The summer’s title word was “dark”: The Painted Darkness, A Darker Shade of Dead, Out of the Dark, etc. The fall’s appears to be “shadow”. We’ve gotten in two different books called Shadowheart (one by Tad Williams, one by James Barclay) plus In the Shadow of Swords by Van Gunn. But don’t lose hope, darkness fans! Surrender to Darkness just landed on my shelves, along with the slightly more general Midnight Riot. And in what might be a harbinger of next season’s trends, I also see Angel at Dawn and Chasing the Sun. Maybe we crave darkness in the summer and light in the winter.
After a while, I start to feel like these titles are cop-outs. “Dark” and “light” are used as stand-ins for so many different ideas that they lose their power. (Cat Valente has an unrelated-to-titles take on this here.) Particularly in paranormal romance, darkness is both evil and enticing, the source of both fear and power. Light tends to get a bad rap by comparison, of the “Evil will always triumph because good is dumb” sort. No one actually wants to be on the side of right and good. It’s boring. So dark ends up being cast as antagonist and protagonist and plot device all at once, and that gets boring too.
My challenge to fantasists is this: do more with color. Give us pink magic, puce magic, plaid and polka-dotted magic. Give light and dark a break. You might be amazed by what you can do when you have a whole spectrum to work with.
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It’s not you. See Orbit’s Chart of Fantasy titles for 2009:
http://www.orbitbooks.net/2010/08/19/the-chart-of-fantasy-art-part-4-title-trends/
The trend is clear. Although thankfully “Dragon” is still popular.
Okee-doke. Here you go:
http://pics.livejournal.com/coppervale/pic/00172qyf
;)
Puce magic? Eeeuw.
Other recent trends … maybe.
Squids.
And immortality or at least resurrection.
Thankfully, none of my titles contain the word “dark”, nor “shadow”, and most of my books are about vampires. The series is called “Children of The Dragon”, not “Children of The Shadows”; though once I was tempted to call it that. I’m glad dragons are still popular, though it would be nice to see that people read more about other kinds of fantasy beside.
Well, even though the one Shadowheart (Barclay) was ours, we did publish two “shadows” in summer: Shadow’s Son by Jon Sprunk and The Office of Shadow by Matthew Sturges. A quick catalog scan confirms we have but one bright color among our line: The Devil in Green by Mark Chadbourn. The rest of the Pyr palette is neutral: The Empire in Black and Gold (Tchaikovsky); The Silver Skull (Chadbourn); Silver Screen (Robson); Silverheart (Moorcock/Constantine); and Ivory (Resnick).
I am the world’s biggest fan of Pink Magic.
I hadn’t noticed the title thing. But the same old paranormal is getting kinda boring.
I sorted my collection of vampire novels (predating the recent trend) into three categories: books with “blood” in the title, books with “vampire” in the title, and books with neither. That last category was a very small one.