Writing popular fiction

written as much as fifty years ago) and enjoy regular, cyclic bursts of extraordinary popularity. With stories like "Pickman's Model," which deals with a painter who fashions portraits of monsters that, the narrator learns, are not imaginary, as they first seemed, "The Rats in the Walls."
    "The Dunwich Horror," and dozens of others
(The Dunwich Horror
and
The Colour Out of Space
are two excellent paperback collections from Lancer Books), Lovecraft created the ghastliest, most horrifying non-humans ever to shamble across the pages of fantastic literature—not the plastic fright-wig monsters of cheap scare movies, but believable and sinister creatures that can frighten an adult as easily as a child. Because of Lovecraft and other fantasy masters before and of his time—August Derleth for his many stories, Bram Stoker for his immensely powerful
Dracula
and other weird tales—the conditions of the dark fantasy have been established, providing certain things the readers expect. To be successful at this sub-type, one must be familiar with these early masters and with the perimeters they established.
    First of all, dark fantasy—unlike all other fantasies-most often takes place against a normal contemporary or recognizable historical setting. Though it could be placed in pre-history, in the far future of Earth, or in another imaginary world altogether, it seems to work best if its supernatural elements can be put in contrast with an otherwise common background.
    For example, William Peter Blatty's enormously popular
The Exorcist
, which is the story of the demonic possession of a pre-teen girl, is set in the present-day environs of Washington, D.C. Its cast of characters is typically American: a moderately popular movie actress, her director, her servants, her child, a clever police detective, a priest troubled by doubts of his calling and his religion, a lady occultist, and assorted minor characters. The day-to-day lives of the characters are full of problems we've all known and can identify with: busy work schedules, concern over a dying mother, and grief at the loss of friends. The only things at all out of the ordinary are the wild, careening changes in the child as she is in stages possessed by a demon, her fits of physical, emotional, sexual rage. Because all else
is
ordinary, the girl's condition is as moving, terrifying, and fascinating as it could possibly be for the reader.
    Likewise, in Ira Levin's best-selling
Rosemary's Baby
, the fantastic element is the only "impossibility" in the story. The hero and heroine are a nice New York couple, with a bright future, newly married. When they move into an enormous old brownstone apartment house, the husband's career seems to move less quickly than it once did. In frustration, and unknown to his wife Rosemary, the husband makes a deal with an older couple in the same building, an older couple who are Satanists: for his own success, he will allow Satan to have a son by Rosemary. By the end of the book, this comes to pass, and the anti-Christ has arrived. This fantastic plot is developed in such a levelheaded manner, with so many references to "normal" life—Rosemary's morning sickness, going to an obstetrician, buying playpens and baby toys—that the impact of the fantasy element is optimal.
    In a fantasy world of miracles and magic, one cannot really fear the villain, because of the hero's superhuman powers. The reader knows the protagonist can handle anything, meet any danger, and that he doesn't deserve much concern. When the setting is work-a-day, however, the hero plainly mortal, the terror blooms and is genuine, for the hero
might
die, be maimed, tortured, go mad, or lose his soul.
    Indeed, a second requirement of dark fantasy is that at least one and perhaps all of these gruesome possibilities
do
transpire. Since the theme of dark fantasy, stated or implied, is "there are things in this life men were not meant to know," and since the hero often pokes deeper and deeper into a curious circumstance in order to learn what's behind it, it follows that more of these tales must end pessimistically than optimistically. In fact, if your protagonist is destined to die, the circumstances of his passing should be as hideous as you can make them, in order to reinforce the theme and provide the reader with the thrill of horror he is seeking. For instance, one of your characters might die by crashing through a window, wrestling with the insubstantial form of Satan, falling