Reddit reviews The Darkness That Comes Before: The Prince of Nothing, Book One
We found 14 Reddit comments about The Darkness That Comes Before: The Prince of Nothing, Book One. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
It is very simply the smartest, best written, and darkest fantasy series out there. There is no competition.
It's also intentionally unsettling and rather dense, but all of that comes with the territory in my opinion.
Here's a portion in which one of the magic-users has reason to be very very upset and completely lets loose against a bunch of rival magic-users. For this sample, all you need to know is that "tears of god" are a kind of artifact that kills magic-users on contact, and "Analogies" is a word for the kind of magic they're using.
I've altered some of the words to eliminate the risk of spoilers.
>Vengeance roamed the halls of the compound—like a God. And he sang his song with a beast’s blind fury, parting wall from foundation, blowing ceiling into sky, as though the works of man were things of sand.
>And when he found them, cowering beneath their Analogies, he sheared through their Wards like a rapist through a cotton shift. He beat them with hammering lights, held their shrieking bodies as though they were curious things, the idiot thrashing of an insect between thumb and forefinger . . . Death came swirling down.
>He felt them scramble through the corridors, desperate to organize some kind of concerted defence. He knew that the sound of agony and blasted stone reminded them of their deeds. Their horror would be the horror of the guilty. Glittering death had come to redress their trespasses.
>Suspended over the carpeted floors, encompassed by hissing Wards, he blasted his own ruined halls. He encountered a cohort of [soldiers]. Their frantic bolts were winked into ash by the play of lights before him. Then they were screaming, clawing at eyes that had become burning coals. He strode past them, leaving only smeared meat and charred bone. He encountered a dip in the fabric of the onta, and he knew that more awaited his approach armed with the Tears of God. He brought the building down upon them.
>And he laughed more mad words, drunk with destruction. Fiery lights shivered across his defences and he turned, seething with dark crackling humour, and spoke to the two [mages] who assailed him, uttered intimate truths, fatal Abstractions, and the world about them was wracked to the pith. He clawed away their flimsy Anagogic defences, raised them from the ruin like shrieking dolls, and dashed them against bone-breaking stone.
>He was free, and he walked the ways of the present bearing tokens of ancient doom.
You can ready the first chapter or so on Amazon. Click the book's cover: http://www.amazon.com/Darkness-that-Comes-Before-Nothing/dp/1590201183
It's not for everyone, but it's the best.
No legit sellers? Amazon sells it themselves ("Ships from and sold by Amazon.com"), or you can buy it from a bunch of other sellers through them.
https://www.amazon.com/Darkness-that-Comes-Before-Nothing/dp/1590201183/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1506711028&sr=8-2
But you'll have to buy it one book at a time - the publisher does not offer it as a single volume or as a set.
http://www.overlookpress.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?q=bakker&x=0&y=0&p=1
Steven Erikson - Malazan Book of the Fallen
Brandon Sanderson - Mistborn
Brandon Sanderson - The Stormlight Archive
Peter Brett - The Demon Cycle
R. Scott Bakker - The Second Apocalypse
Joe Abercrombie - The First Law
Scott Lynch - The Gentleman Bastard
Patrick Rothfuss - The Kingkiller Chronicle
All excellent. Some slightly more excellent than others.
For those unfamiliar with Mr. Bakker, he wrote one of my personal favorite trilogies in Fantasy, and is working on a second one. The place to start is here, if curious:
http://www.amazon.com/Darkness-Comes-Before-Prince-Nothing/dp/1590201183/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1313006327&sr=8-1
Books not mentioned so far that I like:
Lev Grossman's Magicians Trilogy (not 1st-person, otherwise follows your criteria, Harry Potter-esque, some people dislike the protagonist but he's intentionally kind of a tool), starting with The Magicians.
R. Scott Bakker's Prince of Nothing trilogy (not 1st-person, magic is seriously powerful and the protagonist is an already-accomplished practitioner, mythology is complex, I don't recall it having a huge amount of characters), starting with The Darkness That Comes Before.
If you're willing to step outside of prose works, I like The Books of Magic a lot; it's a comic book miniseries.
The Prince of Nothing series is pretty much one big journey. Book 1 is The darkness that comes before
https://www.amazon.ca/Darkness-That-Comes-Before/dp/1590201183/
On Amazon Canada.
I've just finished The Windup Girl, which I had been putting off for some time. It was, quite simply, the most astounding and breath-taking science fiction book I've ever read. I loved it.
However, my problem is that I buy books compulsively. Mostly hard copies, but recently I bought a Kindle and buy the odd e-book or two. I have literally hundreds of books on my "to read" list.
One near the top is A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel. I recently read her phenomenal Wolf Hall and was blown away by her skills as a story teller. I'm a bit of an armchair historian, and I'm particularly interested in the French Revolution (amongst other things), so I'm very excited by the prospects this book holds. If it's anything like Wolf Hall then I'm in for a very particular treat.
Also near the top lies Quantum - Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality, Manjit Kumar's much lauded recent history of the emergence of quantum mechanics. I very much enjoyed other tangentially related books on this topic, including the wonderful The Making of the Atomic Bomb and The Fly in the Cathedral, so this should be good fun and educational to boot.
Having read and loved Everitt's biography of Cicero, I'm very much looking forward to his biographies of Augustus and Hadrian.
I'm listening to an audio-book version of The Count of Monte Cristo on my iPod, which I find rather enjoyable. I've only got through the first half dozen chapters and it's already taken a few hours, so this looks to be a nice, long-term and periodic treat for when I have time alone in the car.
Cronin's The Passage keeps piquing my interest, but I was foolish enough to buy it in that lamentable format, the much cursed "trade paperback", so the thing is a behemoth. The size puts me off. I wish I had waited for a regular paper-back edition. As it is, it sits there on my bookshelf, flanked by the collected works of Alan Furst (what a wonderfully evocative writer of WWII espionage!!) and a bunch of much recommended, but as yet unread, fantasy including The Darkness that Comes Before by Bakker, The Name of the Wind by Rothfuss and Physiognomy by Ford.
Books I have ordered and am eagerly awaiting, and which shall go straight to the top of the TBR list (no doubt to be replaced by next month's purchases) include Orlando Figes's highly regarded history of The Crimean War, Rosen's history of steam The Most Powerful Idea in the World and Stacy Schiff's contentious biography of Cleopatra.
A bit of a mixed bunch, all up, I'd say.
That's one of the few books that shaped the way I think after reading it, then really gave me deep philosophical insights I hadn't considered before.
Another good example of this was The Prince Of Nothing series by R Scott Bakker. You really reconsider what true strength and power are, and how human interaction is all about leverage on every level.
Yes, his first novel either puts people off or sucks them in (Gardens of the Moon). In fact, I accidently started with the second novel, Deadhouse Gates just picking it up in Barnes n Noble. It was easier to follow the first, as Deadhouse is a bit more "compressed" for story lines.
The arc of the series is STAGGERING in scope, and probably isn't slowing down.
However, I will say he's a bit repetitive in characters, too many characters, too much philisophical preening which seems out of place, but that can occur a bit more in the later novels.
The emotive scenes, however, are farkin brilliant. The "power levels" get irksome (characters shift and change, aren't consistent).
I will say those who are trying to find some dark fantasy are truly missing out on R Scott Bakker "The Prince of Nothing" series, of which I find superior in writing (not comparing PLOTS) to GRRM.
http://www.amazon.com/Darkness-Comes-Before-Prince-Nothing/dp/1590201183
GRRM has his own plot genius, but his writing plods to me.
Bakker's novels are some of the darkest, violent, evil and philisophical diatribes out there. I have re-read them about 8x (its a 2 part 3x book series), and the depth of history is rather amazing.
Gets into physics of magic, politics, nations warring, what-would-an-hyper-intelligent (as in, average human is a "child" comparatively) monk do to the world?
The Darkness that Comes Before - R Scott Bakker
Amazon Link
Ah I've seen your comment below. read maybe:
Joe Abercrombie - Best Served Cold
Max Berry - lexicon
Dürrenmatt - Suspicion
Gaiman - Good Omens
Kafka - The Trial
Sillitoe - The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner
Adams - Hitchhiker's Guide ( no way you haven't read that - but who knows )
Branderson - Way Of Kings
Libba Bray - The Diviners
Nietzsche - Thus Spoke Zarathustra ( there is a really ugly bible style translation - beware!!! )
Lynn Kurland - Star Of The Morning ( your sex and age is of interest )
Schwab - Vicious
Bakker - The Darkness That Comes Before
Robert Thier - Storm and Silence
Eco - Name Of The Rose ( no way you haven't read it but u know the drill ) + Foucault's Pendulum
Lord Of The Rings ( duh )
Sanderson - Mistborn
Sanderson - Alloy of Law
Harris - Hannibal
Rothfuss - The Name Of The Wind
Bukowski -Ham on Rye
Burroughs - Running With Scissors
Wong - John Dies at the End
D&D campaigns can be great starting points, so don't let that stop you. It's about what you do with it after that.
As far as the subject matter alienating readers: Are you more worried about alienating "mainstream" readers with fantastical content or alienating fantasy readers with "mainstream" content? It actually doesn't matter, because neither one should concern you, but I'll address them both anyway.
One of last year's most well-received novels was a post-apocalyptic vampire story, and R. Scott Bakker demonstrated that you can write a series that's really about politics, ideology, and self-deception, even if it stars a wizard. Hell, The Name of the Wind dedicates whole sections to getting drunk and playing the guitar.
Personally, I find the mixing of content far more interesting than anything that's stalwartly dedicated to some kind of genre "purity".
This is what bothered me while shopping for the Prince of Nothing trilogy. At the time, the first two books were only available in the old design, while the third one had a new design. Eventually I found the third one in the old design as a bargain book.