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The Craft: What is “Darkness”?

I was asked what made something qualify as “dark, dark, dark romance” the other day and I thought it was worth repeating and expanding on the response I gave. This is a topic I find interesting since I’m often asked to characterize my books and I don’t think they are all that “dark.” I’m curious to hear what you think. Here’s what I said in response to the question of what I think is “triple dark” (a phrase we coined to describe something so dark, it requires 3 “darks” in front of it )…

While I can handle some death and darkness, when a book seems to dwell on gore and killing everyone in sight in really macabre ways, that qualifies it as “triple dark” in my mind. I’ve never read J.R. Ward (everyone gasp now) mostly because the first book I picked up by her featured a super gory battle scene in the first few pages that literally made me dizzy. (Or that could have been the chemicals they’d just put on my head at the salon where I was attempting to read – not quite sure - LOL – either way, I’ve been afraid to pick up that book again and it languishes on my TBR pile to this day.)

I’m not really squeamish. I’ve written my share of battle scenes where characters die or are badly injured, but I don’t like it when an author glorifies the gore. There’s sort of a “line of grossness” I don’t like them to cross. So gratuitous violence is one of the things that makes something really “dark” to me. Another is the setting. Whenever I think dark, I think of movies like Blade Runner or TV shows like Dark Angel, where everything is bleak and dangerous. Those two are sci fi examples, but the old gothic romances could also fit the bill. Something like HBO’s True Blood is dark, but not the “triple dark” that would really turn me off. It’s more like semi-dark because Sookie is such a light character. I think she balances out Bill’s darkness, if that makes any sense.

The Jessica Alba character in Dark Angel is dark. Nothing is ever easy in her life and she never smiles. Her life is hard. The setting is hard – cops on every corner looking to capture her – she has to scrounge for food and creature comforts and when she finally meets a guy she likes, the bad guys infect him with something that if she touches him, he’ll die. Nice, huh? Sookie Stackhouse, by contrast, has a lot of tough stuff happing to her, but she’s basically a positive person with a somewhat bright outlook. She’s not a pessimist. Sure, she has troubles, but she never seems to give up hope for a better future and she sure never stops looking for love.

So it’s really a combination of things – violence, setting, mood and the characters themselves. I hope that makes sense. (I’m making this up as I go along here.) This is just my off-the-cuff analysis. I’m eager to hear how others might define it?