Knight Of Cerebus / Literature

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• It's hard to say exactly when the Alex Rider series became Darker and Edgier. Compare the relative innocence of the first book to the very bleak and cynical feel of Scorpia Rising and be amazed. Most likely Cerebus Syndrome was ushered in by Alexei Sarov, the main antagonist of the third book, who was not only a more competent villain than the previous two, but also one whose psychoses and psychology were more serious than the one-dimensional antagonists Alex Rider had faced before. SCORPIA later ushered in an even darker tone filled with death and trauma and even the occasional Downer Ending (Though the bleakness of the ending was lessened due to the sequel). And when Razim and Alex's insane clone become involved In Rises, the series ditches comedy entirely.
• The Camp Half-Blood Series:
  • Percy Jackson and the Olympians:
    • Atlas, a major villain of The Titan's Curse, is the first Titan that the heroes fight and replaces the comedic one-shot villains that the heroes defeated during their journey with invincible skeleton warriors that constantly chase down Percy and his friends. While he is also defeated in the same book he is introduced in, his appearance turns the mood of the series as a whole to show that the Titans just aren't going to sit there waiting for their leader, Kronos, from reassembling himself (that book is also a major Cerebus Syndrome for the series, what with the deaths of two heroes, one of whom is just a 12-year-old girl; beforehand the series is mostly a comedic adventure with lots of actions), not to mention that he also performs the series' first on-screen human murder: his daughter, Zoë.
    • That's not to mention when Kronos himself makes his appearance in The Battle of the Labyrinth. He manages to give a No-Sell to the heroes by slowing down time, though the bit where Rachel smacks his eye with a hairbrush is kind of a Mood Whiplash. And since he's incorporeal, he needs a vessel to reside in, choosing Luke in the process and casting doubt on whether the latter could be redeemed anymore (he can, thankfully.)
  • The Heroes of Olympus:
    • There's the revelation that Gaea, the frickin' Mother Earth is the Big Bad of the new series. There's absolutely no comedic aspect of them, unlike the hairbrush incident in the previous series, they're responsible for almost all of the bad things that the main heroes experienced (poor Leo and Hazel), and all this before they're even fully woken up. And not like other characters, she's a primordial being, which means that the heroes aren't facing a villain with earthly powers, they're facing the Earth itself.
    • Thrown out of the window with the introduction of Tartarus in The House of Hades, which is arguably the darkest book in the whole series. While Gaea's still asleep, Tartarus is fully awoken, and he's just as every bit of a primordial being as she is. The heroes make it clear that they don't stand a chance against them and it takes at least two Heroic Sacrifice just to ward him off so the heroes could escape. And what aspect of the world do they represent? Hell, not The Underworld that Hades reigns in, Hell.
  • The Trials of Apollo: The Triumvirate — the tone shifts drastically once they reveal themselves. It's notable in that the Knight of Cerebus kicks in right at the start of a new arc. Caligula deserves special mention for being able to kill one of the major protagonists and pretty brutally at that. He's so evil that his fellow Emperors are unnerved by him and Apollo avoided him for decades. This being Apollo before losing his godhood.
• Though Neal Shusterman's YA trilogy Everlost was never exactly light, it was only darkly fascinating to begin with. Then Mary Hightower shows her true colors and the series gets dead serious.
• In Fengshen Yanyi, early invasions of Xiqi are easily defeated by Jiang Ziya and the military staff of King Wu, at most using tricks to defeat certain enemies. Then Wen Zhong asks his friends, the Four Saints of Nine Dragon Island, to take care of the matter and suddenly Jiang Ziya has to face powerful Taoist strong enough to actually defeat most of his disciples and even inflict him a Disney Death, forcing him to rely on outside help to save himself. Then, the real knights come in in the form of the Four Mo Brother or Four Demon Clan Generals: not only they are strong taoists, but since they're destinated to become buddhist deities Jiang Ziya's mighty whip is useless against them and on their first day of battle alone they wipe out thousands of soldiers and dozens of mighty generals. They even come dangerously close to destroy the capital of Xiqi, forcing Jiang Ziya to cover the entire city with the water of the North Sea (with a little help from his master). To defeat them, Jiang Ziya has to rely on his three strongest disciples: Nezha, Yang Jian and Huang Tianhua, and even then they need help to triumph.
• The First Dwarf King opens with Pathruushkè introducing three of his personal Super Soldiers: the Osthan. They have an Establishing Character Moment when they slaughter more than one hundred prisoners for no other reason than to prove that they can. They are Made of Indestructium, have Super-Strength, and can track the heroes over long distances. It isn't until halfway through the second book that the heroes can even figure out a single weakness. What makes the Osthan especially notable is that although the story tends to be rather dark, the heroes are able to hold their own relatively well. But when the Osthan arrive, the heroes are forced to Run or Die.
• The Lord of the Rings starts off fairly lighthearted, with a tone fairly similar to its predecessor. When Khamûl, the second of the Nazgûl and the first of Sauron's dark servants to appear, enters the picture the story immediately takes a far darker tone with a feeling of dread that remains through the rest of the narrative. On a meta-level, it was Khamûl's introduction that made Tolkien realize that the story was no longer a mere sequel to The Hobbit but something with a much vaster scope and darker tone.
• Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn: The Original Trilogy starts relatively light, the first book being a heist-novel of sorts, but progressively gets more complex and darker in its deconstruction of fantasy tropes. The Knight of Cerebus in residence is Ruin; when he is freed, things begin to go spectacularly pear-shaped.
• While the earlier villains of Septimus Heap were usually too stupid to be real threats most of the time, Tertius Fume since Queste is the first antagonist that became a threat to the Castle itself, signaling the more serious events of the later books.
  • He was last seen in book six, allowing the seventh and last book to focus on the real antagonists who were technically introduced in the first book.
• The man with a beard but no hair and the woman with hair but no beard from A Series of Unfortunate Events. Count Olaf is as despicable as they come, but even he gets nervous around his menacing, nameless associates, who arrive just as the series' trademark black humor gets even more grim and mysterious.
• Professor Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes canon. Up to the end of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, most of the criminals Holmes has hunted down have been small fry. Suddenly, you have a genius crime lord who is revealed to have been the Big Bad throughout the Great Detective's career, and he's hellbent on destroying said detective. Not to mention... he seems to succeed in that goal — and even when you know that he doesn't, Holmes holds the Professor up as a standard for the criminals who follow.
• A Song of Ice and Fire, already being an incredibly dark piece of literature, has a heavily downplayed example related to a specific arc. Of all the factions involved in the massive War of the Five Kings, the Greyjoys and Ironborn were the only ones that nobody took seriously and were generally treated as jokes and upstarts to be dealt with when the real threats were gone. This changes in the most horrifying way when Balon is killed off and his brother Euron Greyjoy (who orchestrated his brother's death) enters the picture. Balon was incompetent, but also had standards and strictly held to Ironborn honor. Euron is likely the most dangerous and evil man ever introduced in the series, evil even by Ironborn standards, and his entry takes the Greyjoy story arc from a story of a group of Ineffectual Sympathetic Villains and starts edging it into Horror territory, with their Rape, Pillage, and Burn mentality brough to monstrous levels. Preview material for The Winds of Winter even hint at Euron going into Lovecraftian horror territory with a desire to bring about the apocalypse and a chance to become the ultimate human Big Bad of the entire saga.
• In The Spirit Thief, the Lord of Storms' first contact with Eli's group, when he goes after Nico in book three, is the point where the story leaves behind the episoidic heist stories and dives head-first into the much darker Myth Arc.
• The Squire's Tales: Although The Princess, the Crone and the Dung-Cart Knight touches on some heavy territory, the real darker turn of the last two books is ushered in by usurper Mordred, son of Arthur and Morgause, who transforms the setting from light-hearted parody to a world where Anyone Can Die, and most do.
• The Vong in the Star Wars Legends continuity. They're (a) a new enemy who (b) are impervious to Jedi powers, (c) have organic armor and weapons that can withstand lightsabers (d) and ships that are rendered indestructible by generating black holes to use as shields. And let's not get started on how the New Republic acted on their behalf, let alone tried to screw with Luke's attempts to rebuild the Jedi Order. The Jedi won, so they had to invent an enemy specifically made to counter them with everyone who should be on the side of the Jedi working against them, instead. The Vong indirectly killed Chewbacca and Anakin Solo and completely smashed the New Republic. The idea of an extra-galactic enemy who is too alien even for the Force had appeal, but the books never really recovered from the devastation they wrought.

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