Skeletal Writings

I read an interesting forum post about what the term "Dark Fiction" meant to people, and although it was just as interesting as I said it was, I was left feeling the need to rant about it.  

I went away from this topic thinking apparently you are not allowed to use the terms Dark Fantasy or Supernatural Thrillers because you're really talking about horror novels and by not calling them horror you're discounting the genre.  Maybe I'm biased because I like the fantasy genre as well as the horror genre (a lot of horror fans look down on fantasy fans, another rant for another time) but I've read novels that have been labeled Dark Fantasy that actually are Dark Fantasy.  I'll even give you an example. 

One of my favorite series is Raine's Landing (or something to that effect; anyway, the town, called Raine's Landing, plays a large role in the books).  It is labeled Dark Fantasy.  It is bloody and gory, as all good horror novels should be.  It has strong supernatural elements.  Romance is less important than...everything else that happens.  But it is still Dark Fantasy rathr than horror, and here's why.  In reading the two books, I saw that the author really had to do some world-building because Raine's Landing may be a real place, but definitely nothing like it was described in the novels.  There is a lot of magic usage going on.  Some situations can be solved by magic alone.  In most horror novels, you find out that all your supernatural concerns can be solved by everyday human stuff.  Well, in this novel, there's a lot that feels believable in context, but it's not so real-world stuff when you think about it later.  Sometimes it borders on going into a discussion of human nature.  I won't spoil anything important because I highly recommend this series (and hopefully there will be more than two books for it) but I can tell you that the human-ish characters have just as many flaws as the non-human characters and the end of the second novel really dives into that.  However, I've never found the end goal of this series to be telling us that humans suck and the supernatural is a lot less scary than we think.  It's still escapist reading and it's not trying to beat us over the head with some life lesson.

I love checking in with this forum as a lurker and there really is a lot of good discussions and such, but the overall opinion for this topic bothered me.