Dark Stories

I really appreciate a good dark story. I feel like our culture is so PC and whitewashed that we aren't allowed to show anything awful (unless we show that it happened to people who deserve it). But a truly dark story is chilling. It haunts you. It leaves you shaken while you process what you have encountered.

So what makes a story dark? For me, it is usually a sense of hopelessness. Create characters people like. Follow them around and grow a bond. Then start making things go wrong. We will assume that it is regular adversity that our hero will overcome, either through might or mental prowess. Then keep cutting off options. Make those attempts go awry. It has to all be fair and understandable, not cruel. But by the end, there are literally no more options. Our hero has lost completely and there is no hope for that to change anymore.

Dark stories can also be perverse. I don't mean stories about sexual deviants. And I don't mean gruesome stories about creeps like The Hills Have Eyes. I mean stories about worlds that seem so different from ours, but end up being very similar  to our own, just with a slight twist. Rod Serling was a master of this with The Twilight Zone. A classic story was the one where a woman was so ugly that she needed to have surgery to look normal. The well-known twist is that she actually is beautiful by our standards and the "normal" people have grotesque pig faces. But what people tend to forget is the sheer horror and terror of the woman, seeing that her surgery was a failure and she was still horribly disfigured. She could not even be part of society. She had to be escorted by another disfigured person to a colony where they all live, removed from everyone else in the world. THAT is dark. And if we reach a state where ugliness is that rare, do you think we wouldn't do that? It's a disturbing story of a twisted society, but how easily could we become that?

These stories always lead to questions.  They make us feel uncomfortable, but they also open our eyes. They make us question things we may have previously taken as normal. These are stories that, though we may not want to make them our main diet, are definitely beneficial to have.