Dark Fantasy

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AMCrenshaw

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Noctuary by Ligotti. He's a subtle writer, which you may or may not like.

The Historian by Kostova isn't fantasy, but it is a dark novel to say the least.

Perdido Street Station, et al by China Mieville. Call it urban fantasy, call it modern gothic. It's dark and it's fantasy.

The Gormenghast novels by Mervyn Peake, if you haven't read them already. They're dry novels. The author spends a lot of time on the exteriors of things. But I find it all very endearing.

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blacbird

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Bradbury: Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Peake's Gormenghast novels have achieved the level of classics, but his rather prolix and convoluted over-the-top prose style isn't everyone's flagon of mead.

caw
 

SPMiller

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Is there really that much of a delineation between Dark Fantasy and horror?
Yup. You can do things in horror that won't fly in dark fantasy. For example, in dark fantasy, you generally can't kill the main characters before the end of the story. There's an unwritten understanding that they'll make it to the end--and only then can they die. (Note: fantasy writers will often work around this by having fake or incomplete deaths, a very old trick.) In contrast, horror stories aren't similarly restricted: anyone can die at any time, and death is permanent.

That's just one example, but there are many more.
 
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SPMiller

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That seems like a strange differentiation. So basically you don't know what you're reading until you reach the end and the main characters are still alive?
Writers will often signal their genre in other ways--namely, by which tropes & conventions they use. Like I said, the main protagonists making it to the end is just one example. Since the writers signal that it's fantasy, you know that the characters are going to live long before you reach the end.

Obviously there are cross-genre novels, but they're the exception rather than the rule.
 

Alan Yee

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Since I usually deal with dark subjects and themes in my writing, sometimes I'm not sure whether they would be considered dark fantasy or horror. Personally, I call most of my stories dark fantasy because I usually don't write them with the primary goal of frightening the reader or making them queasy. Also, although I do have disturbing things going on along, I typically don't write gleeful detailed descriptions of blood and gore. As SP mentioned, it also helps that my stories often have other fantasy elements--magic, paranormal activity, a clearly urban fantasy setting, witches, demons, telepathy, psychics, quirky fairy tale retellings, people encountering things that just shouldn't be there, etc.
 

Kasey Mackenzie

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I cannot recommend Anne Bishop's Black Jewels Trilogy highly enough. Love them! I also enjoy her Fae books (which starts with Pillars of the World, I believe) and her Ephemera books (Sebastian and Belladonna) immensely.
 

Smiling Ted

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Hmmm. Some may call it horror, but even so, he must be read if you haven't - so much comes from him:

HP Lovecraft. At the Mountains of Madness, The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow Over Innsmouth.
 

chroniclemaster1

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Bradbury: Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Peake's Gormenghast novels have achieved the level of classics, but his rather prolix and convoluted over-the-top prose style isn't everyone's flagon of mead.

Bradbury in total is fabulous dark fantasy. Fahrenheit 451 and Martian Chronicles are equally good, just non-magical. And you may hate me for saying this, but I didn't find Gormenghast to be either dark fantasy or horror... a really good nap.

Yup. You can do things in horror that won't fly in dark fantasy. For example, in dark fantasy, you generally can't kill the main characters before the end of the story.

I could not disagree more. I find horror to be an intensely formulaic genre. Much more so than fantasy. Dark fantasy need not kill anyone off. When was the last time you saw a horror film where no one dies. Horror is about scaring your freaking pants off. With very few exceptions (mostly masterpieces of the genre) the main character is around til the closing scene. That's what makes them the main character because everyone else is dropping like flies. Scene and setting are much more important in horror than almost any other genre, and the character's internal fears and horrors as well. These are the two things that take the place of plot at the critical moments when someone is about to die at the hands (if it has hands) of the whatever-it-is. There are a series of usually increasingly bloody murders, which culminate in one that is the "stand-out" moment of "ick" in the book. It's at this point that the "plot" of the book really starts as the MC assumes importance as the adversary for the whatever-it-is and the story moves from focusing on deaths to focusing on the MC's battle to avoid it. That's why horror stories bifurcate so strongly, because the first half is a completely different kind of story telling than what happens, not only in a traditional plot-based story, but from the traditional plot-based story that happens in the second half of the book.

Dark fantasy is much more free form. Also, ideas and themes which "may" happen in a horror story, or may not, are typically not only important, but a key way in which the darkness of the tone of a dark fantasy novel is conveyed.
 
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chroniclemaster1

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Hmmm. Some may call it horror, but even so, he must be read if you haven't - so much comes from him:

HP Lovecraft. At the Mountains of Madness, The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

I consider Lovecraft horror too, his settings and adversaries can be fantastical, but if you compare him to the father of horror, Poe, it's quite clear that the structure of his stories follow those same techniques. The fantastical elements are darkly poetic and amazing to read, but formally they are serving as window dressing in the slow build up of a horror story to it's final shock (even if you can see it coming sometimes).
 

AMCrenshaw

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I wouldn't bend this whole bit about formula too hard. Not on any genre. For example, a genre which is, by definition, more "free form" is formulaically so.

Anyway, to give you a heads up on the "formula" of horror, here are two examples of pure horror:

In the Exorcist, more people died in the making than in the movie. Did Reagan actually die at the end when he jumped off the top story? I don't know for sure, but I don't think so. Rosemary's Baby, another cornerstone for the horror genre, had no deaths directly related to the plot, and although I can't say for certain, I'm not sure anyone died in that film.

But I don't think that the main character living or dying before the end of the story is a trope of either genre, so let's not get carried away.

However, one thing to pay attention to is how much "the supernatural" plays a part in the role of the plot. If a world is fantastic and we know this upfront, then what we consider supernatural (the existence of magic, for example) is not considered supernatural in that world-- this would lean the story closer to fantasy than horror. However, if the world seems realistic/conventional to some degree and "the supernatural" is then imposed upon the natural in the events of the story, the plot reflects more the horror aspect [Biology of Horror, Morgan, 2002]. This is why Anne Rice's vampire novels are considered Dark Fantasy rather than horror-- because the existence of the vampire is the obvious reality of the characters in the story, and we as the readers know this immediately. But, Count Dracula, on the otherhand, was discovered to be supernatural, and his existence as that monster was imposed upon a more conventional-- though atmospheric-- sense of reality.

AMC
 

Ruv Draba

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Is there really that much of a delineation between Dark Fantasy and horror?
Yes. The main purpose of horror is to horrify. It also thrills, disgusts, revulses, shocks, titillates etc... The horrific mood is bound to the tension - looming largest at the climaxes, waning to some semblance of normality with the denouments.

Dark fantasy does all the above things too, but its main job isn't to horrify you but to enchant you with its dark beauty. You can tell the difference because with dark fantasy the horror doesn't just rear at the climaxes. It will often pool in the troughs as the author slips horrific imagery into a linking scene or a bit of character exposition.

For dark fantasy, what peaks at the climaxes is beauty or wonder - though of a macabre or repellant sort.

Hope this helps.
 
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