What has led to the popularity of grimdark stories?

This piece originally appeared on Quora.com as an answer to the question, “What has led to the popularity of grimdark stories?”

Because dark is easy, and it keeps the author safe.

From a marketing standpoint, darkness is very effective. Without using exaggerated darkness, the author is forced to trust the reader — to trust that the reader will suspend disbelief, that the reader will understand what is said, that the reader will take the story seriously. You have to assume that your audience is willing to play ball with you, and that they’re smart enough to understand what you wrote. You have to place the story under the control of your audience and trust that they’ll take it seriously. In many ways, you, the author, are at the mercy of the reader. And if an author is not the most courageous person, they can always get around this by simply making their stories as dark as they can.

It basically forces people to take your work seriously, because anything that is very dark can’t possibly be kids’ stuff; you can read George R.R. Martin and still feel like an adult despite reading a book about magical dragons, because it’s all so exaggeratedly dark that nobody could possibly mistake it for a children’s book. Yes, it’s about wizards and dragons, but there’s so much blood and gore and sex and cloying cynicism that you can read it and not feel in danger of losing your Grownup Card. George R.R. Martin doesn’t have to worry about people ridiculing his work, because it’s so DARK AND GRITTY that you basically have to treat it with some degree of gravitas. If I write a scene where someone is getting raped and murdered at the same time, then I don’t have to be afraid of being laughed at. Who’s gonna laugh at that?

Darkness also forces your audience to feel something. See, there are two ways to get an emotional reaction from the reader: write well enough that they can’t help but feel something, or go the easy route and use extreme imagery to force the reaction out of them. If you don’t make your story exaggeratedly dark, it’s much harder to win your audience over. Scenes involving things like rape, murder, torture, and so on, are shocking and guaranteed to pull some kind of reaction out of the reader, whether they like it or not. The author doesn’t have to feel afraid that someone will dismiss their work if their writing is so grimdark that it, like a bad smell, cannot be ignored.

And finally, darkness helps because everyone understands it. You don’t need to be aesthetically sensitive to the finest nuances of feeling to understand grimdark fiction. If someone is getting a hole drilled through their head and their brains sucked out through a straw, you’re gonna react to that. So will everyone else. From a marketing standpoint, grimdark works because pretty much anyone can get it.

And that’s the key, I think, to the work of grimdark authors. By making your story as dark as you can, you get to escape the usual authorial vulnerability to the reader and instead exert a kind of dominance over them. I fully admit to doing this in my own novel. I think I did it, partially because it’s fashionable, but also because there is a certain weakness in me that wanted to exert some control over my readers. Something to keep in mind when I’m writing the next book.