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The permutations of dark fantasy are endless, covering everything from Beowulf
to Wicked. Where there is magic, there's always someone wanting to use it
for selfish or nasty reasons, and sometimes the outcomes aren't orderly and
nice. Sometimes even the heroes are a bit, eh, dark. That's half the fun!
A thought-provoking novella about a hangman with a magic rope that guarantees he will never hang an innocent. But then he meets his latest victim, and suddenly nothing is clear anymore.
Available directly from the publisher: Damnation
Books
Ferrari, a noted illustrator, turns his hand to writing, and does it very well in this, his first novel, which is a mix-and-retell of both the Job and Arthurian legends. Young Joby becomes God's champion when Lucifer once against offer the Creator "the same stupid bet," winner take all. If Lucifer can corrupt poor Joby, he'll get to remake the world into a place without free will, with himself in charge. Naturally, Joby, who as a boy is everything noble, ends up with 30 years of despair and hard luck that is difficult to take for hero and reader alike. But Ferrari pulls it off, partly in the power of his prose, partly in his ability to make us care about these characters, from a wise and loving Creator to slick and at times clueless Lucifer.
A very affecting historical dark fantasy (many are) which retells the saga of Beowulf from the point of view of the monster, Grendel, to whom humans have made themselves evil incarnate.
A classic of fine writing.
Barbara Hambly
The most popular figure for dark fantasy is the vampire. In this case, Don Simon Ysidro forces former British intelligence agent, Jonathan Asher, to help him find the person or persons who are killing the vampires of 1880s London. A riveting murder mystery, with a constant edge of peril. Hambly's prose is elegant and evocative, vividly contrasting Asher's Victorian age with the times past remembered by the vampires.
Used only
Asher and his wife return, and in a dark historical thriller must find out who has the power to coerce vampires into spying against the Empire. Absolutely worth the hunt to find it.
We look forward to the publisher re-releasing this one, whenever that may happen.
Used
This is the form in which you can now get the dark fantasy Conjure Wife, in which a professor of folklore discovers the women of the world are all practicing magic -- and he's just forced his wife to disarm herself before deadly enemies. Our Lady of Darkness is horror, but a nice bonus at the price.
There are Anne Rice readers, and then there are people who happen to read an Anne Rice novel now and then. To the former she can do no wrong. To the latter, she is an uneven talent. This, her first novel, is considered one of her best by the latter, though some people have thrown it down in disgust at the idea that two men and a little girl can live in one mansion in New Orleans for sixty years and never have it noticed that they do not age -- or that they are adding 500 to 1000 people a year to the mortality statistics. Heavy on the twisted eroticism.
If you're going to do the whole Anne Rice vampire thing, this is actually a savings. Many readers who are not devoted to the author consider The Queen of the Damned to be her best in the series. The Vampire Lestat is pretty good, too, but those not devoted to the author consider The Tale of the Body Thief to be the start of the precipitous sag in the series. The individual book titles are for some reason listed in reverse chronological order on this compendium.
Another form of immortal, the eternally living Ramses is released from his sarcophagus in Edwardian England, to follow a trail of his past back to Egypt.
(out of print, expensive)
Yarbro has meshed the tale of the comte de Saint-Germain, an alchemist of the 1700s who claimed to be centuries old and never ate in public, with vampirism, to create a dark fantasy hero of intelligence and charm, as well as ferocity and eroticism.
St. Germain gets around more than most other vampires -- in this case to Peru in 1640, to study the wisdom of the Incas before it is lost to the crusades of the Spanish.
St. Germain can often be found at the cruxes of history, as when in 1912 the Czar enlists him to try to stop the impending European war. This isn't alternate history; even though we know the outcome, Yarbro keeps the tension tuned high because she makes us care about the characters.