Moved to SYW

Um maybe they just don't like dark?

If your book will be dark, set it out early, because if you sucker people in with fluffy bunnies and then it's all guts and gore later...they'll be pissed.

Set your story/world up from the start. People who like it will be drawn into it. People who don't (and this is the same for every book ever written) won't


TLDR -- if it's a dark story don;t be afraid to set that out.
If it's a creeper then maybe ...but you need to pull in the readers who will like his story. If that is people who like dark, then go dark.

PS I LOVE dark and twisted

Find other readers who like grimdark?

Have you asked your readers which details they disliked? I'm having a hard time thinking of general advice without knowing the exact issue.

If you have a lot of graphic or gory details, or spend a lot of time pointing out how miserable people are, it might be more effective to objectively describe what's going on and let readers react to it in their own way. Or, as Mr. Flibble said, it might just be that your readers aren't the audience you're aiming for.

This comment - "Aside from mechanics some have stated they would have set the book down." - makes me suspect you're infodumping instead of establishing a story. Do you start with a character who is doing something (even if it's not initially related to the "big" plot/arc), and show the world through them and their experiences, or do you start with a long and technical explanation of your Dark World and how Dark and Nasty and Generally Untidy everything is before getting around to the plot? People usually like having someone or something they can sympathize with to follow as they visit a new place. It gives them a point of reference, an anchor in what could be an overwhelming tide of New Ideas as you worldbuild.

Just a thought... I can't tell for sure without reading it, and even then it would be JMHO.

It's hard to tell

"aside from mechanics" makes me think the writing (mechanics) is fine, it's the content is the problem?

What is the content btw?

I can't really say anything without knowing more about your story. Write it the way it needs to be. Don't try to fool people into thinking it's going to be more upbeat than it really is.

There's a great entry I read on a writer's blog about world building in short stories. The author talked about how you create the illusion of their being a deep, vivid world by creating glimpses of the larger society. I think the metaphor she used was instead of having your point of view character walk through doors and explore the world in depth, like you might in a novel, you provide windows that give the reader intriguing glimpses.

Here it is

AndreF said:

Heaven forbid should I tell what happened. People get into a hissy fit because you told them ... then you show them and they throw a fit because they've seen just how horrible everything is.

Damned if I damned if I don't.

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Again, hard to say what's going on, since I haven't read it. A couple of possibilities:

1. Your critting buddies aren't the best readers for your story. Not the target audience.

2. If you spend a lot of time describing or showing this news story that your protagonist was just following (not in any way involved in), well, it may feel distant and irrelevant. you mentioned that there's a news story about a crime where the anchors are admiring it. Then later another anchor is taken off the air for condemning it. This is the catalyst that gets your plot moving.

So you have two events, presumably separated by some time, that galvanize your character to do something. Yet short stories usually take place over a matter of hours or days at most. It sounds like a high percentage of your "screen time" is being spent on something that your protagonist is only observing, not participating in. This could make your protagonist seem passive and boring, like they're only reacting to something that happened to someone else rather than making things happen.

As opposed to, say, your character being the news anchor who loses their job as a consequence of condemning the crime and that being the straw that broke the camel's back for him or her. Or maybe your protagonist is one of the victims of that crime.

Yes, but apparently that's standard fare on TV in this world. Why does this act as a catalyst for your MC? As written, he sounds like a ranty old guy.
Oh, and I'd start with 'Charles changed the channel. The image of a newsreader...' The first bit doesn't really tell me anything except that in the future, TV is still going to be crap.
But, again, I'm not the audience for grim/dark.

I don't have anything to contribute to this discussion, but I think this sentence is awkwardly worded:

AndreF said:

Then the image was an infomercial for items one could use to improve their sex life with the family.

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...unless incest is prominent in your world.

AndreF said:

I want people to see that morals have no place there. However a few said to find another way of doing it without being so over the top.

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I agree with them.

Especially if this is the start of the story, the whole gang rape on TV bit is firstly, very in-your-face. Secondly, the MC flipping his lid is also very in-your-face, complete with eight exclamation marks to emphasize what a horrible, horrible thing this is.

I don't mind grimdark, but I don't like poorly written grimdark, where there's no subtlety.

AndreF said:

That's what I was getting at. TV is like that today. So I took it to a whole new level. Well I also cut out the part of the anchors planning to kill someone.

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I don't think you understood the question. If these kind of tv reports are standard in your world, what about these particular ones galvanises your character into action? What's their breaking point?

indwig said:

...unless incest is prominent in your world.

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That was the assumption I made on reading that!

Queen of Swords said:

I agree with them.

Especially if this is the start of the story, the whole gang rape on TV bit is firstly, very in-your-face. Secondly, the MC flipping his lid is also very in-your-face, complete with eight exclamation marks to emphasize what a horrible, horrible thing this is.

I don't mind grimdark, but I don't like poorly written grimdark, where there's no subtlety.

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That's the part that really threw me as well. The in-your-face stuff almost read like satire to me. The tone set me up to expect something along the lines of, say, A Clockwork Orange.

But then the MC freaks out with all those exclamation points about how wrong it is. That's when the reader really gets clubbed over the head, imo.

It would be better to put it into SYW, Andre.

Buffysquirrel said:

I don't think you understood the question. If these kind of tv reports are standard in your world, what about these particular ones galvanises your character into action? What's their breaking point?



That was the assumption I made on reading that!

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And so did I!