Darkness v Light

So I want to talk about the issue of darkness, or bleakness, in writing and the balance of light and shade of tone/content in a novel.

As an urban fantasy fan I have noticed that recent urban fantasy is tending more toward ‘lightness’, as in the books are about healthy, well-adjusted people, usually young attractive women, who manage to overcome hordes of demons/vampires/hybrids/shapeshifters/any other supernatural baddie whilst still looking good and pursuing the hot guy. At the end of the day, despite being somehow haunted/hunted by these life-changing supernatural events, they go back to their day job to crack jokes with their best buddy.

There is nothing wrong with this. I love reading books where people laugh in the face of adversity and find their happy ending. However sometimes, just occasionally, I crave something grittier. Grit is not reserved only for crime dramas and espionage thrillers. There are, of course, examples of gritty, darker urban fantasy. Two series come to mind, the first being the early Anita Blake books, the second being the Jill kismet series by Lilith Saintcrow. Both of these series feature a strong female lead who manages to hold onto her day job despite escalating supernatural hijinks and peril, but the tone is distinctively darker. The ending is rarely happy. Romances aren’t fairy tales and relationships are complex and difficult.

However, there is such a thing as too dark. Go too dark, end in tragedy and have your characters decide there’s no point in it all anyway, and you risk just depressing your readers. On the other hand if you go too light without being deliberately funny you end up with a holiday read that is forgotten quicker than it’s read. So how do you find a balance? 

You would think that a world populated by monsters and magic would lend itself to a dark, bleak story, but we can’t forget that urban fantasy is, at least in part, a reaction to the otherness of traditional fantasy – and most people, fortunately, can’t relate as well to much darkness. Urban fantasy is all about bringing the fantastic to the everyday, and often that means literally combining magic and monsters with characters who live and behave not unlike their authors. So we find a lot of urban fantasy books feature female characters who live alone but for a cat, but rarely is this a cause of concern for them. Rarely do we find these lonely characters suffering from mental illness, for example, despite the reality that loneliness and depression go hand in hand.

For my urban fantasy, I originally gave the protagonist an upbeat sidekick and had her making humorous quips on every other page, but as one draft became another I found I wanted to take her to a darker place. She is a woman with an obsession, having spent her life in pursuit of revenge, and I felt that in order to justify the decisions she makes in the book I would have to write her as more conflicted and disturbed. After all, is it realistic for a character who has suffered tragedy in childhood and spent the rest of her life obsessing about vengeance to be well-adjusted and healthy? I don’t think so.

Often in urban fantasy books characters are put through the most appalling ordeals. They are beaten, tortured, violated, almost sacrificed to the Devil on an altar, and yet, after perhaps a spell in hospital, they appear again at the start of the next book bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. This is perhaps necessary to the continuation of the series, since if a character were to be deeply psychologically scarred at the end of each book, the heroine would soon end up being sectioned or would become just as bad as the bad guys.

This idea is one that appealed to me. The issue of compromised morality is one that both Anita Blake and Jill Kismet were forced to face as they repeatedly made difficult decisions to defeat their enemies. Sure, in some stories the heroine is fortunate enough to be able to kill the villain simply by handing them a mirror, but in more realistic, darker stories, often the villain is not defeated before volumes of blood have been shed. At what point does the woman who kills the monsters become a monster herself? How far can I push that idea before the main character becomes unlikeable? Nowhere have I seen this issue so well explored as in the books and TV series Dexter, where the protagonist is a serial killer but we root for him anyway.

In fact, Dexter was one of my biggest inspirations to make my main character, and therefore my novel, darker. Several years after first watching that show, I now have a final draft of my novel in which my heroine is damaged, fragile, and lonely, and that makes her a real threat in the story, because when pushed to the limits of sanity, she is capable of anything.

Have you ever changed how dark your writing or characters are? Maybe you found it was all getting a bit too dark and had to take steps to lighten things up, Shakespeare style. Have you ever read a book and wished it would lighten up, or groaned at an sickly happy ending?

As always, comments encouraged, all feedback welcome. Follow me @H_Y_Malyk