“Death is an eminence that cannot be quenched. It is forever eternal as Time, and even then, Death shall transcend Time itself. But what is the cost of cheating and conquering Death, for is it not that Death itself shall eventually bow to its own name?”
Raven White, Neon White, Season One.
So I wanted to do a little experiment, more of a discussion than anything else.
Why, though? The reason is, I’m curious. Human nature fascinates me.
According to my readers, I write fairly dark and twisted books (but in my own eyes, my books to me aren’t that dark)
I wanted to know what makes a book qualify as dark.
I listed five questions here that I will answer with my own opinion, but I want to take it to the readers and authors to answer these question as well, in the comments.
What makes a book dark for you?
If you google search Dark Romance for a definition you will see Dark Romanticism or American Romanticism pop up, a lot. (Yes, cue the daunting music for the history lesson.)
“Dark romanticism (often conflated with Gothicism or called American romanticism) is a literary subgenre centered on the writers Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville.”
It was a genre that focused on the human condition in sin, evil and darkness in the forms of the supernatural and paranormal. The story and poems are heavy, dark and relies on the undertone. Your hero is most of the time their own antagonist, regardless if there is an imposing element threat or “villain” for another word. They are flawed, complexed and shared characters.
In my honest opinion, a dark book is not gore and violence to give the story a dark underlining or coating. When I think about dark, I think about the psychological effect of something. Whether that be on the reader; questioning things about themselves or strangely agreeing with the characters even though they know the actions are morally wrong.
Therefore: Dark romance leaves you to question things about yourself.
It’s the angst, and that angst needs to be built up slowly, step by step, breath by breath, word by sentence by paragraph by page.
It’s something that you want badly, but ultimately leaves you scared of your own emotional reaction.
Dark romance shows you life as it is, the way it is in all its beautiful colorful cruelty,
fangs and all.
It’s taking something twisted, demented and so morally wrong and offering it to your readers as a delicious, beautiful black strawberry, dripping with poison into which your reader will relentlessly sink their teeth. They will devour that morsel of dark, deranged death and still proceed to lick their lips and suck the juices off their fingers while their mouth waters, starving, ravenous for more.
Why is there such a big diversity between readers when it comes to dark books?
I honestly think readers are scared. Some of us love to embrace our hidden darker nature and ultimately fiction allows us to do that. I think it’s the reason why Vampires and the paranormal and supernatural are such a popular theme in fiction. Vampires are the personification of basic raw human desires; they feed us a glimpse of ourselves at our darkest and yet still hold that human eminence. Vampires represent the constant struggle we have between good and evil, light and darkness. And show us what it would look like if the darkness were to win.
Vampires personify our human darkness in a more acceptable way. I almost want to say in a safe way, whereas once darkness crosses over into contemporary, it might be cutting it too close to reality for some.
Yes, you can argue most readers want an HEA, they want to unwind and read a happy stress-free story. Maybe there are too many close similarities that could trigger bad memories.
To sum up my answer very simply: there is nothing we fear more than being confronted by ourselves, because no one, NO ONE, knows us better or has seen our inner demons as vividly as ourselves.
What makes you care for a morally wrong, violent psychopath or villain if they are the protagonist in the story?
Here, I think, we can all agree to some extent that it’s not the character so much as the way he or she is portrayed.
If the author can make us agree with their MC actions, no matter how unnerving or vile the act itself is, it’s the heaviness and strength of making the actions believable and agreeable to us as readers that counts.
If you as an author cannot back up your villainous MC actions with enough emotions and reason to sway your readers mind, they will not sympathize with your character. I for one definitely won’t.
As authors of dark romance we have to paint a villain so painfully beautiful, readers cannot help but feel for the monster on the pages, no matter how grotesque they are or the actions that defile them.
You will not win your reader over with mindless and endless violence just for the sake of shock or gore—the world is full of that already, we don’t need to read it in our books.
But feed us a strong motivation for violence and gore and you have already won the reader over.
Let’s look at it in a different way.
Loki in the Marvel films. If the story was told from his POV, would you sympathize with him more than the so-called heroes?
He shows a strong justification that Odin favors Thor. What makes him a villain is how he reacts: by scheming to depose his brother, and his adopted father. But he’s not unsympathetic. He’s charming, he’s witty, he’s smarter than his opponents and he’s not without empathy—he’s genuinely hurt by how his relationship with his mother changes over the course of the film.
Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire is another one because deny it though we may, Lestat is the villain.
And just to stretch the point, what about Moby Dick? What if the story was told from the whale’s POV ( I know, I know, a POV from a whale won’t be very interesting, but I’m trying to point out something here)
It is not what is portrayed, but how it is portrayed.
How has dark romance influenced your reading?
I’ll be brutally honest here. I can’t read sugary goodness anymore, all those fluffy clouds and rainbows are like an instant injection of diabetes into my veins. The darker the book, the more I crave the next one to be even deeper stained in black depravity.
But I also need a deep emotional connection with the book. It tends to be that dark books hold far more emotions than most books in fiction; wrenching emotion, gut wrenching, heart robbing, sitting on the edge of your seat; angry and bitter at the character that you want to murder your E-reader against the wall or slam a fist through your computer screen or maybe start a book trial and have a tribunal and burn the book.
Dark romance tends to leave you emotionally drained, mentally exhausted when you are done with it.
When does dark romance fail?
When authors portray this badass Alpha MOFO and I never see it—it only gets mentioned. I hate that. This MC is so feared, so dark and dangerous, but it’s hardly ever seen throughout the book.
Make me believe it, make me feel the bane crawling in their veins for revenge or retribution. Make me understand their broken parts bleeding acid. Make me test their anger. Make me cry the tears they themselves can’t cry.
(This question touches on something else throughout all genres but in dark romance especially when it comes to emotions, it’s crucial for the story to work. Showing instead of telling—if it’s lacking in the story, you have failed the genre, but I’ll leave that discussion for next time’s post.)
In closing, I will say this from my journey to writing “dark.”
Dark romance not only applies to the concept(plot) of a story but the actual writing, the tempo and tone of your story, how you present your character to your readers and finally the emotion you invoke with that character and draw from your reader.
Feel free to join in. I would love to hear from readers and other authors’ POV on the questions or one of the question. My opinion is just that—mine—and we each have our own views on topics and therefore we each deem something dark by our own standards.
(Could I please ask kindly that we keep this to a HEALTHY debate, and not a shading contest, in respects to the reviewers and owners of Love Bytes? Thank you.)