Counting Down to the 2028 50th Anniversary of my first published book (September 23, 1978)
 Transman Quaraun (The Pink Necromancer) and his husband King Gwallmaic (aka BoomFuzzy the Unicorn) King of The UnSeelie Court. Main characters of The Adventures of The Pink Necromancer series.
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Happy 2026!
It is our 30th anniversary here at Space Dock 13!
On the web since 1996!
You have encountered an extremely old website that continues to exist in old web ways, the same way it has done for now three decades.
In spite of being now 30 years old this year, started in 1996, it is still heavily active and old pages updated daily, new pages added daily, still now in 2026. All hand written, all hand coded (no AI), all by me, same as it ever was.
We Still Exist: The Old Web Did Not Go Away, You Just Forgot How To Find Us
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This site was NOT designed for mobile devices (as they had not been invented yet when I created it) thus this site looks best on a computer, at 1280x768 or above. |
This is a very old website created in 1996, so, yes, javascript is needed for the site to work as it should. If things don't function, you may need to update javascript drivers on your device |
This site tries to be mobile friendly but it's been online since 1996, so old pages may not load right on mobile devices, and as this site has had pages added near daily for 30 years there are now over 20k pages here. |
Having started out in life as a GeoCities site, this site contains glitter, bright colours, blinkies, moving gifs, and other things the old web was known for. |
Dark Fantasy vs Grimdark
- EelKat Wendy C Allen: Old Orchard Beach's Autistic Author & Art Car Designer
- Romance Novels
- Dark Fantasy vs Grimdark
Dark Fantasy vs Grimdark
6 min read
Dark Fantasy vs Grimdark
Quaraun and Lich King Gwallmaiic aka BoomFuzzy the Unicorn (humanoid form)I am an author of Dark Fantasy novels, novellas, and short stories, and as such, there are common Dark Fantasy related questions that get sent my way, either from readers looking to know lore or from writers looking for writing advice.
A common one is:
Dark Fantasy vs Grimdark. How are they different? What do you consider the main differences between the two, if any?
I find that, while this is a very easy question answer, most new, young writers really hate the answer.
Read.
Yep.
That’s it.
This is one of those places where you really can tell writers who never read a book in their life, from the rabid readers who read a lot.
It doesn’t matter what two genres we are comparing, either.
The simple answer is always going to be: read.
Why?
Well, because if you read this genre vs that genre, regardless of what either genre is, you’ll quickly figure out what beats and tropes and themes cause book A to be genre A, and which beats and tropes and themes cause book B to be genre B.
Let’s consider the question I used in my example above:
Dark Fantasy vs Grimdark. How are they different? What do you consider the main differences between the two, if any?
They are not even remotely close to being the same, not similar at all. Miles apart in types of things they feature. Once you read both you will see how silly it is to think you could ever confuse one for the other.
Dark Fantasy
Dark Fantasy is actually NOT Fantasy, but rather is a subgenre of Gothic Horror that happens to feature Fantasy elements. It features things like Vampires, Necromancers, and Zombies very heavily. Magic is in heavy use. Mages and Wizards and do battle against vampires and lich kings. Terror, ghosts, and things ripped from Edgar Allan Poe or HP Lovecraft lurk in every shadow. It is the Horror genre with magic and wizards. It leans heavily into Cosmic Horror but with things like Vampire Elves and Lich Unicorns. The Curse of Strahd, Fall of the House of Usher, and the entire RavenLoft franchise are good examples of Dark Fantasy.
In Dark Fantasy you would expect to see a Victorian haunted mansion with a dragon sitting on the roof.
If you write Dark Fantasy you are a Horror author.
GrimDark
GrimDark is a subgenre of Low Fantasy and features Fantasy societies that are set in depressing dystopian worlds, where the government is heavily suppressing the freedom of the citizens. Magic is rarely seen. The focus is heavy on attempts to take on a corrupt government. It is very political, very preachy, and heavily focused on realism. The Hunger Games, Game of Thrones, and The Witcher are good examples of GrimDark.
In GrimDark you expect big epic battles fought by knights in shining armor.
If you write GrimDark you are a Fantasy author.
But this did not answer the question, because as it turns out, the question was asked by a scammer trying to con me into writing a book outline for him...
But this is common knowledge to any reader of either genre. So why then do questions like this get asked so often? For the same reason the internet is being flooded with AI crap that was shit out by ChatGPT. Because there are two types of writers:
Writers who actual enjoy writing.
Scam artists looking to make a quick buck and think writing is their easy meal ticket.
Writers who actual enjoy writing, also enjoy reading the genre they write. They love researching historical details and science facts, or whatever they need to study to bring their stories to life. They will spend weeks, months, even years doing the long hard, grueling work it takes to read, research, write, edit, read some more, research some more. They love the work, so it’s neither hard nor grueling for them.
Scam artists looking to make a quick buck and think writing is their easy meal ticket, seek to avoid work. They think reading is dull and boring, so they would rather ask what makes this genre vs that genre instead of reading both genres and finding out for themselves. They think writing and editing is too much like school homework (which it is) so they take the lazy road with AI. And they can not be bothered with research at all, so they do not bother to fact check what AI spit out either.
Yes, I know the title of this page was Dark Fantasy vs Grimdark and I went off on a tangent. But, I was asked this question earlier today, and I answered with the two definitions I just gave you here and the person who asked the question responded to have a total meltdown. They said they could not be bothered to read the books I recommended and said if I had actually wanted to help them, I would have given them a detailed list of things to include and things not to include.
I gave them THIS:
- Dark Fantasy is actually NOT Fantasy, but rather is a subgenre of Gothic Horror that happens to feature Fantasy elements. It features things like Vampires, Necromancers, and Zombies very heavily. Magic is in heavy use. Mages and Wizards and do battle against vampires and lich kings. Terror, ghosts, and things ripped from Edgar Allan Poe or HP Lovecraft lurk in every shadow. It is the Horror genre with magic and wizards. It leans heavily into Cosmic Horror but with things like Vampire Elves and Lich Unicorns. The Curse of Strahd, Fall of the House of Usher, and the entire RavenLoft franchise are good examples of Dark Fantasy.
- GrimDark is a subgenre of Low Fantasy and features Fantasy societies that are set in depressing dystopian worlds, where the government is heavily suppressing the freedom of the citizens. Magic is rarely seen. The focus is heavy on attempts to take on a corrupt government. It is very political, very preachy, and heavily focused on realism. The Hunger Games, Game of Thrones, and The Witcher are good examples of GrimDark.
- If you write Dark Fantasy you are a Horror author.
- If you write GrimDark you are a Fantasy author.
And it made them very upset, that I did not spend hours of my time to do the research for them, to outline a sample of plots they should use, and lists of things to include in their story.
But… the question they asked was THIS:
Dark Fantasy vs Grimdark. How are they different? What do you consider the main differences between the two, if any?
And I did in fact answer the question. Did I not?
I thought I had answered the question as they wanted, and I was quite surprised, and frankly unsettled and saddened, by their raging inferno, demanding, accusatory reaction.
I had thought they were a reader who truly wanted to learn how to write these two genres, and I thought my answer was helpful. But my answer mad them very angry, and incited them to have a full meltdown over all the hows and whys of why they shouldn’t, couldn’t, and wouldn’t ever read a book.
I’m sorry, but, I truly believe the best way to learn about the genre you seek to write, is to read the bestselling in that genre.
But also, we authors are not slaves. I’m sorry, but, writing, editing, and researching take 40+ hours a week, for weeks on end, for EACH book I write, and I’m not going to write YOUR book for you. That’s not my job. Please, please. please: do NOT contact an author asking them to do the work for you.
Dark Fantasy vs Grimdark
Quaraun and Gingerbread Cake Chef King Gwallmaiic aka BoomFuzzy the Unicorn (humanoid form)... scene from the novel BoomFuzzy, from when BoomFuzzy was still alive and not yet a Lich and Quaraun was not yet a Necromancer, not yet wearing pink, not yet a serial killer, and had not yet gone insane, at Santa Claus's Gingerbread Cake Bakery in Ivujivik, Quebec, where BoomFuzzy was the master pastry chef.
The Pink Necromancer, Quaraun and GhoulSpawn the Sheep (humanoid form)
This page was written by Wendy Christine Allen of 146 Portland Ave, Old Orchard Beach, Maine. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright © [oldest articles written 1978],[website founded - 1996] –
More Website You Might Enjoy:
- What's the difference between Dark Fantasy and Grimdark? https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/af5nks/whats_the_difference_between_dark_fantasy_and/
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- What’s the Difference Between Grimdark and Dark Fantasy? https://joncronshaw.com/2023/10/30/whats-the-difference-between-grimdark-and-dark-fantasy/
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- What’s the Difference Between Grimdark and Dark Fantasy? https://joncronshawauthor.substack.com/p/whats-the-difference-between-grimdark-and-dark-fantasy
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- Dark Fantasy and Grimdark Recommendations - The Best of the ... - Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/yo5z3x/dark_fantasy_and_grimdark_recommendations_the/
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- Grimdark Fantasy: What Is It & How to Write It - Campfire https://www.campfirewriting.com/learn/grimdark-fantasy
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- random notes: the differences between horror, dark fantasy, and the ... https://www.tfrohock.com/blog/2018/8/2/random-notes-grimdark-darkfantasy-horror
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- The Edge of Darkness: 9 Grimdark Fantasy Books for Fans of Gritty ... https://www.cabbagetreebooks.com/blog/grimdark-fantasy-books
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- What Is Dark Fantasy? A Comprehensive Guide to the Mysterious Genre https://darkfantasyfans.com/what-is-dark-fantasy-a-comprehensive-guide-to-the-mysterious-genre/
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- The Difference Between Dark Fantasy And Horror (And Why It ... - UPROXX https://uproxx.com/hitfix/dark-fantasy-vs-horror/
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- What we mean when we talk about "Dark Fantasy" - Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/tmtk5d/what_we_mean_when_we_talk_about_dark_fantasy/
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- What Is Dark Fantasy? The Shadowed Intersection of Horror and Wonder https://filmlifestyle.com/what-is-dark-fantasy/
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- Dark Fantasy: Book Genre Explained - Ultimate Guide https://rtbookreviews.com/dark-fantasy-book-genre-explained/
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- Horror vs. Dark Fantasy--What's the Difference? | Brilliant Books https://www.brilliant-books.net/horror-vs-dark-fantasy
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- A Crash Course On Writing In The Dark Fantasy Genre https://www.campfirewriting.com/learn/dark-fantasy
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- What is Dark Fantasy? A Brief Explanation (with Pictures!) https://darkfantasyfans.com/what-is-dark-fantasy-a-brief-explanation-with-pictures/
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- Elements of a Dark Fantasy Story (Infographic) - Auden Johnson https://audenjohnson.com/2020/12/elements-of-a-dark-fantasy-story-infographic.html
- A Brief Guide to Grimdark Fantasy and Where to Start Reading It - BOOK RIOT https://bookriot.com/guide-to-grimdark-fantasy/
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- Beware of Heroes: A Guide To Grimdark | by Basil Price - Medium https://medium.com/dice-addicts-weekly/beware-of-heroes-a-guide-to-grimdark-f9cea0a1df46
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- What is Grimdark? Miniature Painting Dark Fantasy and Reality https://tangibleday.com/what-is-grimdark-the-art-of-dark-fantasy-in-miniature-painting/
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- What is grimdark and examples thereof? : r/GrimDark - Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/GrimDark/comments/wcq36j/what_is_grimdark_and_examples_thereof/
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- Grimdark Magazine - The home of grimdark fantasy, sci-fi, and horror ... https://www.grimdarkmagazine.com/
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Dark Fantasy vs Grimdark
This page was written by Wendy Christine Allen of 146 Portland Ave, Old Orchard Beach, Maine.
All Rights Reserved.
- EelKat Wendy C Allen: Old Orchard Beach's Autistic Author & Art Car Designer
- Romance Novels
- Dark Fantasy vs Grimdark
While there are around 20k pages on this website, most of them are blocked from search engines, with only around 800 of them available for appearing in Google/Bing/etc search results. The remainder can only be accessed via the various links found throughout this site. This was done deliberately on my part, and I did it because the bulk of the pages on this website are chapters from 138 novels and 423 novellas, so only the first page of each novel and novella indexed by search engines, and the remainder are linked in order, one page at a time, via clicking "next page" at the end of each. So if you are looking for a specific page from a specific novel, Google can't help you.
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Get an email whenever Wendy Christine Allen 🌸💖🦄 aka EelKat 🧿💛🔮👻 publishes on Medium.
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Important:
Fraudulent sites are impersonating Wendy Christine Allen.
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Fraudulent social media accounts, particularly on Reddit and FaceBook are impersonating Wendy Christine Allen.
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Find Me on Social Media:
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Any websites and accounts you find online that are NOT on this list are NOT Wendy Christine Allen
If you encounter a page which asks for a password, no, you can not request access. There are over 2k pages of this website set to password access, due to the ongoing FBI investigation into my son's murder. If you are a police officer authorized access these pages but do not have the passwords, let me know, I will deliver the passwords to the specific pages you are allowed to access, to you via the Portland FBI office and you can pick them up from the FBI agent in charge of the murder investigation.
Pages where you can find out more information on that:
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What's New (Newly Published or Recently Updated or Edited)
If you are one of (as of December 2025, the now more than ten thousand) daily visitors, who arrive here daily in search of SEO advice, I made this page for you:
The Park Bench Method of Writing
Crazy Woman Just Attacked - No Clue Why or Who She Is
Articles For Writers on How To Write & Publish A Rapid Release Series
For Anyone Looking for:My response to MUFON's Amphibious Aliens? My response to Coast to Coast AMs Arrival in my yard?
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Looking for my annual NaNoWriMo Prompts and Dares? I've been publishing these every year since 2004!
 The Park Bench Method of Writing The Adventures of Quaraun The Insane: Paperpacks & Hardcover Editions on Amazon:
Not sure what the series is about? Check out and Faeries vs Elves (In The Quaraun Series) A Pink Necromancer World Lore Post and Worldbuilding MoonQuakes and Disabled Characters for Fantasy Writers and How well do I know Quaraun? - Let's find out! to find out more about the plot and lore of the series. Not sure which story to start with? These here are good places to start, to get a good introduction to the three main characters:
Or if after reading those, you still are looking for more free to read stories, there are over three thousand of them on this site, too many to list here, but here a few dozen to get you started... ...you can just jump in and try reading some of the free to read online stories first before committing to buying the books:
Hmmm... soooo... I was making the above list to ALL the links to EVERY Quaraun story published on my website here, and adding it into the footer of my site, here as you can see, which loads on every page, and then I realized... wait... there are over two thousand Pink Necromancer stories up free to read on my website, I can't put two thousand links on every single page! Whoops! LOL! So, now I'm putting list to ALL the links to EVERY Quaraun story published on my website here on this page instead and just link that page to the footer instead. But also I'll just leave some of the links in the footer, as you can see above.
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This page was written by Wendy Christine Allen of 146 Portland Ave, Old Orchard Beach, Maine.
All Rights Reserved.
- EelKat Wendy C Allen: Old Orchard Beach's Autistic Author & Art Car Designer
- Romance Novels
- Dark Fantasy vs Grimdark
The Space Dock 13 WebRing
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Yes, this website (founded in 1996) is old enough to have WebRings on it, and they are still in use.
Don't know what a WebRing is?
They were how we webmasters used to get traffic to our websites before the invention of search engines (aka before Jeeves, DogPile, Yahoo. Google, Bing, or the rest existed). In their simplest form a WebRing is an html code that rotates link displays. In their more advanced form they are java scripts that give random results. Each ring had three active links titled "Previous", "Random", and "Next", clicking any of the 3 links would take you to the next website in the ring.
Web Rings are the REASON the internet was called "the world wide web". To use them, each webmaster submitted their site to the ring, a single code held 100 websites, and codes could be stacked to hold 100 code sets (or 10,000 links to 10,000 websites), each web master in the list, would then place the code in the footer of their website.
This created the SPIDER WEB that was the literal WEB OF LINKS that gave the internet it's name "World Wide Web" and is WHY websites are CALLED "web sites". And technically, your site is not a WEB site unless it is connected to a WEBRing, likewise you technically are not a WEBMaster if you do not build WEBrings links for you WEBsite to connect to the WEB.
Unfortunately, most knowledge of WebRings, and whi sites were called WEBsites and sites on the WEB were called the World Wide Web, vanished from the internet in 2014 when the official WebRing.org company who managed 90%+ of the internet's WebRings went out of business after the infamous Google Panda 2013 bot attack that delisted ALL websites from the Google Index if they contained a WebRing of links to other websites in it's footer.
And while most sites abandoned the use of WebRing Codes on their sites, Space Dock 13 did not. The Space Dock 13 WebRing remains active, now 28 years after it's creation. Over the decades however, one by one all the other websites in the ring have gone off line, and as they did, I replaced the url with a link to a page of my own website (as this is a java code - it updated on every website without the others needing to change anything). Today in 2026, eelkat.com is the last remaining website in the ring, and now all 10k links go only to pages on eelkat.com, no longer sending you to other websites.
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- EelKat Wendy C Allen: Old Orchard Beach's Autistic Author & Art Car Designer
- Romance Novels
- Dark Fantasy vs Grimdark
The Park Bench Method of Writing
If you are one of (as of December 2025, the now more than ten thousand) daily visitors, who arrive here daily in search of SEO advice, I made this page for you:
If you have any information about my son’s murderer, please call FBI Agent Andy Drewer at 207–774–9322
- Everything we are allowed to publicly release about The FBI Investigation Can Be Found Here
If you encounter a page which asks for a password, no, you can not request access. There are over 2k pages of this website set to password access, due to the ongoing FBI investigation into my son's murder. If you are a police officer authorized access these pages but do not have the passwords, let me know, I will deliver the passwords to the specific pages you are allowed to access, to you via the Portland FBI office and you can pick them up from the FBI agent in charge of the murder investigation.
Pages where you can find out more information on that:
Copyright © – oldest articles written 1978, website founded - 1996
This website is a safe zone for LGBTQAI+, pagans, and BIOPIC communities.