Writing from death

How dark fiction illuminates life

Writing crime fiction changed my life in peculiar ways. For starters, every travel destination becomes a potential story setting. A couple of years ago, my husband and I spent a weekend in Gedinne in the Belgian Ardennes. Despite our wonderful B & B, and the lush surroundings, my mind was spinning a different story. Sure, that lake might look gorgeous and innocent, but what kind of secrets is it hiding on the bottom?

It wasn’t that I particularly wanted there to be a dead body or an object that would turn my beliefs upside down, it’s just that my mind loves to race ahead and report what it finds, possibly so I’d be better prepared for any potential danger or oddity life might throw my way.

Having lived with anxiety most of my life, I’ve become accustomed to thinking of death more often than most people. It’s unsurprising perhaps, that I’ve turned to writing dark fiction as a consequence. I admit it, death intrigues me as a topic. Not because I often write about it, but because I also write from it. In short, death is the vantage point that shapes my perspective.

Let me explain.

Anxiety skews life in a way that every sharp curve on the road ahead brings death a bit closer. The gorgeous view from a high-rise building? Death with a touch of vertigo. The rustic bridge above the gorge? Yup, that’s death lurking bellow the surface. Don’t even get me started on plane travel.

Having said all that, I find death neither morbid nor terrifying. If anything, its presence shifts everything closer to life. It encourages me to spend more time with the people I love and become less reliant on putting aside what matters.

To me, death is the air that feeds the flame of life. It sustains it. It keeps it bright.

Similarly, writing dark fiction provides structure to dip into the murky mess of life, and make sense of it. It provides a framework that allows us to channel our anxieties and bring them to a resolution and makes us feel better prepared for potential dangers.

As Lisa Cron puts it so deftly in ‘Wired for Stories’: “That’s what readers come for. Their unspoken hardwired question is If something like this happens to me, what would it feel like? How would I best react?”

It’s no wonder, perhaps, that the darker the times, the bigger the need to write and read dark fiction. Horror, for example, has been on the rise, while thrillers/mystery remains among the most popular genres of the past years. And those are only a few dark fiction genres.

We don’t seek out these stories because we want to read about suffering, but because they promise a resolution. At the end of the story, the crime will be solved, the killer found out and everything will make sense. Reading dark fiction channels our anxieties and delivers closure.

Life, on the other hand, doesn’t have to make sense. It’s messy, challenging and often completely absurd. Like in writing, there’s no one way to go about it and what works for some might not work for you. Like in fiction, it’s up to you to carve out the meaning.

I’ll pick reading a piece of dark fiction over reading news any time. A few things terrify me more than the combination of power and incompetence. But hey, what do I know, since I make up stuff for a living?