When using or hearing the term “dark fantasy,” my mind immediately jumps to the aesthetics and imagery brought from the original Brother’s Grimm Fairy tales, Hans Christen Anderson, and even Aesop’s Fables. I’ve seen the TL: DR definition on Social Media as “fairy tales with no happy endings” or “stories without the Disney or Hallmark branding.” The more formal definition I’ve seen in the publishing industry is “stories centered with fantastical and horror elements.” Whichever definition you like, this genre of storytelling has captured my heart and mind since I was a little girl.
Books were a self-soothing escape and a source of friendship in my home. I always felt like an odd duck to the characters it drew me to and didn’t seem to be the same as everyone else. The first book I remember being so proud to receive and finish was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl. The character I enjoyed most in the book was Mr. Willy Wonka because of the incredible power he seems to have to punish these terrible children AND the adults. A few months ago, I had the immense honor and pleasure of listening to the author of the series “The School for Good and Evil,” Soman Chainani, speak in person at San Diego Comic-Con. In his talk, he mentioned that as a kid, he often remembered enjoying the villains of Disney films more than the good guys. This instantly brought me back to being a child and watching The Little Mermaid, but always having the most fun singing Ursula’s part and remembering how DUMB I thought Ariel was about not reading anything before she signed that piece of paper. It also gave me a flashback to the opening of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and how enamored I was with the woman in the stained glass window who cursed everyone.
I think I jumped to Matilda by Roald Dahl next because I found stories that didn’t just end in “happily ever after” felt more natural, even at that young age. As I started school, they quickly labeled me with the “very nerdy” title, as I preferred reading R. L. Stine and Christopher Pike to Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. I often had journals for various points of time – letting very angsty trite poems, I think, being the first things I ever “wrote.” When the idea for The Girl came, I tried writing in a very high fantasy style but quickly found that I had no authentic voice in that area because these dark undertones always seemed to come quickly. So the idea sat and stayed in various notebooks and journals until I recalled these past feelings and books that lent themselves to being dark fantasy and horror for kids. The stories that really stuck with me at that age were the ones I heard from my family, those I read in Aesop’s Fables, or the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales. I remember vividly that I’d received a package of illustrated books with accompanying cassette tapes (aka Walkman style) so my parents could hit “play” on the cassette, and the cassette tape would “read” me the story with full voice actors and sounds. There would be voices acting out the fight sequences, animal growls, and even tears or gasps for the death scenes. And the crazy part was it was the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Aesop’s fables, so all the dangers and gore were very much present from an early age.
All this is to say that dark fantasy and dark fiction have left a mark on me. A pattern that does trend into the other genres of writing I started in. My first “published” piece was a nonfiction short story I wrote about a trip to Seoul, Korea, in 2019. I started with short stories, both in dark fantasy and horror, and nonfiction for almost half a year before I even attempted to write an entire novel. If there was any doubt as to which of the literary writing advice tropes I listened to, it was “write what you know.”
Victory Witherkeigh is a female Filipino/PI author from Los Angeles, CA, currently living in the Las Vegas area. She has printed publications in the horror anthologies Supernatural Drabbles of Dread through Macabre Ladies Publishing, Bodies Full of Burning through Sliced Up Press, and In Filth It Shall Be Found through OutCast Press. Her first novel, set to debut in December 2022 with Cinnabar Moth Publishing, has been a finalist for Killer Nashville’s 2020 Claymore Award, a 2020 Cinnamon Press Literature Award Honoree, and long-listed in the 2021 Voyage YA Book Pitch Contest.
