: Re: What are most common tropes of a paranormal book and dark fantasy book? I'm trying to decide what genre my novel should be. I wanna be more generic so the answers can help other people, so

@Phylliss352

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What your novel should be? What do you want it to be?

Paranormal story would would be about the paranormal. (duh!) It is the genre for stories where you want to tell about the things hiding beside or beneath the normal and their discovery. Is your story about discovering hidden things? Things that go bump in the night?

Typical trait of paranormal stories is that even though you discover something hidden it will be hidden again and remain paranormal. How they get hidden varies. Somebody might hide them to protect something. The paranormal might be elusive and vanish without a trace. The evidence, including witnesses, might be destroyed by the events. Insanity, the destruction of minds exposed to paranormal, is traditional, if horror is involved.

Another trait is heroes that find those paranormal things in the first place. They might be in a special place that is haunted or otherwise special. They might be actively looking for the paranormal. They might themselves be special somehow. Or a combination of the above.

Dark fantasy story is about the world being darker and scarier than we think. Also supernatural. There be monsters. Monster here simply means evil and powerful. Are characters or entities central to your story evil or even EVIL? Are they powerful enough that their actions determine the fate of your characters? Is the fact that they are evil central to your story?

As an example a story about the invasion of an horde of orcs is IMHO dark fantasy, if a) they are a real threat and likely to win b) they are actively evil in their actions c) the story shows their evil actions and it is relevant to the story.

Note that if it is the protagonists that are actively evil, they automatically are powerful and relevant relative to the story.

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These are just my personal thoughts. Very much IMHO. But writing this did not cost me anything and it might be useful, so why not?

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