10 Awesome Authors Every Game of Thrones Fan Needs to Read

9. Joe Abercrombieserved cold So you think Game of Thrones is grimness personified? Believe me, it€™s Disney compared to Abercrombie€™s books. Taking bleak fantasy to a new level (gritty would be a step up) Abercrombie€™s first novel "The Blade Itself" was released in 2006 and featured a torturer as one of the main characters. If that didn€™t warn you what was to come, well, you soon found out. Betrayal, cynicism, selfishness, and pain abound. There are no heroes here. And yet for all the darkness there is a level of sharp humour that stops it becoming the literary equivalent of a Smiths album. The characters are rich, the storytelling is intricate, and it has that compelling power of a pageturner meaning you€™ll be up until the early hours if you don€™t force yourself to put it down. With six books out so far and a bright (or maybe dark) future ahead, Abercrombie is one who is forging his own path, but definitely one to follow.

Contributor

Richard has been playing video games since the days of the BBC Micro, (and incidentally when is Chuckie Egg going to get a reboot?) He is currently available for the post of Head of Marketing at Nintendo, seeing as no-one else seems to be doing the job. He's also a major fan of fantasy/sf books and is just waiting for his novel about an assassin who doesn't wear a hood to get picked up.