“Grimdark” is a term that I only picked up on in the past year or so, mostly on Reddit and Goodreads. It is a descriptive, and increasingly pejorative, name for a subgenre of Science Fiction and Fantasy that is pervasively bleak in tone and dwells on the most negative aspects of humanity. In Fantasy fiction, “grimdark” arose at the beginning of the “I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me?” era of the 1990s, when the genre was working hard to shed its (at the time) deeply uncool connections to Tolkein and his embarrassing bastard child, Dungeons & Dragons. “Batman” had already proven the “fantasy + nihilism = realism” theory (commercially, at least), and Fantasy followed swiftly behind them, dismantling its own tropes and replacing them with little more than cynicism. The increasingly brutal visual iconography of Fantasy videogames of the time also played into the marketing of the material. What might have begun as an earnest attempt to explore the dark psychology of people who fight monsters for a living was co-opted and diminished into a muddier, bloodier marketing pose. In 2016, writer Damien Walter referred to “grimdark” as an attempt to “win adolescent readers” and feared that the trend would move the genre away from “a truly epic and more emotionally nuanced kind of fantasy.”
As a writer of Fantasy that is admittedly horrific at times, I try to take these criticisms of “grimdark” fiction seriously. I write because I enjoy exploring and communicating the human experience, and the last thing I want to do is limit my own work – and my audience, let’s be honest – by shelving “The Elect Stories” in such a niche. While its themes are dark, they are very human themes of loss and regret. To my mind, this is a capital-R-Romantic darkness, not a nihilistic one. The difference? Hope. To me, hope is what makes all stories epic and emotionally nuanced. So for those of you still on the adventure with us: Thank you. I am grateful. And to those of you who are perhaps growing weary of the grim and the dark: Stay close and take our hand. There is still hope.
