I’ve always loved dark, thought-provoking tear-jerkers, the way they challenge my mind and elicit powerful emotions. Maybe it’s because I grew up in an age when men couldn’t cry or show emotions. Maybe it’s because I lived such a happy-go-lucky childhood, hiking through woods and catching lizards and turtles, that I grew curious about the darker aspects of life. It could be how I cope with having fought for two years on the front lines of combat and why I found myself in a philosopher’s classroom, studying ethics. All I know is that my heart craves powerful, dark stories that make my eyes leak.
I read it in the 5th grade, and it set the bar for the type of story I yearn to read. It’s such a heartwarming story up until it rips open the heart. It helped me through a difficult loss in my youth.
I found myself walking beside the main character and his two dogs, enduring their cold hunts and sobbing over his loss.
Read the beloved classic that captures the powerful bond between man and man’s best friend. This edition also includes a special note to readers from Newbery Medal winner and Printz Honor winner Clare Vanderpool.
Billy has long dreamt of owning not one, but two, dogs. So when he’s finally able to save up enough money for two pups to call his own—Old Dan and Little Ann—he’s ecstatic. It doesn’t matter that times are tough; together they’ll roam the hills of the Ozarks.
Soon Billy and his hounds become the finest hunting team in the valley. Stories of their great achievements…
I recently opened this required high school read, seeking insight into the darkness that taps at the human soul, and this bok did not disappoint. It’s darker than I remember from high school and full of amazing symbolism and foreshadowing.
I think this tragic story hit a lot harder for me as an adult than it ever could have as a teenager.
A plane crashes on a desert island and the only survivors, a group of schoolboys, assemble on the beach and wait to be rescued. By day they inhabit a land of bright fantastic birds and dark blue seas, but at night their dreams are haunted by the image of a terrifying beast. As the boys' delicate sense of order fades, so their childish dreams are transformed into something more primitive, and their behaviour starts to take on a murderous, savage significance.
First published in 1954, Lord of the Flies is one of the most celebrated and widely read of modern…
Seeking justice for a massacre in a frontier village, a young sellsword enlists the help of an unlikely combination of mercenaries, each of whom wrestles demons and secrets of their own. Together the new-found companions battle against a sinister cult and its inhuman allies in the dark caverns and green…
I’ve always enjoyed dark stories, and the first book of The Coldfire Trilogy did not disappoint. I also read this series in high school.
It was the first fantasy series I read that felt more rooted in the dark reality of life, which gave it a familiar grittiness that I hadn’t experienced in the books I’d read.
Over a millennium ago, Erna, a seismically active yet beautiful world was settled by colonists from far-distant Earth. But the seemingly habitable planet was fraught with perils no one could have foretold. The colonists found themselves caught in a desperate battle for survival against the fae, a terrifying natural force with the power to prey upon the human mind itself, drawing forth a person's worst nightmare images or most treasured dreams and indiscriminately giving them life.
Twelve centuries after fate first stranded the colonists on Erna, mankind has achieved an uneasy stalemate, and human sorcerers manipulate the fae for their…
When I was twelve years old, I never understood why people cried over the death of a fantasy character. After all, the characters weren’t believable like in fiction.
Then I read the Dragonlance Legends Trilogy, and the ending devastated me for days. I cried, and I understood, and that moment has never left my heart.
The first installment in the New York Times–bestselling epic fantasy trilogy about twin rivals Raistlin and Caramon, set in the magical Dragonlance universe.
The War of the Lance has ended, and the darkness has passed. Or has it?
Sequestered in the blackness of the dreaded Tower of High Sorcery in Palanthas, and surrounded by nameless creatures of evil, archmage Raistlin Majere weaves a plan to conquer the darkness—to bring it under his control.
Two people alone can stop him. One is Crysania, a beautiful and devoted cleric of Paladine, who tries to use her faith to lead Raistlin from the…
At five years old, Kasiel was found with the pointed ends of his ears cut off. Despite that brutal start, he’s lived twelve peaceful years with the man who took him in. Keeping his hair long over his mutilated ears helps him hide the fact that he is Vanrian, a…
I fell in love with the prose in this masterful series, and I very much found myself in the main character—just a happy-go-lucky boy thrown into the dark, cruel world.
At the time, all the loss, suffering, and heartache the characters endured throughout the series helped me process the loss of my grandparents. It’s dark, absolutely tear-jerking, and I love it.
The first book of the trilogy "Memory, Sorrow and Thorn" tells the story of Simon, a kitchen boy and sorceror's apprentice, who must find the solution to the riddle of the long-lost swords of power, in order to combat the evil of the undead Sithi Ruler, the Storm King.
I love stories that rip me through powerful emotions. I want to feel when I read, which is what I set out to do when I wrote this book. It’s a dark epic fantasy that explores the transformative power of sacrifice and the battle between destiny and free will.
This heart-wrenching adventure follows Makayla, a young slave girl given the power of a god, and Kael, a devout citizen of the empire and skilled shaper of magical powers. Believing herself to be the Light of Prophecy, Makayla’s path of vengeance plunges the empire into war. Meanwhile, Kael discovers that he holds the key to altering Makayla's deadly course and must abandon his loyalties to the empire to change her path before she destroys the world.
The Cave of Past and Present is an archaeological descent into a living labyrinth—part ruin, part machine, part prophecy.
When Moria Chione follows a vanished colleague into the empire’s wild fringes, she uncovers a sentient subterranean archive that reshapes itself around intruders and rewrites their memories as easily as stone.…
Mother of Trees is the first book in an epic fantasy series about a dying goddess, a broken world, and a young elf born without magic in a society ruled by it.
When the ancient being that anchors the world’s power begins to fail, the consequences ripple outward—through prophecy, politics,…
