Dark Doesn’t Mean the Same Thing to Everyone
Dark doesn't mean the same thing to everyone.
To be honest, it would be boring if it did. Tell someone you write dark fiction and watch their brain immediately decide what you mean.
Murder
Kidnapping
Blood
Sexual violence
Serial killers
Organised crime
Apparently we have a range. The problem is, dark doesn't mean the same thing to everyone. There isn't a universally agreed scale where a killing earns you three darkness points, kidnapping gets one, and inserting something medically inadvisable into an orifice unlocks a secret bonus level.
(Although given some of the books I've encountered, I'm sure someone is trying.)
Darkness is subjective.
More violence doesn't automatically mean more dark.
I write some fairly unpleasant things. The Wrong Woman contains kidnapping, coercion, captivity, organised crime, murder and a relationship under circumstances that could have a whole field of red flags flying in it, and most marriage counsellors quietly close their notebook and leave.
And yet, compared to some of the ideas currently living rent-free inside my head, I consider it pretty much a bedtime story.
That's because I don't think darkness is measured by how many terrible things you can cram into a book. You can write a chapter being brutally murdered, and have the reader forget about it by the following one. You can also write two people sitting peacefully at a kitchen table and make the entire scene deeply fucking uncomfortable.
Context matters.
The Things We Can't See
One of the things that fascinates me most about psychological fiction is how little you actually need to do to make something horrifying.
Take identity: Imagine your husband goes away, he comes home.
He looks exactly the same. His voice is the same. He knows your name, your home, your history.
Everyone else sees your husband. You don't.
You know something is wrong.
Now prove it.
There doesn't need to be a severed head on the kitchen table. (In fact, please don't put one there. They're an absolute bastard for ruining the finish.)
The horror comes from isolation.
From knowing something nobody else knows, from looking at a familiar face and suddenly finding it unfamiliar.
From everyone around you wondering whether the problem isn't him. Maybe it's you.
That can bother me far more than another creative dismemberment, because the physical threat isn't necessarily the frightening part, It's losing control of your own reality.
Dark Romance has the same problem
Dark romance makes the whole conversation even messier because we're now mixing darkness with attraction, fantasy and relationships.
One reader's deliciously possessive hero is another reader's restraining order. One person's morally grey is another person's Ma'am, that man has committed several felonies.
Neither reader is necessarily wrong.
We bring ourselves into fiction.
Our experiences, fears, boundaries, fantasies and tolerances all come with us whether we consciously realise it or not. That's why trigger warnings matter, but it's also why they can never completely predict how somebody will react to a story.
Something I barely register might stay with somebody else for days. Something another reader finds horrifying might have me sitting there thinking:
Is that it?
Human brains are unique like that, the lives we lead and our experiences are all individual and shape how we look at the world, and our books.
Shock isn't the same as darkness
This is probably the distinction I care about most in my own writing. I don't want to put something horrific into a book simply because I can, and believe me, I can.
My search history has seen things that probably has me on some sort of international watchlist.
Shock has its place. Sometimes I want the reader staring at the page wondering what the fuck they just read. But if I can remove the disturbing scene and nothing about the story changes, what was it doing there?
For me, darkness works best when it has consequences.
It changes somebody.
It exposes something.
It alters a relationship.
It forces a decision.
It makes what happens afterwards different from what came before.
Otherwise we're just playing atrocity Top Trumps, and no one is playing with a full deck.
I want the consequences
Maybe that's why I keep coming back to the same thing in my books.
Consequences.
I don't particularly care how romantic fiction has traditionally framed a behaviour. If somebody stalks another person, I'm interested in what being stalked actually does to them. If someone is kidnapped, I'm interested in what happens when the adrenaline wears off. If somebody's autonomy is taken away, giving it back doesn't magically erase what happened.
And if a character does something terrible because they love someone, the word love doesn't operate like a legal defence.
That's where darkness becomes interesting to me.
Not how far can I push this?
But what happens because I did?
So, how dark are my books?
Fuck knows.
Helpful, isn't it?
I can tell you what's in them. I can give you content warnings. I can tell you which books I personally consider darker than others.
But I can't tell you how dark they'll feel to you. Nobody really can.
Because darkness isn't a genre setting you select before writing, it's personal.
Sometimes it's blood on the walls, Sometimes it's what somebody is willing to do for love, Sometimes it's discovering that the person you trusted never existed. And sometimes it's sitting across from someone you've known for years, looking directly into their face, and realising you're the only person in the room who knows they aren't who they say they are.
Darkness isn't just what happens.
It's what the story makes you sit with after it does.