Polygon has published a recommendation list of the 10 best recent dark fantasy novels, aimed at readers who enjoyed George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire and Andrzej Sapkowski's The Witcher. The piece matters as a reading guide for fans of the subgenre, which is characterised by morally grey characters navigating violent, unjust worlds, and it focuses on titles published over the past 20 years rather than established classics such as Glen Cook's The Black Company or Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen.

The selections span standalone novels and series, including Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora (2006), Joe Abercrombie's The Blade Itself (2006), James Islington's The Shadow of What Was Lost (2014), Sabaa Tahir's An Ember in the Ashes (2015), V.E. Schwab's A Darker Shade of Magic (2015), N.K. Jemisin's Hugo Award-winning The Fifth Season (2016), Naomi Novik's A Deadly Education (2020), Christopher Buehlman's The Blacktongue Thief (2021) and R.F. Kuang's Nebula-winning Babel (2022). The entries range from heist capers and gritty war epics to brutal takes on Ancient Rome, deadly magical schools and dark academia set in an alternate 1830s Oxford.