistborn: The Final Empire

This remains one of the best places to start for readers who want a modern, accessible fantasy novel with a clear magic system.

Vin is a teenage thief in a world ruled by an immortal tyrant. She discovers she can use Allomancy, a form of magic based on burning metals to gain specific abilities.

Each metal does one thing. Each power has a cost. Sanderson makes the rules clear, then spends the book finding smart ways to push against them.

It is also a heist story, which helps. The characters have a plan, the plan has problems, and the magic is tied directly into the plot rather than sitting beside it.

If this works for you, there is plenty more Sanderson waiting. The wider Cosmere alone can keep you busy for years.

Get Your Copy.

Then: Brian McClellan, Promise of Blood

Promise of Blood takes some of the pleasures of Sanderson’s work and puts them in a sharper, more political setting.

This is flintlock fantasy: muskets, revolutions, coups, and magic threaded through a world that feels close to the French Revolution.

There are several systems at work here. Powder mages can draw power from gunpowder. Privileged use more traditional sorcery. Knacked have small, strange gifts that can be useful in the right situation.

The plot moves quickly. The main characters are adults who know what they are doing, even when they are making terrible decisions. It has the pace of a thriller without losing the satisfaction of a well-built fantasy world.

Get your copy.

Then: Will Wight, Unsouled

Unsouled is the first book in Will Wight’s completed twelve-book Cradle series.

Lindon comes from a society built around personal advancement and martial power. He has been marked as Unsouled: someone with no future, no gift, and no place in the hierarchy.

Then he is given a reason to fight anyway.

This is progression fantasy at its best. The pleasure is watching Lindon learn, train, fail, adapt, and become stronger through effort rather than luck.

The books are fast, addictive, and very hard to put down once the series finds its stride.

Get your copy.

Where to go next

Try The Way of Kings if you want a much bigger Sanderson series with more characters, more history, and a larger canvas.

Try Robert Jackson Bennett’s Foundryside if you want a heist story with unusual magic and a more contained trilogy.

Path 2: I Want Characters Who Feel Like Real People

This is the path for readers who are there for the people.

The world can be interesting. The magic can be impressive. But what matters most is whether the characters feel alive.

You want to know what they are thinking. You want to see them make mistakes, carry regrets, hurt people they love, and try to become better.

Start with: Robin Hobb, Assassin’s Apprentice

Robin Hobb writes characters with a level of emotional precision that few fantasy writers can match.

Assassin’s Apprentice is told through Fitz, the bastard son of a prince. He grows up at court, caught between the people who want to use him and the people who claim to care about him.

Fitz is not always easy to read. He can be stubborn, loyal beyond reason, and blind to the damage being done around him.

That is part of why he works.

Hobb makes you feel every bad decision, every betrayal, and every small act of kindness. The first Farseer trilogy is a strong starting point, but it is only the beginning of Fitz’s story.

If you carry on through Tawny Man and Fitz and the Fool, you get one of the longest and most affecting character arcs in fantasy.

Get your copy.

Then: Michael J. Sullivan, Theft of Swords

Where Hobb can break your heart, Michael J. Sullivan is often warmer.

Theft of Swords introduces Hadrian and Royce: a swordsman and a thief who work together as Riyria, taking jobs for people who can afford them.

The books grow into something bigger, with conspiracies, lost history, political upheaval, and old secrets coming back to the surface.

But the friendship between Hadrian and Royce is what holds it together.

They are different in almost every way. Hadrian believes people can be better. Royce generally assumes they cannot. Watching that partnership change over the series is one of the great pleasures of the books.

Get your copy.

Then: Tad Williams, The Dragonbone Chair

Tad Williams helped shape much of what modern epic fantasy became.

The Dragonbone Chair begins with Simon, a kitchen boy in a castle who finds himself caught up in events far larger than he understands.

This is old-school epic fantasy in the best sense. It takes its time. It lets the world feel lived in. It gives its characters room to grow.

Simon starts out young, uncertain, and sometimes frustrating. That is deliberate. The pleasure comes from watching him become someone capable of carrying the weight the story puts on him.

Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn is a finished trilogy and remains one of the foundations of modern epic fantasy.

Get your copy.

Where to go next

Try Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls for intelligent, character-led adult fantasy.

Try Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana for a more lyrical standalone about memory, loss, and the cost of liberation.

Path 3: I Want Adventure with Friendship at the Centre

This is for readers who want a party, a crew, or a band of people who become more important than the quest itself.

You want arguments around a campfire. You want badly timed jokes, impossible plans, old grudges, and people risking everything for each other.

Start with: Nicholas Eames, Kings of the Wyld

Imagine a group of ageing mercenaries getting the band back together for one last job.

That is the basic idea behind Kings of the Wyld, and it is much better than that description makes it sound.

Clay Cooper used to be part of the most famous mercenary band in the world. Years later, his old friend turns up needing help to rescue his daughter from a city surrounded by monsters.

The group reunites. They are older, slower, carrying injuries and baggage, but they still know how to fight.

The book is funny without feeling weightless. It understands nostalgia, friendship, and the strange pain of realising your best years might be behind you.

Then it makes you care enough to hurt you.

Get your copy.

Then: Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora

Locke Lamora is a thief, con artist, and professional liar in a fantasy city inspired by Renaissance Italy.

He and the Gentleman Bastards run elaborate scams on wealthy targets. Then they attract the attention of people far more dangerous than the people they usually steal from.

The plotting is intricate, but the relationships are what make the book work.

Lynch cuts between the present-day con and the earlier years when Locke’s crew came together. By the time the plan starts collapsing, you know exactly what these people mean to each other.

It is clever, fast, filthy, funny, and often brutal.

Get Your Copy.

Then: Sebastian de Castell, Traitor’s Blade

Falcio val Mond is one of the last Greatcoats: travelling magistrates and swordsmen once sworn to serve the king.

The king is dead. The country is falling apart. Falcio and his two oldest friends are still trying to carry out their final duty.

Traitor’s Blade has duels, plots, betrayals, and plenty of swashbuckling energy. But it also has real moral weight.

Falcio, Kest, and Brasti feel like men who have known each other too long to bother pretending. Their friendship is built on loyalty, irritation, shared history, and the certainty that they will show up when it counts.

Get Your Copy.

Where to go next

Try Joe Abercrombie’s The Heroes if you want a war story about the people trapped inside it.

Or go back to Michael J. Sullivan and read more Hadrian and Royce.

Path 4: I Want Literary Prose and Mythic Weight

This is for readers who come to fantasy through literary fiction, or who want fantasy where the writing itself is part of the pleasure.

You are not reading only to find out what happens next. You want atmosphere. You want ambiguity. You want stories that leave room for silence and unanswered questions.

Start with: Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

Ursula K. Le Guin wrote fantasy with a clarity and control few writers have matched.

Earthsea is a world of islands, old names, dragons, sea journeys, and quiet danger. Magic comes through knowing the true names of things.

The first book follows Ged, a boy with enormous power and very little wisdom. He makes a mistake that follows him for years.

It is a short novel, but it does not feel small.

The books deepen as they go. The Tombs of Atuan is stranger and more intimate. Tehanu, written years later, is one of the best books fantasy has produced about adulthood, power, and the lives people are expected to live.

Get Your Copy.

Then: Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

Do not read much about this one before you begin.

The narrator lives in a vast House filled with statues, halls, tides, birds, and bones. He believes he understands the House. Gradually, both he and the reader begin to realise he does not.

Piranesi is short, strange, and quietly moving.

It is the kind of book that changes shape as you read it. By the end, you may find yourself thinking back over details that seemed unimportant at the start.

Get Your Copy.

Then: Patricia A. McKillip, The Riddle-Master of Hed

Patricia A. McKillip remains one of the most under-read great fantasy writers.

Her work has the texture of myth without feeling like an imitation of older stories. Songs matter. Names matter. Old stories matter because they are rarely as dead as people think.

The Riddle-Master of Hed follows Morgon, prince of a small island kingdom, who learns that his ordinary life is tied to something far older and more dangerous.

The trilogy is full of riddles, old powers, and a sense that the world is holding back more than it reveals.

If McKillip works for you, read The Forgotten Beasts of Eld next.

Get Your Copy.

Where to go next

Try Robin Hobb’s Farseer books for character-led fantasy with real emotional depth.

Try Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria for a book about books, language, memory, and ghosts.

Path 5: I Want Gritty Fantasy with Moral Complications

This is for readers who want fantasy that does not treat violence as clean or heroism as easy.

You want characters making difficult choices in bad situations. You want consequences. You want people trying to do the right thing when there may not be a right answer available.

That does not mean every book needs to be bleak.

The best dark fantasy still gives you people worth caring about.

Start with: John Gwynne, Malice

John Gwynne writes big, muscular epic fantasy with battle, monsters, old gods, betrayals, and large casts of characters.

But Malice has more heart than its reputation for bloodshed might suggest.

It is the first book in The Faithful and the Fallen, a completed quartet set in a world where old prophecies are starting to come true and the people caught in them have to decide what they are willing to become.

The story has darkness, but it also understands loyalty and courage. Gwynne gives you characters who are scared, angry, grieving, and still trying to stand up for each other.

If you like this, his later work is also worth reading, especially The Shadow of the Gods.

Get Your Copy.

Then: Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself

Joe Abercrombie helped define what many readers now mean when they talk about grimdark.

The Blade Itself follows Logen Ninefingers, a northern warrior trying to leave his bloody past behind; Sand dan Glokta, a crippled torturer who has become very good at spotting lies; and Jezal dan Luthar, a vain nobleman with more confidence than sense.

The dialogue is brilliant. The violence is ugly. The characters are selfish, damaged, funny, and often more human than they want to admit.

Abercrombie does not offer easy moral lessons. He is more interested in what people do when they have already become the worst version of themselves.

The standalones that follow the original trilogy are some of his best work, especially The Heroes and Best Served Cold.

Get Your Copy.

Then: Mark Lawrence, Red Sister

Nona Grey is sent to a convent where girls are trained to become warriors, assassins, scholars, and nuns.

The world is dying. The sun is failing. The convent holds secrets that reach far beyond its walls.

Red Sister has a strong central character, excellent action, and a setting that becomes stranger and more interesting the further you go.

Nona is dangerous, angry, and fiercely loyal. The book gives her room to be all of those things without pretending that any of them are simple.

Mark Lawrence’s earlier Prince of Thorns books are much harsher. I would start here.

Get Your Copy.

Where to go next

Try Anna Smith Spark’s https://geni.us/N7yI for darker fantasy with a more lyrical style.

Try Glen Cook’s The Black Company for one of the books that helped establish the modern military fantasy tradition.

A Final Thought

Most readers do not stay on one path forever.

Readers who begin with Sanderson often end up reading Hobb. Readers who love Hobb often find their way to Le Guin. Readers who start with Le Guin sometimes want something harder and turn to Abercrombie.

The genre is bigger than any one shelf in a bookshop.

Do not worry about finding the perfect book. Pick the path that sounds right for you now. Read the first recommendation. See what it gives you.

If you finish it and want more, carry on.

If you finish it and feel nothing, try another route.

Part of becoming a fantasy reader is working out what you want from stories. The only real way to do that is to keep reading.

The five starting books here—Mistborn, Assassin’s Apprentice, Kings of the Wyld, A Wizard of Earthsea, and Malice—give you a good sense of the range fantasy can offer.

Read all five over the next year and you will know far more about your own taste than any guide can tell you.

Whatever path you choose, I hope it leads you to something you love.

Happy reading!

Note: This post includes affiliate links.

Writing Through the Heatwave & Returning to Mark, The Chosen One | Author Diary, June 26, 2026

Writing through the UK heatwave, revisiting Mark, The Chosen One, and reading The Hobgoblin Riot. Plus updates on my fantasy writing and the sequel to Orphan Farm Boy of Destiny.

This week’s been a challenge thanks to the UK heatwave, but I’ve still managed to make progress on my latest fantasy project.

I’ve been working through what I have so far on Mark, The Chosen One, a follow-up to my Patreon novella Orphan Farm Boy of Destiny.

The story picks up 20 years later. Mark is now in his forties, has a teenage son, and hasn’t picked up a sword in over two decades.

The Dark Lord never appeared when prophecy said he would… but now the prophecy has finally come true.

After years of living an ordinary life, Mark must decide whether he can become the hero everyone expected him to be.

On the reading front, I finished Dominion of Blades by Matt Dinniman and immediately started Book 2, The Hobgoblin Riot. I’m really enjoying the series and seeing another side to Dinniman’s writing outside Dungeon Crawler Carl.

What a John le Carré Spy Novel Looks Like in a Fantasy World

What happens when the paranoia, bureaucracy, and moral ambiguity of a John le Carré spy novel collide with epic fantasy? A look at fantasy espionage, institutional corruption, and the ideas behind Silent Watcher.

There’s a moment in a lot of epic fantasy where someone unrolls a map and explains the problem.

An ancient evil is rising. A kingdom is falling. A prophecy must be fulfilled. The lines are clear. The enemy is obvious.

John le Carré spent an entire career writing stories that work in exactly the opposite way.

Nobody unrolls a map because nobody can agree what the map means. The enemy isn’t a dark lord. It’s a department. A committee. A chain of decisions made by people who all believe they’re doing their jobs properly.

The hero isn’t chosen. They’re assigned.

Usually against their will.

And the great fear isn’t that evil will win. It’s that everyone involved has quietly stopped being able to tell the difference between winning and losing.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot while writing Silent Watcher, because fantasy rarely operates on those terms.

Fantasy is full of wars, rebellions, coups, and corrupt rulers.

Yet the genre is surprisingly trusting of institutions.

The rightful king returns. The true heir takes the throne. The wise order of mages was right all along. Even when institutions are corrupt, the corruption usually comes from somewhere else. A traitor. A dark influence. A villain who has infected an otherwise healthy system.

Remove the bad actor and everything works again.

Le Carré’s fiction runs on a different assumption.

The institution is the problem.

Not because a villain corrupted it.

Because the institution itself produces outcomes nobody would choose individually.

Everyone follows procedure.

Everyone acts reasonably.

Everyone passes responsibility to the next desk.

Then something terrible happens and nobody can point to the exact moment it became inevitable.

That’s a very different engine for a story.

One of the great strengths of a spy novel is uncertainty.

The protagonist always knows less than the people they’re investigating.

Every document could be planted.

Every witness could be rehearsed.

Every clue could have been left there deliberately.

The people creating the evidence are often the same people being investigated.

That translates remarkably well into fantasy if you build the institution correctly.

Imagine an order whose authority comes entirely from observation and record-keeping. Their reports become official history. Their archives become accepted truth.

Now imagine those records can be altered.

Reports disappear.

Names change.

Signatures appear on documents that were never signed.

Events are rewritten after they happen.

Suddenly the protagonist loses the one thing investigators normally rely on: certainty about the evidence.

That’s where the paranoia begins.

You don’t need magic to do this. Le Carré managed perfectly well with filing cabinets and classified documents.

Fantasy just gives you sharper tools.

The strongest influence le Carré had on me isn’t really about plot.

It’s about protagonists.

George Smiley isn’t an action hero.

His gift is attention.

He notices the inconsistency. The detail that’s slightly wrong. The explanation that’s a little too neat.

His heroism comes from refusing to look away.

Fantasy has an equivalent archetype, but we don’t use it very often.

The witness.

The observer.

The person whose job is not to fight, but to see.

And that’s where things become interesting.

Because what happens when a person trained to observe injustice realises that observation has become complicity?

What happens when faithfully recording events helps preserve a lie?

What happens when “watching without shaping” becomes an excuse for doing nothing?

Those feel like le Carré questions to me.

They’re also fantasy questions.

We just don’t ask them often enough.

So, why isn’t rthere more fantasy like this?

Part of the reason is that these stories are harder to sell.

The pleasures are quieter.

They’re built from suspicion, investigation, and revelation rather than spectacle.

As fantasy readers, we often expect a restoration at the end. The crown returns. The kingdom is saved.

A le Carré story isn’t usually interested in restoration.

It’s interested in asking whether the system was worth saving in the first place.

That doesn’t mean nobody is working in this space.

Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant is probably the clearest modern example. K. J. Parker spends a lot of time examining institutions through the lens of clever people trapped inside them. Robert Jackson Bennett and Daniel Abraham both understand that information and administration can be just as powerful as armies.

None of them are writing le Carré in a fantasy world.

But they’re all mining the same vein.

The one beneath the institution rather than the battlefield.

The one where the real horror isn’t the monster outside the walls.

It’s discovering the walls were built to keep you looking the wrong way.

If that sounds like your kind of fantasy, it’s very much the territory Silent Watcher occupies.

A Watcher arrives in a quiet provincial town to investigate a colleague’s death. The official record doesn’t match the evidence. Witnesses repeat the same stories. Documents vanish. Then she discovers reports carrying her own signature that she has no memory of writing.

It’s a standalone fantasy spy thriller for readers of Seth Dickinson, John le Carré, and K. J. Parker.

Get your copy.

Why I Don’t Think Hard and Soft Magic Are Useful Labels

A fantasy author’s perspective on hard and soft magic, worldbuilding, and why mystery remains one of the genre’s greatest strengths.

 For the past twenty years, fantasy readers and writers have increasingly discussed magic through the language of “hard” and “soft” magic systems.

The distinction comes largely from Brandon Sanderson’s essays on magic, and it has become so widely adopted that many readers now treat it as the default way to think about fantasy.

I understand why.

The framework is useful. It gives people a shared vocabulary. It helps explain why a magic system in a role-playing game, a video game, or a progression fantasy often feels satisfying. Readers enjoy understanding the tools available to characters. They enjoy seeing clever solutions emerge from established rules.

The problem comes when the framework stops being descriptive and starts becoming prescriptive.

Over time, the language of hard and soft magic has created a hierarchy. Magic that operates according to explicit rules is often treated as more sophisticated, more developed, or more believable. Magic that retains mystery is frequently discussed as though it occupies a lower rung on the ladder.

Yet some of the richest magical traditions in fantasy operate according to very different principles.

In Earthsea, magic is tied to true names. In Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, magic emerges from folklore, history, scholarship, and forgotten traditions. In Tolkien’s work, magic carries spiritual and moral significance. In each case, the power of the magic comes from what it means within the world and the story.

These systems possess depth, consistency, and internal logic. They shape cultures, histories, beliefs, and characters. They feel ancient and real.

They simply invite the reader to engage with them differently.

One of the great pleasures of fantasy is encountering something larger than human understanding. Many mythologies, religions, and folk traditions revolve around powers that can be glimpsed but never fully grasped. Their significance lies partly in their mystery.

Fantasy inherits much of that tradition.

When every magical phenomenon is catalogued, measured, quantified, and explained, magic begins to resemble engineering. It becomes a branch of fictional physics. That approach can produce excellent stories, but it represents one tradition among many rather than the destination toward which all fantasy naturally progresses.

As fantasy readers, we often talk about immersion. Yet genuine immersion does not always come from knowing every rule. Sometimes it comes from sensing that there are truths beneath the surface that nobody fully understands.

That is largely how I approach magic in the Ravenglass Universe.

The setting contains rules. Ravenglass behaves in particular ways. Blood can awaken its power. Tears can shape it. The Shadow Realm follows principles of its own. Certain actions carry predictable consequences.

Beneath the stories, there is a coherent system.

The characters, however, only possess fragments of that knowledge.

A Guardian scholar might understand one aspect of ravenglass. An assassin might know another. A wyvern might possess memories stretching back centuries. Ancient records preserve clues. Myths preserve others. Some pieces have been lost. Some have been deliberately hidden. Some are misunderstood.

fAs a result, the people living within the world experience magic in the same way real societies experience history, religion, or science. Knowledge accumulates unevenly. Competing explanations coexist. Certainty remains elusive.

That uncertainty creates wonder.

When Ragnar encounters ravenglass for the first time, he does not receive a rulebook. When Soren learns to forge a blade, he discovers one small corner of a much larger reality. When Adelinde uncovers forbidden histories, she finds evidence of a force beyond human understanding.

The mystery itself becomes part of the setting.

I sometimes wonder whether terms like hard magic and soft magic have outlived their usefulness.

They encourage us to sort magic into categories rather than asking what role it serves within a story. They turn a wide spectrum of approaches into a binary choice. They also carry unintended value judgements that place certain traditions above others.

Fantasy has always been broad enough to contain all of these approaches.

Some stories thrive on clearly defined magical tools. Others thrive on folklore, symbolism, myth, religion, dream logic, or half-forgotten truths. Some combine several traditions at once.

The question is never whether a magic system is hard or soft.

The question is whether it creates the experience the story needs.

For many fantasy readers, part of the appeal of magic lies in the feeling that there is always another layer beneath the one we can see. A forgotten name. A lost story. A secret buried in an old chronicle. A truth that remains just beyond reach.

That sense of mystery has carried fantasy for centuries.

I suspect it will continue to do so long after the current labels have faded from fashion.

From Grimdark to Nobledark: How the Fantasy Zeitgeist Is Shifting

Why fantasy is shifting from grimdark to nobledark—a working novelist on cultural cycles, the Fourth Turning, and where the genre is going next.

Something has shifted in fantasy.

If you’ve been paying attention to what’s selling, what readers are actually reaching for, and what’s getting talked about online, the texture of the genre has changed in the last few years.

The brutalist nihilism that defined fantasy from roughly 2005 to 2020 is no longer the dominant note.

The doorstop grimdark epic isn’t dead (Abercrombie still sells, Lawrence still sells) but it isn’t where the cultural energy is any more.

Something else is rising in its place, and naming it properly matters, because we’re going to be reading and writing in this new register for at least the next decade.

This post is about what’s shifting, why, and where I think the genre is going.

The short version: we’re moving from grimdark to nobledark, and the shift is being driven by something larger than literary fashion.

What Grimdark Was, and Why It Dominated

Grimdark didn’t appear out of nowhere. It was the natural literary register for a particular cultural moment.

The genre’s grimdark era roughly coincides with the years after 9/11 and especially after the 2008 financial crisis.

These were the years when institutional trust collapsed in real time. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated that the old certainties about righteous causes weren’t going to hold. The banking crisis demonstrated that the people running the economy didn’t know what they were doing (or did know and didn’t care). The political class on both sides of the Atlantic looked increasingly hollow.

The fantasy genre, which had spent the previous half-century in various forms of Tolkien-inflected heroism, started writing books that reflected the new mood.

Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself arrived in 2006. Mark Lawrence’s Prince of Thorns in 2011. R. Scott Bakker’s Prince of Nothing trilogy had started in 2003. George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (already running since 1996) became culturally dominant in this period and reached its televised peak in the early 2010s. The Witcher books found international readership in English translation.

What these works shared was a basic posture: heroism is a lie, institutions are corrupt, the people in charge are venal or worse, and any character who believes otherwise is naïve and probably dead by chapter ten.

That register made sense in its moment. Fantasy was doing what good fantasy does. It was taking the underlying anxieties of the culture and giving them mythic form. The bleak chuckle of an Abercrombie protagonist was the appropriate literary response to a world that had stopped believing its own institutional myths.

But that moment is passing.

Black-and-white quadrant infographic titled “Fantasy Tone Map”, showing fantasy tones by protagonist and world. The vertical axis runs from Grim, meaning morally grey or cynical protagonists, to Noble, meaning heroic and hopeful protagonists. The horizontal axis runs from Dark, meaning a brutal world, to Bright, meaning an ordered world. The quadrants are Grimdark, Grimbright, Nobledark, and Noblebright.

The Fourth Turning Lens

There’s a sociological frame worth bringing in here, because it explains the shift better than any purely literary analysis can.

Strauss and Howe’s Fourth Turning thesis, published in 1997, argues that history moves in roughly 80-year cycles consisting of four phases—a High of institutional confidence, an Awakening of cultural rebellion, an Unravelling of institutional trust, and a Crisis of collapse and reformation. The Crisis phase, by their account, is when the existing order can’t sustain itself any longer and a society has to reach back to first principles to find what it actually believes.

You don’t have to buy the theory wholesale to find the diagnostic useful. The grimdark era of fantasy maps onto what Strauss and Howe would call the late Unravelling—the phase where institutional trust is collapsing and the dominant cultural mood is ironic, distrustful, and exhausted.

That’s exactly the types of books we were reading from 2005 to 2020.

What we’re in now is something different. By Strauss and Howe’s reckoning we’re somewhere deep in the Crisis phase, and Crisis phases have a different cultural signature. They produce appetite for first-principles narrative. They reach back for heroic archetype not out of nostalgia but out of need.

The institutions can’t be trusted, so the question becomes: what do you trust instead?

Your own moral code. The bond between you and the people you love. The duties you choose to honour. The cost you’re willing to pay to do the right thing.

This isn’t a return to pre-grimdark heroism. The brutal world that grimdark insisted on hasn’t been disproved. Readers in a Crisis era don’t want to go back to a pastoral Tolkien-era register where everything works out and the orcs are clearly delineated from the elves.

They want fantasy that acknowledges the grimdark world and then tries to live morally inside it anyway. That’s a different register, and it deserves a different name.

Black-and-white infographic titled “Four Turnings × Fantasy Tones”, with the subtitle “Strauss–Howe cycle mapped to fantasy tone”. Four stages run left to right in a cycle: First Turning, High, maps to Noblebright with “strong institutions • collective”; Second Turning, Awakening, maps to Grimbright with “rebellion • autonomy”; Third Turning, Unraveling, maps to Grimdark with “fragmentation • distrust”; and Fourth Turning, Crisis, maps to Nobledark with “threat • rebuild”. Arrows connect each stage, and a looping arrow at the bottom returns from the fourth stage back to the first.

The Markers of the Shift

You can see the shift in what’s getting commercial traction.

John Gwynne’s career arc is one of the clearest signals. His Faithful and the Fallen and Of Blood and Bone series are gritty—Norse-coded, brutal, properly dark—but they aren’t nihilistic.

Loyalty matters. Friendship matters. The decent characters are decent without being naïve.

Gwynne has overtaken many of the original grimdark writers commercially, and he isn’t doing grimdark. He’s doing something else.

The Conan revival is another signal. Robert E. Howard’s original stories are seeing a genuine cultural resurgence—new comics from Titan, new film projects, Heroic Signatures’ careful stewardship of the property.

Conan is pure first-principles myth. A man, a sword, a corrupt civilisation, a personal code that operates outside institutional law. That isn’t nostalgia for the 1930s. That’s a culture in a Crisis phase reaching for the archetypes it needs.

The cosy fantasy boom is part of the same shift, even though it looks different on the surface. T. Kingfisher, Travis Baldree’s Legends and Lattes, the explosion of low-stakes warm-tone fantasy—these books are also rejecting the grimdark register, just from a different angle. They’re saying: actually, kindness is the interesting thing now. Decency is the rebellion.

Even the romantasy boom, often dismissed as commercial confection, is part of the same shift.

Underneath the spice and the dragon-bonded mates is a fundamentally hopeful register. The bad guys lose. The morally serious choices matter. Love is real and worth fighting for. That’s a Crisis-era register too, even when it’s wearing very different clothes from John Gwynne.

What all of these have in common is that they’re rejecting the grimdark assumption that heroism is a lie. They aren’t pretending the world is gentle. They’re insisting that meaning is recoverable inside a brutal world. That’s the cultural energy of a Crisis era, and it’s the energy fantasy is now running on.

Naming the New Register

I’ve been calling this nobledark, partly because the existing taxonomy doesn’t quite catch it.

Grimdark is dark in a particular way: the world is brutal and heroism is a lie. The two go together. Heroes get killed or corrupted, decent characters are revealed as fools, and the moral arc bends toward nothing. Whatever else you say about grimdark, it has an honest internal logic.

Noblebright is the opposite—the world is broadly hopeful, heroes are mostly good, evil is identifiable and defeatable, and moral effort is generally rewarded.

This is the arena Tolkien works in (with complications) and the register that dominated fantasy before grimdark arrived. It’s still alive—it isn’t extinct—but it doesn’t catch what’s happening now either.

The new register isn’t asking us to forget the grimdark insight that the world is brutal. It’s asking us to live morally inside that insight.

Nobledark is the register that holds both. The world is as brutal as grimdark said it was. Heroism is as hard as grimdark said it was. Institutions are corrupt, power is venal, decent people get destroyed by forces larger than themselves.

But—and this is the bit grimdark refused—moral commitments still matter, decency is still possible, hope is real even when it costs you everything to keep it alive. The world bleeds, but the bleeding doesn’t conclude the argument.

You can see this all over the books I named in the previous section. Gwynne does it. The Conan revival does it. The cosy fantasy boom does it from one angle, romantasy from another. Even some of the grimdark writers themselves are drifting toward it—Abercrombie’s The Heroes and his Age of Madness trilogy have noticeably more weight on the moral commitments of their characters than his earlier work.

What nobledark refuses is the easy ironic detachment that defined grimdark. It refuses the bleak chuckle. It refuses the implied authorial position that all of this is grim and pointless and isn’t it interesting how much of it I can wallow in. The Crisis era doesn’t have time for that posture any more.

What This Means for Writers and Readers

If you write fantasy, the shift matters because the readers you’re writing for are no longer the readers of 2010.

The reader who wanted Prince of Thorns in 2011 wanted a confirmation that the dark world they suspected they were living in was the real one.

The reader picking up new fantasy in 2026 wants something else. They’ve already accepted that the world is dark. They want to know what to do about it. They want characters whose moral effort is taken seriously by the text. They want costs that mean something. They want hope that has paid for itself.

If you read fantasy, the shift matters because it explains why your taste might have moved without you realising it. If you used to love grimdark and have noticed that recent grimdark releases feel slightly off—not bad, just somehow not landing the way the old books did—that isn’t because the books got worse. It’s because you’ve moved, and the broader cultural moment has moved with you.

In the Ravenglass Universe, what I’ve been trying to do—what the whole King of Nobledark framing has been about—is write fantasy that lives in this cultural shift honestly.

Ragnar in Ravenglass Legends lives in a brutal world that crushed his family and saw him adopted by his enemies. Maja lives in a court that survives on manipulation and threat. Soren in Dawn of Assassins lives in an empire that’s actively collapsing around him.

None of these are gentle worlds. But all of them have characters who choose, repeatedly, to act morally inside brutal circumstances, and whose choices cost them real things.

That’s nobledark, and it’s what I think fantasy is going to be doing more of for the foreseeable future.

Where Fantasy Goes Next

I don’t think grimdark is going anywhere—the books are good, the readership is loyal, and the genre will continue to produce strong work. But it isn’t going to be as dominant over the next decade. The cultural moment that gave grimdark its weight has passed.

What’s coming next is fantasy that takes the grimdark world seriously and then asks the next question. What do you owe the people you love when the institutions can’t be trusted? How do you act morally when the law is corrupt? What do you choose to honour when no one’s making you? How do you keep faith—in anything—when the world has given you every reason not to?

These are Crisis-era questions, and fantasy is uniquely equipped to answer them because it can build the worlds that make the questions visible.

The next decade of fantasy is going to look different from the last one, and the writers and readers paying attention can feel it already.

The age of grimdark is winding down. The age of nobledark is starting now.h

How Rome Inspired My Fantasy Writing: Ruins, Empire and Story Fuel

A week in Rome sparked fresh fantasy ideas, from the Colosseum and Vatican power symbols to Ostia Antica’s ruins, sculpture, empire, faith and memory.

I had one of those rare weeks where I didn’t write.

We spent the week in Rome. Not a writing trip. No laptop, no word counts, no “I’ll just make a few notes” that quietly turns into a chapter by accident. But when you write fantasy for a living, you can’t really switch that part of your brain off.

And Rome is ridiculous for story fuel.

Every corner gives you another ruin, statue, inscription, archway, or impossible piece of engineering, and every one of them is whispering something about power, empire, spectacle, faith, or the strange lengths people will go to make themselves permanent.

So yes. I came home with ideas.

The Colosseum is one of those places that feels unreal even while you’re standing in it. I kept trying to imagine sitting there two thousand years ago, packed in with tens of thousands of other people, watching gladiators kill each other for the afternoon’s entertainment.

As a fantasy writer, you can’t help thinking about the machinery behind that spectacle. Not the combat itself — the systems around it. Who pays. Who benefits. Who gets sacrificed. What it does to a culture when public violence becomes the default civic entertainment.

Cheery holiday thoughts, obviously.

The Forum gave me the same feeling. Walking through the bones of power. Temples, law courts, political spaces, monuments — all of it ruined, all of it still heavy with what it used to mean.

I’m always drawn to that gap. The distance between what something once claimed to be and what’s left of it.

The Vatican Museum was a mixed experience. As most of you know, I’m legally blind, and the Sistine Chapel’s lighting did me no favours. I couldn’t make out much of the imagery, and a lot of the detailed paintings were lost on me.

But I got a different kind of useful from it.

The scale. The wealth. The careful performance of sacred authority. The contrast between the Gospels (poverty, humility, washing other people’s feet) and the centuries of accumulated gold, marble, and gilded ceiling above your head. That gap again. What an institution claims to be versus what it actually became.

The Egyptian collection was a highlight, especially a magnificent Anubis statue.

My favourite part of the Vatican Museum wasn’t the Sistine Chapel.

It was the Popemobiles.

I genuinely loved them. There’s a whole section showing papal transport through the ages, from golden carriages to modern vehicles with raised bulletproof platforms. A golden carriage tells you one thing about power. A bulletproof glass box tells you something else entirely. Both are theatre. Both are how a ruler manages the distance between himself and the people watching.

I can already feel that feeding into the Ravenglass Universe somewhere. Not Popemobiles, unfortunately, but the question of how rulers present themselves to the public. What they sit in. What they wear. How high above the crowd they stand. How close they let anyone get. How much danger they’re willing to admit exists.

The kind of detail that makes a fantasy culture feel real.

My favourite place on the whole trip was Ostia Antica, the old Roman port at the mouth of the Tiber.

I’d been to Pompeii before. Astonishing, but heaving. Ostia Antica was quieter. Space to slow down and actually be there. We walked through streets, bathhouses, courtyards, old living spaces. The amphitheatre felt almost modern in its layout, which is a strange thing to say about something two thousand years old, but you could immediately understand how people gathered there.

That’s the thing that gets me. The past feels distant until you’re standing somewhere and realise people haven’t changed as much as we like to think. They still wanted entertainment, comfort, status, food, gossip, religion, beauty. Somewhere to sit. Somewhere to wash. Somewhere to be seen.

The museum at Ostia Antica was wonderful (and well-lit) so I could actually enjoy the exhibits. As some of you know, I studied history of art to PhD level, and worked at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds for a while, so the focus on sculptures meant I was in my element.

A good sculpture shows you what someone looked like.

A great sculpture shows you who they were.

There were portraits, reliefs, sarcophagi, mythological figures. A statue of Minerva I keep thinking about a week later.

There’s something about sculpture that feels especially useful for fantasy. It carries memory. It turns people into symbols. It can flatter, distort, preserve, threaten, or haunt. Statues in fantasy worlds shouldn’t just stand in courtyards looking decorative. They should tell you what a culture values, what it fears, and what lies it tells about itself.

A rare week off writing, but not really a week off stories. I came home with ideas for scenes, settings, power structures, rituals, public spectacles, imperial symbols, and the ways empires try to make themselves look eternal.

Some of it will end up in the Ravenglass Universe.

That’s one of the great joys of writing fantasy. You look at our own history, with all its beauty and brutality, and ask what happens if you tilt the mirror slightly.

Rome tilted the mirror plenty.

And now, back to the writing.

Religion in Fantasy: Why Most of It Isn’t About Faith

Why has fantasy mostly stopped engaging with faith as faith? A working novelist on Lewis, Tolkien, Sanderson’s Mormon themes, and the Ravenglass Universe.

A reader on Reddit recently asked what role religion plays in modern fantasy.

The question stuck with me, because the honest answer is not much, and that’s strange.

Fantasy is full of churches, gods, prophecies, cults, and sacred texts. What it mostly isn’t full of is faith.

Religion in modern fantasy usually functions as worldbuilding, politics, horror, or symbolism. Characters rarely believe in a way that feels sincere and grounded. Genuine belief is often treated as manipulation, fanaticism, or naïveté.

That absence feels odd in a genre perfectly suited to asking religious questions.

This post is about why that absence exists, what writers like Lewis, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Sanderson

are doing differently, and how I’ve tried to approach religion in the Ravenglass Universe.

Lewis, Tolkien, and Two Different Christianities

The two writers most often grouped together as the foundational Christians of modern fantasy were actually doing very different things with faith.

C. S. Lewis wrote apologetics through fantasy quite openly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Narnia

is an evangelistic project. Aslan is a Christ figure in plain sight, and the books are designed as theological storytelling. Lewis wasn’t subtle about this and didn’t want to be. He believed fiction could carry the gospel, and the Narnia books came directly out of that belief.

J. R. R. Tolkien approached religion differently. Tolkien was a lifelong Catholic, but he rejected allegory. Rather than writing doctrine into Middle-earth directly, he let faith shape the world’s moral atmosphere.

Mercy matters. Pity matters. Bilbo sparing Gollum ultimately saves the world. The longing for the West, the fall of Númenor, the sudden turn from despair to hope. None of this is Catholic in the obvious way Aslan is Christian. But the worldview underneath it clearly is.

That distinction shaped much of what followed.

Lewis uses fantasy in service of faith. Tolkien lets faith shape the texture of the world itself. Both take belief seriously. Both assume that what people believe about the divine matters.

Modern fantasy often doesn’t.

Four Modes of Religion in Modern Fantasy

Modern fantasy tends to approach religion in four broad ways.

The first is religion as worldbuilding. This is probably the dominant mode in epic fantasy. Steven Erikson fills the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malazan_Book_of_the_Fallen

books with gods, ascended beings, cults, and ancient powers, but the religious systems mostly explain how the world operates. The focus is cosmology rather than belief.

Brandon Sanderson often does something similar. His magic systems function almost like theology rendered mechanically. The systems are important and deeply tied to the plot, but they’re rarely about ordinary people wrestling with faith itself.

The second mode is religion as political power.

N. K. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._K._Jemisin

uses religion in The Broken Earth Trilogy as part of imperial control. Mark Lawrence does similar things in Book of the Ancestor. In these stories, the institutions matter more than the underlying belief. Religion becomes another mechanism of authority.

The third mode is religion as horror.

A lot of modern fantasy still sits under the shadow of H. P. Lovecraft. Divine knowledge becomes dangerous knowledge. The sacred becomes corrupting or alien. Writers like Tamsyn Muir use religious imagery to create unease, decay, and metaphysical wrongness.

The fourth is religion as symbolic structure.

This is where writers use systems like tarot, alchemy, mythic cycles, or kabbalah as narrative architecture rather than literal faith. Italo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italo_Calvino

The Castle of Crossed Destinies is a classic example, using tarot spreads to organise narrative patterns and meaning.

None of these approaches is wrong. They’ve all produced brilliant books.

But very little of it is about lived belief. That’s the missing piece.

Modern fantasy often treats religion as institution, system, or symbol, while sidestepping the inner experience of faith itself.

Sanderson’s Mormon Themes and Hidden Theology

The biggest modern exception is probably Brandon Sanderson.

Sanderson is openly Mormon and has talked many times about how his faith shapes his fiction. What makes his work interesting is that he rarely writes religion directly into the foreground. Instead, Mormon theology shapes the deep structure of the worlds.

One of the clearest examples is the Mormon idea of eternal progression. In LDS theology, humanity can move toward divinity through growth, trial, discipline, and moral choice.

That idea appears everywhere in Sanderson’s fiction.

Vin ascends in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistborn_series

. Sazed follows. Characters in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stormlight_Archive

gain power through moral development, knowledge, and self-mastery. Human beings move upward rather than being punished for reaching too high.

That creates a very different type of fantasy thanTolkien.

In Tolkien’s Catholic-influenced cosmology, reaching for divine power usually leads to corruption. Sauron falls through it. Saruman falls through it. The Númenóreans fall through it. Galadriel’s defining moment is refusing ultimate power when it’s offered.

Sanderson’s worlds often move the opposite way. Progress toward the divine is treated as the goal rather than the temptation.

Another recurring pattern is revelation through rediscovery.

Characters constantly recover forgotten truths. Ancient systems become understood again piece by piece. Knowledge unfolds progressively rather than arriving complete. That mirrors the Mormon idea of continuing revelation, where truth remains open rather than closed.

Put together, Sanderson’s fiction becomes deeply religious in structure without becoming apologetic. It’s the Tolkien approach applied to Mormon theology instead of Catholicism.

Building Religion in the Ravenglass Universe

Thinking about how other writers handled religion made me more deliberate about it in my own work.

The ravenglass universe/tag/ravenglass-universe spans multiple eras over roughly a thousand years, and one of the recurring questions underneath the stories is what people believe and what those beliefs cost them.

The dominant religion is the worship of Creation, the force underlying reality itself.

Creation isn’t a god in the traditional fantasy sense. It isn’t a person. It doesn’t speak. It doesn’t intervene directly. It’s closer to a metaphysical principle than a deity.

People who worship Creation aren’t praying to a being who answers them directly. They’re orienting themselves toward what they see as the underlying order of existence.

At the centre of the faith stand the Nameless Four. Their lack of names is deliberate. The idea comes partly from apophatic theology and mystical traditions which hold that the divine can’t truly be contained in language.

That idea shaped the Four.

They’re known through symbols, actions, and associations rather than names or fixed identities.

The religion changes dramatically across different eras of the setting.

In the imperial age of the The Ravenglass Chronicles, worship of the Four becomes institutionalised through temples, priesthoods, and political hierarchy.

In Ravenglass Legends, especially in Wiete, belief becomes more localised and practical. Household rites. Seasonal customs. Folk traditions the Empire might consider heretical if it paid attention.

By the time of Guild of Assassins, much of the organised structure has collapsed, but individual faith often becomes more intense because it’s no longer reinforced institutionally.

What mattered to me was allowing belief to feel real to the characters without the books confirming or denying the truth behind it.

When characters pray, they mean it.

Some believe they receive answers. Others lose faith entirely. Some interpret coincidence as divine intervention. Others see silence.

I didn’t want the worldbuilding to settle the argument for the reader. The /uncertainty matters.

Tarot in Fantasy Fiction and the Ravenglass Chronicles

The Ravenglass Chronicles is built around the Major Arcana of the tarot.

Twenty-two novellas. Twenty-two cards. From The Magician to The World.

Kat’s journey loosely follows the Fool’s Journey, moving from innocence through transformation toward integration and self-knowledge.

Part of the appeal was structural.

The Major Arcana creates a shape without forcing the story into a conventional three-act framework. The cards carry archetypal weight even when readers don’t consciously recognise it. A book linked to The Tower naturally carries a sense of upheaval and collapse whether the card itself appears or not.

The tarot also has a long literary history beyond fortune telling.

Calvino is the clearest example, but writers like Charles Williams, Robert Graves, and John Crowley all used esoteric systems as narrative structure.

What interests me most now is that the tarot exists outside the awareness of the characters themselves.

Nobody in the story lays out cards or discusses the Arcana. The structure exists for the reader rather than the world.

That creates an interesting split.

The tarot shapes the narrative.

Why This Matters

Part of this is simply about storytelling.

Religion remains one of the deepest motivators in human history. Characters who genuinely believe in something beyond themselves often make different choices, accept different sacrifices, and carry different fears from characters who treat religion as background decoration.

Fantasy loses something when belief becomes purely aesthetic.

But there’s also a broader reason.

Fantasy is uniquely suited to religious questions because fantasy worlds can negotiate metaphysics directly. Realist fiction has to take a position on whether God exists. Fantasy can create worlds where belief is justified, mistaken, partially true, culturally constructed, or permanently unknowable.

That uncertainty interests me far more than certainty ever could.

In the Ravenglass Universe, some believers are vindicated. Others are crushed. Most exist somewhere in the middle, with faith and doubt running alongside each other.

That isn’t a flaw in the worldbuilding. It’s the point.

Artwork by Covers by Christian.

Midpoint Milestone, Running Progress & Tandemonium! | Author Diary, May 1, 2026

Past the midpoint of Dawn of Assassins Book 4 and revealing its working title. Also got The Prince and the Fool back from my editor, ran 5.8k nonstop, and tried tandem cycling.

This week I passed the midpoint of Dawn of Assassins Book 4 and officially reveal the working title for the project.

It’s been great getting back into this world after such a long break away from the series.

I also received The Prince and the Fool back from my editor, so that’s now moving into the next stage of the publishing process.

Outside of writing, I’ve continued with my running and managed 5.8k without stopping, which felt like a huge milestone.

I also took part in a tandem cycling taster session, which was a lot of fun and something I’d love to do more of.

Silent Watcher Chapter 1 Free – Read Jon Cronshaw’s New Dark Fantasy on Patreon

Read the opening chapter of Silent Watcher for free on Patreon. A dark political fantasy of espionage, conspiracy, and betrayal set in the Ravenglass Universe.

I’ve started posting my new novel Silent Watcher on Patreon—and you can read the opening chapter right now for free.

This one’s a bit different. Darker. More claustrophobic. The kind of story where the truth keeps shifting just out of reach the closer you get to it.

Here’s the setup:

A dead Watcher. A town that won’t speak. A truth someone is desperate to bury.

Anselma Versen arrives in Halborg to investigate a colleague’s death. Officially, it was an accident.

It doesn’t feel like one.

The streets are scrubbed too clean.

The townsfolk speak like they’ve rehearsed it.

And the dead Watcher left behind a journal he was never meant to write.

Then things start to get… stranger.

Records don’t match.

Witnesses remember different versions of the same events.

And Anselma finds her own name—her own signature—on reports she never wrote.

At that point, it’s no longer just an investigation.

It’s a system.

And it’s already accounting for her.

If she follows orders, she survives.

If she keeps digging… she probably doesn’t.

If you like your fantasy with a strong espionage edge—something closer to a spy thriller in tone—this might be your kind of thing. Think conspiracies, institutional power, and a protagonist who refuses to accept the official version of events.

I’ll be posting chapters on Patreon, starting now, and the first one’s free if you want to take a look.

👉 You can read Chapter 1 HERE.

If you give it a try, I hope you enjoy stepping into Halborg. It’s not a friendly place.