Exploring Dark Fantasy

I’ve always been drawn to stories that embrace a little more grit, darkness and danger.

Even as a child, I found myself captivated by worlds that felt unforgiving, where heroes weren’t guaranteed victory and where the journey itself seemed more than capable of breaking the people that undertook it. There was something about those darker stories that felt more real to me. The stakes seemed higher. The consequences felt meaningful. Characters weren’t simply tested; they were pushed to their limits, stripped of certainty, and forced to discover who they truly were when everything around them fell apart.

I think that’s one of the reasons I’ve always loved dark fantasy in particular. The horror influences that often accompany the genre add an extra layer of tension that keeps you turning pages long into the night. There’s a constant sense that something could go wrong at any moment, that there are terrible things lurking just beyond the edge of the torchlight, and that uncertainty creates a kind of suspense that I find incredibly compelling.

Many of my earliest influences came from film. I grew up watching classics such as Conan the Barbarian, Excalibur, Dragonslayer and later Pan’s Labyrinth, all of which left a lasting impression on me. They were imaginative, atmospheric and often surprisingly dark, presenting worlds that felt ancient, mysterious and dangerous.

Then, like so many fantasy fans of my generation, I was completely swept away by Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lord of the Rings.

Those films didn’t just entertain me; they fundamentally changed my relationship with storytelling. The scale of the world, the depth of the characters, the sense of history woven into every location and every conversation. It was unlike anything I had experienced before, and watching those films inspired me to pick up the books, beginning with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien, and from there I disappeared down a rabbit hole that I’ve never truly emerged from.

My reading expanded into the works of Robert E. Howard, Robert Jordan, Naomi Novik, Barbara Hambly and Robin Hobb, and more recently I’ve enjoyed authors such as Brandon Sanderson, Joe Abercrombie and Christopher Buehlman, whose works continue to showcase just how varied and exciting modern fantasy can be.

What I love most about fantasy and science fiction is the immersion they offer. Few forms of storytelling allow you to step so completely into another reality. They transport you to worlds without limits, places where authors can explore any theme imaginable through a unique blend of creativity, nuance and entertainment. They can examine politics, morality, faith, identity, love, war, survival and humanity itself, all while telling stories about dragons, starships, ancient curses or distant planets. For me, it’s the ultimate form of escapism.

Outside of reading, much of my life has been spent working as a wildlife photographer and tour guide. My career eventually took me to South Africa, where I immersed myself in an entirely different kind of world. The longer I spent in the African wilderness, the more fascinated I became by its complexity, learning about the flora and fauna, predator behaviour, animal dynamics and the countless interconnected relationships that hold entire ecosystems together. Every species plays a role. Every behaviour has a purpose. Every success and failure creates ripples that affect everything around it.

The more you learn about nature, the more fantastical it becomes. There are creatures that seem impossible, behaviours that appear almost mythical, and stories unfolding every single day that rival anything found in fiction. A leopard disappearing into darkness. A pack of wild dogs coordinating a hunt, lions defending territory and hyenas exploiting opportunities. Entire ecosystems functioning through an intricate web of cause and effect.

Before long, those observations began inspiring ideas of my own. Characters appeared first. Then fragments of stories. Then locations. A ruined fortress here. An ancient sword there. A kingdom on the edge of collapse. A monster lurking beneath the earth. I would jot these ideas down and file them away without any real plan for what would eventually become of them. At the time, I wasn’t trying to write novels. I simply felt compelled to preserve the ideas before they disappeared.

Years later, while running my own photographic safari business, I found myself needing another creative outlet as, anyone who owns a business will know, it can be extremely difficult to truly switch off. There is always another email to answer, another itinerary to plan, another problem to solve. Photography remained a huge creative passion, but I found myself wanting something entirely separate from work, and something that existed purely for the joy of creating.

So I started writing, and at firs, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing. I had always enjoyed writing, but my experience had largely been rooted in educational articles, travel content and retrospective pieces related to my wildlife photography. Fiction was an entirely different beast, and fantasy fiction felt even further removed. Yet I kept returning to those old notes and story ideas, and I started connecting pieces together and asking questions. Could this character fit into that world? What would happen if these two ideas collided? How could this history influence that conflict? Did I really want to attempt writing an entire novel? The answer, as it turned out, was yes.

Very quickly, I fell in love with the process. I loved creating characters and watching them evolve. I loved building histories, cultures and legends. I loved exploring the lore of imaginary worlds and uncovering secrets that even I didn’t know existed when I began. I enjoyed shifting plot points, playing with reader expectations and experimenting with familiar fantasy tropes to see how they could be twisted, subverted or reimagined. It felt like being handed the keys to the world’s largest sandbox and being told to build whatever I wanted.

Hours disappeared without me noticing. Ideas multiplied faster than I could write them down and stories that had existed only as vague fragments slowly transformed into characters, locations, conflicts and eventually entire novels.

I never started with the dream of publishing books or building a writing career, and I certainly never started because I thought it would make money. I wrote because I enjoyed creating, I wrote because the stories wouldn’t leave me alone, and I wrote because I found immense satisfaction in penning (or typing) something into existence.

For a long time, those stories were simply for me, then friends and family started reading them and the response was always the same.

“You can’t just leave these sitting on your computer.”

And perhaps they were right, stories are meant to be shared. They’re meant to be experienced, discussed, enjoyed and passed on. They aren’t supposed to remain hidden away in folders where nobody will ever discover them. So eventually I decided to take the leap and share mine. Whether readers enjoy the worlds I’ve created, the characters I’ve written or simply find a few hours of escape within the pages, that’s ultimately all I could hope for. After all, it was escapism that first drew me into fantasy and now, in some small way, I hope I can offer that same experience to someone else.