Editing Grimdark (section)

===Literature===
* '''''[[1984]]'''''
* '''''All Quiet on the Western Front''''' Of all the wars humanity's ever fought, World War I was one of the most grimdark. The writer, who himself served in the war, thought that the war destroyed his whole generation whether or not they survived the trenches. The book follows a group of German boys who eagerly enlist as soon as they turn eighteen, only to be met with the worst kinds of horrors World War I could bring. Even if they survive the battles, they are broken by the horrors of industrialized trench warfare. By the end of the novel they are all dead and the field report simply states "all quiet on the western front".
* '''''Cormac McCarthy''''' is an American writer whose most famous works are considered some of the darkest novels ever written, due to the near casual way violence is depicted and the rather bleak outlook it takes on humanity's place in the world. Notables include:
** '''''Blood Meridian''''' a book following the exploits of the Glanton Gang, a real-life group of scalpers in the 19th Century. Kids die left and right, lawlessness runs rampant, sickfuckery abounds, it's... brutal.
** '''''No Country for Old Men,''''' also adapted as a film, covers the rising violence of the drug war on the US-Mexico border. Or simply suggests things have always been that bad and there's no way for good men to stop it.
** '''''The Road''''', along with the film, can be summarized as follows - the biosphere is dead with no hope of reviving it. A man and his son now traverse the dying, bleak landscape along a road, without any remnant of human civilization left, only able to depend on each other. Seriously, this setting is bleak in ways Warhammer 40k can only have nightmares about.
* '''''Clive Barker''''' in general. His works include The Hellbound Heart (which was turned into the Hellraiser movie franchise), Rawhead Rex where an ancient god of male sex eats kids, the Midnight Meat Train where an ancient cult feeds people to an underground society of monsters so New York isn't destroyed, and... let's just say there's a reason he's basically a BDSM enthusiast given way too much handle.
* Everything from '''''[[H.P. Lovecraft]]''''' and the '''''Cthulhu Mythos''''', though this can vary when you add in later Mythos writers like August Derleth. To explain: 95% of everything Lovecraft ever wrote is grimdark as shit; his is an amoral, uncaring, and inhumanly vast cosmos infested with hyper-advanced aliens, unspeakable extradimensional horrors, mad gods who control the threads of reality, and all kinds of eldritch monsters, all of whom see humanity as nothing more than primitive apes to be experimented on, played with, eaten, or exterminated. Even when his protagonists "win", they usually wind up dying, going insane, or going insane and then dying. Should they somehow escape unscathed, they still tend to be left with the knowledge that all they've managed to do is temporarily delay the plans of whatever horrible entity they crossed paths with. These stories were strongly influenced by Lovecraft's personality and worldview; he was an introverted, pessimistic atheist/racist/traditionalist who believed that humanity was a tiny, impermanent speck in a vast and uncaring universe. Mythos writers who don't share his worldview, like Derleth, have tried to impose a more conventional "good vs. evil" structure on Lovecraft's universe, which has the knock-on effect of making things less grimdark. Others have cranked the grimdark knob to 11 and ripped it off, either in reaction to the former or because it's how they like to write. Which of these, if either, is the correct approach remains [[skub|a matter of debate among Lovecraft fans]]. 
*'''''Mistborn''''': A trilogy of books by Brandon Sanderson (at least the First Era). The stories themselves rarely meet the criteria of grimdark, but hoooo boy the background setting and villains sure do. About a thousand years ago, a hero rose up to stop a mysterious enemy… and failed. Now, volcanoes spew ash down on the land, choking all but the most hardy plants. The brightest color is yellow, and flowers are an alien idea. Modern fauna include ectoplasmic monsters composed of the skeletons of other creatures and… that’s mostly it. The rest is dead. 95% of the population are slaves, and it’s a revolutionary idea to consider that they may be able to think. The nobility rule mostly because the immortal Lord Ruler gave their ancestors powers, and some of them still have some today (the titular Mistborn). The only way to trigger these powers is through trauma, and so even among the good portion of the population, all children are nearly beaten to death to see if they have these powers. Usually, they don’t. The villains also deserve a dishonorable mention, as the average one is a pedophiliac, slave owning rapist. Even the “good guys,” are only good by comparison. Variously, they are rebels who know full well there is no hope, a thief who could and would kill anything that contradicts him, and an optimistic young man who is eventually forged into a warmongering emperor. Oh, and the only way to “save the day” involves killing a minimum 1/16th of the planetary population.
* '''''Grimm's Fairy Tales''''' ("Hansel and Gretel", for example).
* The first two '''''Hyperion''''' books.
* '''''Metro'''''. Both the books and games, but mostly in the books, where the last known humans are hiding in underground subway tunnels, and when not trying to finish each other off are fighting endless hordes of [[mutant]]s [[/b/|and other, much worse things]]. Also, if you're one of the stalkers, the few brave ones that head to the surface to [[Blood Ravens|loot anything they can find]], you risk [[Tyranid|being eaten by flying daemons]]. Hell, it even has the same "abandon all hope" vibe in the intro, just like 40k. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. Note as the books go on the grimdarkness does tone down by showing the areas outside of the city to be in much better living conditions and other metros.(though not all the books are written by the same author). 
* Noir in general, from Raymond Chandler's novels to games like This is the Police.
* [[Post Apocalyptic]] stuff in general tends to default to Grimdark.
* World Devastators in '''''[[Star Wars]]'''''. Seriously, if you read about them without knowing that they are from Star Wars, you could easily mistake them for something from 40k. And we're not talking about Star Wars Legacy and the genocide of the Mon Calamari.
** All of '''Steven Baxter's works''' arguably qualify. '''''Evolution''''' can be summed up as "humanity almost overcame its flaws, fixed the damage it did to Earth, and ushered in a [[noblebright]] future, and it might have worked, but [[Rocks_fall,_everyone_dies|just then a supervolcano erupted, wiped out human civilization, and everyone died]]. The end. There's even a chapter in the middle of the book outright stating it. Also that humans [[Imperium|are nothing but vicious bastards who rape, kill, and destroy everything they touch]] and have been ever since our ancestors were rats under the feet of dinosaurs, but other animals aren't much better.
* '''''[[SCP Foundation]]''''' universe as a whole is borderline grimdark, as many aspects of the Foundation are mixed between absurd comedy, derp, and pure grimdark. At its very worst, the SCP Foundation has things that make the [[Daemonculaba]] look nice by comparison. Above all: [[Inquisition|Secure. Contain. Protect.]] 
* '''''Shakespeare's tragedies''''', especially ''Macbeth'' and ''Hamlet''.
* '''''Shin Sekai Yori''''' also known as From the New World is a novel by Yusuke Nishi (also has an anime adaptation). Basically it's a dystopian story with people using magic to run their society instead of machines in a world that has deliberately regressed to the medieval level. Every child who doesn't manifest magical abilities by a certain age is killed, and all existing non-magical humans have been genetically engineered into a slave-race of mole-people so long ago they've forgotten their origins. The magical people are instead engineered to commit unwilling suicide should they use their powers to harm another human (mole people are fair game, though), and those of them who are too strong and can't manage to control themselves become Lovecraftian abominations.
* '''''The Slenderman Mythos''''' (HE ALWAYS WATCHES).
* '''''[[A Song of Ice and Fire]]''''' AKA Game of Thrones: Good guys screw up monumentally or never win, the only people who get ahead are amorally manipulative assholes and everyone is going to be massacred and enslaved by the evil ice elf necromancers in the end. And if they somehow survive, then another war for the Iron Throne will happen after the winner gets their revenge-boner satisfied and later, their kids would need to clean up the wankstains.
* Most of '''Stephen King's''' works. As the joke goes, some people say that Stephen King's works are so fucked up they should come with a content warning. The reply is that they ''do'' have a content warning, they have the words "written by Stephen King" on the front.
* '''Peter Watts'''. Brutal neuropunk sci-fi horror, as bleak as H. P. Lovecraft but with a list of scientific citations at the end to let you know just how realistic it really is. Hits you with a world-ending catastrophe and then manages to make it a thousand times worse -- an alien invasion DURING a hard-takeoff singularity, for example. Sociopathy and post-human augments abound. [http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm Also, the books are free!]
* The majority of the '''Tragedy''' genre of stories.
* '''''[[The Witcher]]'''''. Racism, genocides, dozens of monsters that want to eat your face whenever you enter a random forest. Or cave. Or ruins. The video game adaptation even features a medieval Hitler running the [[Inquisition|Witch Hunters]], a fanatical order of [[Black Templars|racist scumbags dedicated to wiping out both mages and non-humans]] in the name of the Eternal Fire. Meanwhile, the neighboring empire starts a series of wars against northern kingdoms (where the series takes place), in which both sides descend into scorched earth warfare, all the while backstabbing their allies and generally being a colossal wall of dicks to the point that close to 70% of civilian population in war-zones died from raiding, famine and occasional outbreaks of extradimensional plagues. To add insult to injury, the whole world is doomed due to the (slowly) encroaching Ice Age, and the only person that could save it took two glances at this shitshow and decided to fuck off to a parallel universe and let them all die, ''because it would be a mercy''. (To be fair, though, she comes back, if only to save her adoptive mother and father from said Ice Age, as she still maintains her 'fuck the rest of humanity' attitude.
* '''''World War Z''''' (the book). After zombies overran most of the world, many people had it so bad that they simply lost the will to live. Fighting in the Paris Catacombs with weaker weapons that wouldn't cause a cave-in due to hazardous gasses everywhere. Russian soldiers rioting over unfair treatment and enforced secrecy ordered under pain of death to kill one in ten of their own squadmates - with rocks - to teach them the price of freedom and democracy. Which they then happily traded away. The survival of the human race hinged on governments following a plan including elements of eugenics and leaving settlements of people behind as zombie bait. People resorted to cannibalism to survive in Canada. North Korea entirely vanished without a trace. Pakistan and Iran nuked each other. After the war officially ended, there are still loose zombies wandering around, Russia has started a breeding program to deal with severe underpopulation, several species are extinct, and diseases thought to be wiped out are coming back en masse. 
* Anything from the '''''[[Xeelee Sequence]]'''''.