Before moving to Dark Fantasy as a sub-set of fantasy and horror, let's look at the larger category of fantasy. Fantasy is currently the largest selling genre. It's larger than science fiction, bigger by a mile than horror, and one of the few genres that did not suffer a fall off when 9/11 happened.

Women constitute more than fifty percent of the authors and a disproportionate number of them are in the upper brackets as sales figures go (and if you include YA, such as Rowlings, the guys will never recover).

If you look at the fictionwise dark fantasy list, (which I do frequently because they carry my novels), you'll notice that many of the novels are listed in more than one category. The biggest mix appears to be dark fantasy/romance, followed by dark fantasy/fantasy, and dark fantasy/horror.

You rarely see dark fantasy/horror in the top twenty-five titles. Dark fantasy/romance dominates with erotic/romantic vampire fiction. That's an almost entirely female audience. (I say almost, because I know a guy who reads romances and has been since his teen years when he decided it was a good way to learn about what women wanted/needed in a relationship and it would help him make himself a more romantic guy to catch/attract women. It must have worked because he's had a successful marriage for twenty years now).

One of the biggest changes in fantasy has come about because of the influx of women writers. It raised the bar in terms of quality. Fantasy stopped being looked upon as adolescent male masturbatory material in the early 1980s. It no longer worked to simply produce a decent story of a male swaggering into an adventure waving his big sword around (double entendre intended), rescuing damsels in distress, and butchering monsters and villians. It went beyond give me a good story, to give me a great story about characters I can identify with, with all the blemishes, virtues, relationships, and interactions, give me insight into the human condition through the metaphor of fantasy.

Examples: Sara Douglass, Mercedes Lackey, Robin Hobb, Anne Bishop, Lynn Flewelling, Katherine Kurtz, the list is huge. And they are writing both male and female protagonists. Love, life, tragedy, hope, catharsis, victory and defeat, prejudice, bigotry, injustice, and above all the triumph of the human spirit over the darkness wait in their pages.

But start reading and what jumps out first and foremost is the extent of the depiction of cultures, societies, characterization, and interactions. It is done in great and encompassing details that flow with the story. There's no slap dash, here we have the story, Bonehead the Barbarian has sauntered in and Oh my gorsh, look at that!

Maybe someone should tell Bonehead the Barbarian to put his mouse back in his trousers.

To go beyond the simple-minded adventures of the previous era has required a willingness to think beyond the confines of a simplistic plot. And the arrival of women writers raised the bar there.

When I first started selling there were not many places to sell my stories of Chimquar the Lionhawk, a woman masquerading as male in a world that would deny her a place, raising her two children, and fighting both monsters and an unjust society. In each of them I tried to take the, then popular, sword and sorcery adventure traditions a few steps forward, examine what it must have felt like to be one of those women who didn't want their lives boxed in, and yet had to make uncomfortable compromises in order to be free.

As a result of the New Wave movement of the 60s, women writers became widely accepted in science fiction and fantasy, and their numbers leaped up exponentially over the decades that followed.

Horror remained the only field with a handful of women writers in it, a place where women writers are often and still disparaged because of their gender.

But they who call the hunt should be careful lest the foxes eat their wolves.

Around ten or so years ago, fantasy elements began to be blended in with horror elements in the wake of the slipstream movement that preceded it, and became known to editors, agents, and publishers as "dark" fantasy.

Wolf-Caller and Bonehead the Barbarian seem to think that editors, agents, and publishers can be deceived as to the nature of the writing by simply slapping on their own label of "dark" fantasy and masking the fact that they're writing horror.

Sorry to break it to you boys, but we're not stupid.

TO BE CONTINUED
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Some brief creds, a partial list

articles published in:
Movieline *** Cinefantastique *** Washington Post Book World *** Los Angeles Times *** Los Angeles Drive Guide *** Black Belt *** Martial Arts Weapons *** Monsterland *** Thrust: Science Fiction in Review *** Science Fiction Review

Former MPAA Accredited Journalist.
Currently Active member, SFWA