Dark Stories--Reading them; Writing them; Understanding them.

This thread is about dark stories, esp. short stories. I want to discuss a limited number of them.

What makes a story 'dark'; often the presence of 'dark' or evil forces, which, if they don't win, exact an enormous price.

Shelley's 'Frankenstein' and Poe's works are early examples; the genre seems to have taken flight in the 19th century, and to be closely related to the "romantic" genre (not necessarily romance-related).

The presence of one or more 'evil' or seriously flawed, or deranged major characters is common, and they may be ultimately defeated, but the costs are enormous. (Sometimes they self-destruct.) Often one finds them, in some ways, sympathetic, as the monster in Shelley's work.

Themes or topics in the stories often have to do with death, violence, corruption, decay, and chaos, although violence alone does not do the trick. Suffering, besides being poignant, is often excessive, and sometimes utterly pointless. Certainly King Lear is pretty damn dark if you ask me, whereas I don't think all tragedies qualify.

Let others post urls of some favorites, esp. online, esp. at literotica, and let's focus on a limited number of them for discussion. Here are some from our own, for discussion, to begin with:

scold's bridle, by black shanglan
http://www.literotica.com:81/stories/showstory.php?id=221415

the moth's song, by dr_mabeuse
http://www.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=166465

below and above, by elsol
http://www.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=184764

[[ADDED ENTRIES:

down, by varian
http://forum.literotica.com/showthread.php?t=546615 ]]

Oh, one last thing, as opposed to focussing on typical *content* of a dark story, one might instead define it in terms of reader impact: it's a story that's deeply disturbing; it is not always, but certainly is sometimes terrifying. It makes one uneasy or anxious, and the resolution often does little to abate the feeling. A favorite of mine is Poes, The Black Cat, available online.

http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/eapoe/bl-eapoe-blackcat.htm

Helplessness is another commonly evoked feeling.

1) So what IS a 'dark story'? What are your favorite examples? Besides naming some, pick one and talk about it.

2) Ever tried to write one? How is it different from erotica? Might there be a coincidence, as as in 'dark erotica'. Discuss the writing of dark erotica, focussing on a particular example of yours. Discuss the role of depraved or perverse sex acts as manifestations of evil, in 'dark erotica.'

I expect this thread to be continuing or 'sticky' if there's interest. It will go beyond 'share the halloween story you're writing', but those examples are certainly welcome. Do not be shy about posting a URL--NOT the whole story-- of something you've done. Please check with a moderator if you propose to post an entire story or big excerpt, say more than 600 words.

Ebon Genesis fits the bill on some points. The damage Lavina and Peronelle do before they die is certainly extensive. Their actions end up twisting Tharsas into a sexually deviant, mad, sadistic force determined to rip the gods from the heavens and reforge the world in his image.

http://www.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=259331

Denethia in Harvest of Blood manages to gain her revenge over the man who spent years torturing and using her - but at a terrible price to herself.

http://www.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=277251

Home by the Sea is a little different. There are no sympathetic characters here. The only damage here is evil feeding upon itself ( and the obvious need for an edit )

http://www.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=256416

I've never had a problem writing dark stories. I just take the habitual nightmares I suffered as a teenager and drop my characters into them. Once you move into dark erotica, the uneasiness is easy to conjure up. The simple presence of titilation combined with the darkness pushes buttons.

I'm always aiming to have the erotic elements hit home with a touch of arousal, and yet drop little jabs in there that provoke those feelings of uneasiness all the while.

I don't know whether I'm any good at it, but I like writing them and drain a lot of old wounds that way.

hi dark,
thanks for the suggestions. i want to *discuss* some stories, not just list them. can you say something more about one of the ones you cited?

Pure said:

hi dark,
thanks for the suggestions. i want to *discuss* some stories, not just list them. can you say something more about one of the ones you cited?

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Well, I was aiming for answering the more general questions in the original unedited post while putting a general thematic for the stories in question.

Home by the Sea was written as a sort of homage to the Genesis song by the same name. That song always came across as extremely dark and disturbing to me. Once I started writing, I knew I wanted to do something with it.

I started out with two characters that nobody could love - two scumbag burglars that get as much out of destroying the sense of security or the thrill of tying up/killing the homeowners as anything else.

"Creeping up the blind side, shinning up the wall..." That sounded like burglars to me. Victor and Cat just popped in my head as soon as I decided on that connection. I went with a male and female, because I wanted this to have creepy erotic elements, but I didn't want to get too far into rape, which either character is more than capable of and guilty of.

The real character of the story is the Home by the Sea that they're robbing, however. I think of the place as a living entity unto itself, which feeds upon others of black purpose for reasons unknown. On occasion, others may wander into the trap, but it actively seeks out those lurking on the underbelly of society.

I incorporate the lyrics of the song throughout the story, more or less following the sequence in order. It's mixed up here and there, just because the story can't flow exactly the same way as the song. The whole story is designed to give the reader a sense of uneasiness and chaos. That's the flavor of the song I wanted to deliver in my story.

I knew from the beginning that the house was going to win, but I wanted to drag out the torment. I wanted to generate just that barest touch of sympathy for two people who are utterly beyond sympathizing with. They're larcenous, murdering scum who don't feel the slightest bit ashamed of it. That little touch has to be there, in order to give the reader the sense of justice from drawing out the suffering. Cat and Vic just don't deserve to go out easy - and they don't.

You never really know what's real and what's imagination, and neither do the characters. The sex is rough, visceral, and very graphic. It aims to titilate, while still raising the hair on the back of your neck at the same time.

The "shadows with no substance, in the shape of men" are born both of the song lyrics and an old nightmare, much like anything dark I write. This was one of those nightmares that blended in with reality, taking place in the bedroom with nothing out of place except those spectres and the enormous spider-web hanging over the bed, absolutely crawling with hundreds of spiders. Most of the spectres were just flitting around the room, but one of them sat right at the foot of the bed. It was silent, and made no hostile moves. It just stood there, scaring the hell out of me. I finally summoned up the will to reach through the spider web and turn on the light, which actually happened in reality.

My brother was none too amused to have the light flash on at 3am.

I couldn't tell you whether I did that in my sleep, or whether the nightmare followed me once I awakened, taking advantage of dancing shadows and my bleary eyes to construct a very convincing and frightening hallucination.

Well, that's Home by the Sea in a nutshell.

I hope to revisit this thread with something more substantial, but just as a quick thought, I'm stricken with this passage from The Black Cat:

E. A. Poe said:

And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS. Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart --one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such? This spirit of perverseness, I say, came to my final overthrow. It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself --to offer violence to its own nature --to do wrong for the wrong's sake only --that urged me to continue and finally to consummate the injury I had inflicted upon the unoffending brute. [...] [In] so doing I was committing a sin --a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it --if such a thing were possible --even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God.

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I'm not sure if a story needs to visit the place of "doing wrong for the wrong's sake only" in order to qualify as 'dark', but the passage does seem to offer one possible definition of the dark territory.

hi,

that is a very famous passage, as you know, verdad, a kind of Poe specialty. while i don't think 'perversity' is a requirement for 'dark,' something a little broader might be: i'm referring to a main character who is in the grip of an impulse he knows to be evil.

this occurs, for instance in the male character in the SF story to which you drew my attention, The Screwfly Solution, by Sheldon. of course more intense darkness would occur if the character (husband), despite himself, carried through. Anne's (wife's) impending death is perhaps 'darker,' scarier and more upsetting. the work certainly has themes of ineluctable tragedy and death. that's dark, in my book.

one might say these are the old themes of 'possession' and 'automatism', which, depending on the acts--e.g. in Jekyll and Hyde-- can be terrifying.

You bite off a big chunk here when you start talking about dark literature. All I can do is address my own story, "The Moth's Song", and all I was trying to do in that is write something creepy—that is, take the familiar and make it frightening. I chose insects as my paradigm, because to me, 95% of all horror is insect horror—people acting like insects or looking like insects. I don’t know why this is true but it is true. Insects lack expression and emotion, and we humans find that terrifying. People acting under compulsion are terrifying. It might just be a coincidence that they're acting like insects, but there you have it. Insects are the great horror paradigm for me.

Other than that, I shy away from the very idea of "evil", which I take as a very Christian idea. I know all my Christian friends seem to see the universe in terms of good and evil or moralistic terms whereas I see it in aesthetic terms, in terms of beautiful and ugly. I think we're pretty much living in a post-moralistic world and so good and evil don’t quite cut it any more. In my story there is no evil, but there is ugliness in the form of grotesqueness. The giant moth is quite ugly and grotesque, and what I did to make it scary, to infuse every day life with horror (which is what you have to do to make the horror resonate), is make the very processes of life grotesque. The giant moth is a product of normal sexual urges gone wrong. It’s copulation taken to the extreme--putting the microscope where we shouldn't look.

I do this a lot with horror. I call this biological horror, and it's not really horror, it's just cheap-shot nausea. A lot of biological processes are really quite nauseating when you get close enough to stick your nose right in them, and sex is one. "The Moth's Song" is not really as horrifying as it is nauseating and it gets its punch from simple bestiality, from cross-genus sex between an insect and a human, putting an insect part in your body. It turns out a moth has a penis-like organ called an adisthis or something and the sexual process is all very disgusting and I made good use of it and it worked. It was nauseating enough to gag a maggot, and when coupled with the general creepiness of insects and the haunted feeling of lost love, which itself brings up the feeling of specters and monsters in the mind, it all worked quite handsomely.

(In fact, I think it might almost be more interesting to look at the emotional atmosphere of the characters in dark stories rather than looking at the darkness itself. Residual or unresolved or neglected love often morphs into something monstrous that contributes that actually holds the story together and we might not even recognize it as such, we're so busy concentrating on the big dark spot. But in "The Moth's Song" I really think it's the unresolved love between the two main characters that gives the story its atmosphere of doom and tension and gives the monster context and emotional meaning.)

I had a more sophisticated take on horror in a novel I just finished called Vampires of Prague where I did have to deal with the idea of evil. In there I wanted my vampires to be not just wicked little blood suckers and seducers, but truly evil, as evil as the Nazis they hang around with, and so I had to decide on what made someone truly evil. I had to come up with a quick, workable definition of evil. What I decided was that evil was a total lack of empathy, a total inability to feel what other people felt. A lack of empathy was necessary and sufficient to allow a person to do all sorts of horrible, horrible things, and that indeed is what we adopt when we're about to do horrible things to another group of people: we convince ourselves that they're not human and thus deny them our empathy. (A lack of empathy and emotion is, incidentally, a quality of course native to insects .)

But then, because the relationship between the characters in the book was always smooth, the love story lacked the tension and punch I'd hoped it would have. There's some nice sexual blood drinking in the book though. That's always a plus.

--Zoot

I have a silly question.

What makes a story dark?

Seriously, is it dark that she leaves him for another man? Or does it have to go farther and she kills him?

Would it be dark to have a woman forced into a marriage with a man she does not know and does not like, who beats her and mentally abuses her?

Similar question, would it be to dark to do a trueish story about a woman who is married to a man she does not know by her parents, he beats and abuses her, she turns to the church for help and is told she is his and must stay with him. She kills him in self defense, he pulled a knife they struggled and she ended up gutting him. Is sentenced to death by the church despite the fact they fought and she was wounded, many came forward to say he abused her. She was still sent to the guillotine and had to have it dropped twice to finish her off.

I'm a little confused by what you mean by "dark," Pure, even with the clarity of your descriptions ... I could understand it as "horror," which is where you begin, but not sure how that translates into tragedy (but not all, you explain), and if you want to be broad, what of perssimism and misanthropy, Gunter Grass and Theater of the Absurd ... sorry I don't mean to make it complex, but I do have an observation about the horror traditions --

Originally (Shelley, Poe) the horror was spawned from, and directed toward the human imagination and the worst it could conceive. In contemporary, there is little of this it seems to me. More of the paranormal, the dis-enfranchised, the special effects-type undead and so on.

For me, the contemporary isn't as "scary" as the traditional. The infinitely dark bottom of Poe's pit (in "The Pit and the Pendulum") is filled with the most awful things I can imagine ... and beyond them ... because I never see what they are. If it were contemporary, a gazillion dollars and as many efforts would be made to paint a scary picture of it all ... and, in the process, render it less frightening. It becomes what we call "creepy" rather than "frightening" because unknown.

Just a thought.
ST

perhaps you can clairify, doc

in the beginning of your post, you distance yourself from 'evil' as a xian notioin, and say you 'shy away' from it. and you say you don't see the universe in terms of good and evil, but in aesthetic terms.

speaking of your new novel, you say, in contrast:

dr m: In there I wanted my vampires to be not just wicked little blood suckers and seducers, but truly evil, as evil as the Nazis they hang around with, and so I had to decide on what made someone truly evil. I had to come up with a quick, workable definition of evil. What I decided was that evil was a total lack of empathy, a total inability to feel what other people felt.

P: you say, 'truly evil', like Nazis who for you and me, [at least at the higher levels of officialdom] represent consummate evil. and you then proposed it's linked with lack of empathy, a bit, i might say, like sociopathy/psychopathy.

so which is it? i'm in the same boat, of course. i'm inconsistent. i can get very 'aesthetic', and spew the line of Nietzsche, Sartre, Derrida, and the 'postmoderns' like Baudrillaud. ho hum; murder of undesirables is banal; goes back forever. but i still react to evil, like those who pimp kidnapped child (soon to be) prostitutes. i say, 'string 'em up,' not "well, evil is so boring, so relative and so xian, who gives a shit."

so apparently, at a gut level, for most of us, there is "evil"; and dark stories involve getting us to imagine it as very powerful, as perhaps controlling, at least for a time, some main characters (if not being incarnate in them); and as, if not winning, at least giving 'good' a hell of a run for its money. there is a dark strand in many of the famous romances: in Jane Eyre, Rochester ends up blinded, having been nearly killed in the burning down of his mansion.

---
PS. I think evil has solid OT/Tanach and preXian roots: first, as breaking a commandment, e.g. in the garden of Eden. second as idolatry, closely connected to whoredom; such people seemingly fit only to be destroyed. third, in the Cain figure, who's motives for murder are a bit tenuous; fourth, and perhaps more subtly, in the David figure; who arranges for the fine and loyal soldier, Uriah, to be slain to as to take his wife; and pays the price--viewing it as deserved--death of a child.

it's perhaps a better and more complex map of evil than the xian one, but it is a map of evil.

Dark stories to me are stories that in some way glorify the undesirable/the unmentionable. Of course that statement can be softened. You can discuss the term glorify, you can try to narrow down what is undesirable or unmentionable. But at a basic level I think dark stories tap into our fears and our own dark side. Every human being has thoughts or wishes that are not acceptable to the society as a whole. It's not only evil forces, or undead monsters.

Dark stories tell you about the things we like to keep in the dark. Jung called that part of our psyche "shadow". It's there, we all have it, but not everybody is willing or able to acknowledge the fact, or if they do they will try to suppress it or cure it.
It's also the reason, I think, that fear plays such an important part in dark stories as well. Once you accept that you have a dark side, you will have to be careful to keep it under control. And what about the dark side of your neighbour? Can he control his?

As for the examples you gave, Pure. I loved both the Moth and Scold's Bridle. Scary, scary stories that left me uneasy after reading them. The facts are repulsive - especially in the Moth - but you still cannot stop reading. You want to know, even if it makes you vomit.

I have written only one true horror story (it's also the only story so far that's been published). The original raw draft can be found in the bowels of Literotica. I can dig it out, if anybody wants to know since it's not available as a submission. I wrote it as an exercise: could I write something scary and sick but still entertaining.

There is another story, I think from Dranoel, about the love for a woman who is dying after a car accident. A totally harmless plot, but the story was gruesome, captivating and moving. It's no longer on the site though.

"Dark" then, as a synonym for Evil. Leaving philosophy aside for fiction then, I still go back to the notion that it is better as imagined than as detailed or portrayed. The ho-hum comes from giving it a name and a recognizable face, or a costume, not from the truly horrible darkness we imagine in dreams.

The dark between stars, for me.

For Melville, a white whale ... and it works as well.

I don't think the preference for a hazy outline of suggestion is because we're afraid to think about it, but that in naming it we give it a lie. We pretend it can be controlled and made sweet if we just put on a mask and go door to door saying 'Trick or Treat.' It's a nice fantasy, but as different from confronting evil as going down a roller coaster is from falling from a height.

In my opinion,
ST

hi soft,

i agree that 'dark' thing can be trivialized... after all, go into a drugstore and purchase a cheap mask with a bloody gash in the cheek.

the best dark stories leave lots to the imagination.

if we can recognize a part of ourselves---and who hasn't thought of bloody murder or torture--- that makes it even more disturbing.

Softouch911 said:

"Dark" then, as a synonym for Evil. Leaving philosophy aside for fiction then, I still go back to the notion that it is better as imagined than as detailed or portrayed. The ho-hum comes from giving it a name and a recognizable face, or a costume, not from the truly horrible darkness we imagine in dreams.

The dark between stars, for me.

For Melville, a white whale ... and it works as well.

I don't think the preference for a hazy outline of suggestion is because we're afraid to think about it, but that in naming it we give it a lie. We pretend it can be controlled and made sweet if we just put on a mask and go door to door saying 'Trick or Treat.' It's a nice fantasy, but as different from confronting evil as going down a roller coaster is from falling from a height.

In my opinion,
ST

Click to expand...

That's what I meant to say. Giving words to the unspeakable is something else than giving it a name. Although both can be seen as a way to put a spell on the darkness; make the fear go away. I know of one famous Dutch writer (Gerard Reve) who said as much himself. His stories all had a lot of dead, blood and decay in them, without being horror by the way.

It follows that dark stories to me are not the same as horror.

black t It follows that dark stories to me are not the same as horror.

hi, black!

i think they can be distinguished, but there are gray and overlapping areas. i notice that my proposals re 'dark' in the first posting did not mention horror.

so how would you define the difference? where do some of the stories mentioned above, fit?


one feature i'd observe is that some pop horror is formulaic, often with a simple battle of good and evil, frequently with good triumphant. the 'horror' is in the scares, the thrills, the gore. where this is not the case, there's often a terrible 'thing' that refuses to die, and hence dutifully reincarnates for the next story or film to make money for the producers of what is essentially a franchise/serial.

a popular film i rather like for its 'darkness' is 'firestarter' with drew barrymore (written by King). its disturbing quality does not come from what i'd call 'horror' scenes but from the dominance of evil forces. good takes a real beating. there are, of course, some spectacular violent/fiery scenes. but what i like is that the 'power', though a blessing (to save Drew from the bad guys), is also a curse.

Okay to go back to the reader's reaction instead of to the story itself?

I'm mindful of your OP, Pure, in which you mentioned approvingly of Poe. Perhaps you've read his "Philosophy of Composition" (if I have the right one in mind) in which he talks about how he theoretically wrote "The Raven."

In it he talks about choosing every word (e.g., "Nevermore") and the raven itself because the sounds and associations of the words and rhythms would excite "awe" or "horror" in the reader. (He used the words as virtual synonyms, iirc.)

I think that notion still controls fiction that deals with the "dark" side, though horror (in the sense of the formula you mention) is probably too narrow -- perhaps the notion of what makes a story "dark" is still what he said -- it's anything at all (words or images) that excite the reader's sense of awe, or of being at the imagined mercy, of malevolent forces.

I mean: it's not what happens to the characters but what happens to us as we read/watch.

Does that makes sense to anyone else?

ST

Softouch911 said:

(Poe) talks about choosing every word (e.g., "Nevermore") and the raven itself because the sounds and associations of the words and rhythms would excite "awe" or "horror" in the reader. (He used the words as virtual synonyms, iirc.)

...perhaps the notion of what makes a story "dark" is still what he said -- it's anything at all (words or images) that excite the reader's sense of awe, or of being at the imagined mercy, of malevolent forces.

I mean: it's not what happens to the characters but what happens to us as we read/watch.

Does that makes sense to anyone else?

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Absolutely.

I think it's possible, and often desirable, to create moods and provoke emotions with the sensuality of language, much in the same way music, lighting, sound effects, etc., enhance our emotional response to the action taking place on screen when watching a film.

One can use staccato sentences and words to give a sense of speed to an action, or soft, flowing words to ease a reader into a sense of calm or sensuality, etc.

Often, the wrong language used to convey a scene utterly undermines its impact, in my opinion.

-Varian

Pure said:

black t It follows that dark stories to me are not the same as horror.

hi, black!

i think they can be distinguished, but there are gray and overlapping areas. i notice that my proposals re 'dark' in the first posting did not mention horror.

so how would you define the difference? where do some of the stories mentioned above, fit?

one feature i'd observe is that some pop horror is formulaic, often with a simple battle of good and evil, frequently with good triumphant. the 'horror' is in the scares, the thrills, the gore. where this is not the case, there's often a terrible 'thing' that refuses to die, and hence dutifully reincarnates for the next story or film to make money for the producers of what is essentially a franchise/serial.

Click to expand...

I'll preface by saying I'm not at all versed in the genre of horror, so my thoughts here are based in intuition rather than knowledge.

My sense is that usually 'horror' involves something supernatural--Frankenstein's monster, ghosts, possession, etc., which may represent aspects of human darkness, but are not, themselves, human. Or, at the outside, involve an 'unnatural' evil bent, such as a murderous child or Texas Chainsaw-level brutality.

Horror stories have darkness at their core, but there are certainly dark stories that aren't horror.

One of the darkest stories I've read is Jersy Kosinski's "The Painted Bird," which depicts the experiences of a young boy among Polish peasants during the holocaust. He encounters various individuals and groups, and witnesses one horrific brutality after another. It's a crushingly bleak survey of human cruelty.

For me, that's the scariest kind of darkness: not the aberration, like a psychotic individual who goes on a killing spree, but the awful things "ordinary" people are capable of, given the right set of circumstances. Bosnia, Rwanda, or things like witch trials, or public stonings--where masses of people come together to destroy in the name of preserving community values. Or the fact that when people are taken out of familiar surroundings, where social mores keep them under control, it's a given they will commit atrocities (extra-curricular cruelties of soldiers at war is an easy example).

note to var

P: i still vividly remember some scenes of 'the painted bird,' decades after reading it.

of course, some of it's wartime, but the E European setting certainly conjures up some pretty dark visions, e.g. the brutalities of superstitious peasants with fears of magic and a traditional xian hatred of jews. i agree the 'dark' doings of ordinary folks are perhaps scarier than monsters, e.g. burning of the town of Rosewood Florida, and the murder of a number of its residents, in 1923; not to say the Salem, Mass. events.

as you probably know, Kosinski misleadingly implied he himself had lived some of the events the boy is depicted in; a claim found to be false.

one comment on
var My sense is that usually 'horror' involves something supernatural--Frankenstein's monster,

P: M Shelley is said to have written an early example of 'dark' literature. but i think the monster is not the key. the key is the desire of humans to control life, even create it and to master nature. though these seem desirable they are inextricably linked with darkness.

a later example of human's ingenuity, commented on by Oppenheimer, is the atomic bomb with its proven ability to vaporize thousands in an few seconds.

http://www.lanl.gov/history/atomicbomb/trinity.shtml

Trinity

[verbatim excerpt]

At 5:29:45 am Mountain War Time on July 16, 1945, the world’s first atomic bomb exploded one hundred feet over a portion of the southern New Mexico desert known as the Jornada del Muerto – the Journey of the Dead Man.

On seeing the fireball and mushroom cloud, J. Robert Oppenheimer recalled a passage from the Bhagavad-Gita: "I am become death the destroyer of worlds."

Trinity Test Director, Harvard Physicist Kenneth Bainbridge, had a less ethereal reaction, saying, "Now we are all sons of bitches."

[end]

here's a bit of Canadiana:

http://www.mysteryquests.ca/quests/10/support/4048en.html

A group of disgruntled townspeople established a vigilante committee as a substitute for a legal trial, conviction and sentencing. Their purpose was to punish the wayward Donnellys whose crimes had escalated in the 1870s. Finally, on February 4, 1880 the Donnelly farm was burned to the ground. The bodies of James, his beloved Johannah, son Tom [25] and niece Bridget [21] were in the ashes. Another son, John, lay dead in a separate murder the same night. Evidence suggested that a cruel and vicious mob, a breakaway group of a society called, ironically, “The Peace Society,” was to blame. Despite a great deal of evidence (including at least one eyewitness) and two trials, no one was ever found guilty of the crimes.

accounts by witnesses:

http://www.donnellys.com/History2.html
http://www.donnellys.com/History3.html

Pure, I assume there are others (like me) who are ignorant of the Rosewood, FL example. Could you ref me to something I can read?

And if I'm the only one who doesn't know it, as sometimes happens, please PM a link or ref?

Thanks in advance,
ST

Pure,

Your examples raise an interesting distinction, which I wasn't thinking of when I wrote my post: that between the organized/systematic "machine" of 'dark' force, wherein society or the segment of society in power deliberately implements a mechanism of destruction (the a-bomb, the holocaust, the Inquisition, etc.), versus an individual or mob wreaking destruction without great forethought (as when a drunken mob tortures and kills a gay kid, lynchings, gang rapes, etc.).

I've been thinking a lot about the latter, as thoughtless mob violence is a key element of something I've been writing. But I think the two often overlap (individual's emotions are often deliberately whipped into a frenzy in order to get them to participate in the 'machine of destruction' planned by religious, military, and political leaders, for example), and I think that, in addition to catalysts of an intellectual, moral, and power nature, one common factor in these manifestations of 'darkness' is fear.

Many dark acts, it seems to me, are motivated on a more or less subconscious level by desperate fear, whether it's fear of being identified as sympathetic to the target of violence if one doesn't participate, fear of one's own weakness, which might seem conquerable through an act of violence, or a genuine fear that what the target represents might undermine one's sense of security in 'the way things are', etc.

I tend to believe that fear, insecurity, a need to control one's environment, is at the core of most darkness. So I suppose that's where I go when I write dark fiction.

Softouch911 said:

Pure, I assume there are others (like me) who are ignorant of the Rosewood, FL example. Could you ref me to something I can read?

And if I'm the only one who doesn't know it, as sometimes happens, please PM a link or ref?

Thanks in advance,
ST

Click to expand...

I didn't know, myself. Here's a starting point:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosewood_Massacre

here's a pretty definitive source for rosewood, and it has a summary at the beginning

http://mailer.fsu.edu/~mjones/rosewood/rosewood.html

Thank you both. I'll do my homework.

ST

note re Varian's story

i'd encourage everyone to read Varian's newly posted story, and it's certainly 'dark' and very well written.

http://forum.literotica.com/showthread.php?t=546615


it's a little tricky where to post one's comments, for i don't want to drain off feedback from the feedback/critique thread.... perhaps here the more philosophical issues to do with evil, and the general approaches to writing it [as they are handled by V] can be discussed; in the thread itself, comments and criticisms of the mechanics, its effect on the reader, and so on.

in any case, V will receive input regardless whether it's here or at the thread.