Best Fantasy Books With Antiheroes

The definitive antihero fantasy. Logen Ninefingers is a barbarian warrior trying to be better than his worst self. Sand dan Glokta is a torturer who was himself once tortured. Jezal dan Luthar is a vain soldier who thinks he wants to be a hero. Abercrombie gives each of them complete interior logic and then lets the world punish every aspiration while refusing to redeem anyone.

Jorg Ancrath is one of fantasy's most genuinely disturbing antiheroes — a 14-year-old who has done things that are not softened or excused, leading a band of outlaws across a broken world. Lawrence writes from inside Jorg's head with terrifying conviction, making his logic comprehensible without making it acceptable. The Broken Empire trilogy is a masterclass in how to write an antihero without apologizing for them.

Baru is an antihero in the most precise sense — someone who does terrible things for reasons that are completely comprehensible and possibly even noble, and who has to live with what she's done. Dickinson writes the gap between Baru's intentions and her actions with extraordinary precision, and the novel's climax is one of the most devastating in modern fantasy precisely because Baru's logic is so complete.

The First Law opener introduces Sand dan Glokta — a former hero turned torturer who hates himself, hates the people he works for, and hates the people he tortures, but keeps doing it anyway because the alternative seems worse. Glokta is one of fantasy's great antiheroes because his self-awareness doesn't save him: knowing what he is doesn't stop him from being it.

Mia Corvere is training to be an assassin to avenge her family — her motivation is sympathetic but her methods are not, and Kristoff refuses to make the killing clean or the training cost-free. The Nevernight Chronicle is stylized and dark in ways that lean into the antihero premise: the footnotes, the narrative intrusions, the sense of a story told by someone who knows how it ends and is already judging Mia for what she becomes.

Rin starts as a sympathetic underdog and becomes something genuinely terrible over the course of the trilogy — the antihero arc here is about how war and trauma transform people rather than about a protagonist who was always morally compromised. Kuang's treatment of how atrocity works and who participates in it is one of the most honest in fantasy, and Rin's transformation is earned at every step.

Locke Lamora is an antihero in the more playful register — a con artist who steals from the rich, has a strict code about not targeting the poor, and will do almost anything to protect his crew. Lynch writes with a lightness of touch that makes the dark elements land harder, and Locke's principles — such as they are — make him consistently surprising.

Kaz Brekker is Bardugo's great antihero — a gang leader who is genuinely ruthless, who uses people, who has rules about what he won't do that don't cover most of what he will do, and whose traumatic backstory is revealed slowly enough to complicate rather than excuse him. Six of Crows ensemble has multiple antiheroes competing for the reader's attention, and Bardugo balances them brilliantly.