This is the working vocabulary Portal Avalon uses when we talk about the kind of fiction we publish — the terms editors and writers reach for, the labels Google uses, and the older Gothic words that still describe what is actually happening on the page. Some entries are clinical (gaslighting, narcissistic supply); some are critical (the uncanny, dramatic irony); some are simply the trade names of moods (gothic, noir, slow burn). Use the alphabetical jumps below or read straight through. Each term ends with an example from our library.
Jump to: A · B · C · D · E · F · G · I · L · M · N · O · P · S · T · U
A
Addiction (in fiction)
The compulsive repetition of behaviour despite negative consequence, used in dark fiction to map relationships rather than substances. Portal Avalon stories explore addiction to attention, to intermittent reward, and to the person who provides both harm and relief.
Anti-hero
A protagonist who lacks conventional heroic qualities — moral authority, clear virtue, reliable judgment — but whose journey the reader follows regardless. The anti-hero is complicit in their own damage and often in others’.
Atmosphere
The ambient pressure of a story — the weather, the silences, the recurring images. In dark fiction, atmosphere is load-bearing: it does the work that plot does in other genres. See Mystical Horror.
B
Betrayal narrative
A story whose central event is the breach of an explicit or implicit trust — marital, professional, fraternal. The interest is in the architecture before the breach and the wreckage after. See Betrayal & Secrets.
C
Catharsis
Aristotle’s term for the emotional purging that good tragedy produces in the audience. Dark fiction generates catharsis by taking reader emotion to extremes: readers process fear, desire, and anger through the safe container of narrative.
Coercive control
A pattern of behaviour that limits another person’s autonomy through isolation, monitoring, financial constraint, and the systematic erosion of self-trust. Coercive control is broader than physical abuse and is the structural subject of much of our dark-psychology tag.
Codependency
A relationship dynamic where one person’s sense of self becomes so entangled with another’s that they can no longer distinguish their own needs. In dark fiction, codependency is often portrayed as indistinguishable from love, until it isn’t.
Cognitive bias
A systematic pattern of deviation from rational judgement. Dark fiction exploits cognitive biases — confirmation, sunk-cost, optimism — as plot mechanics: the protagonist sees what she expects to see until the story refuses to let her keep seeing it.
D
Dark romance
Romance with the lights turned down. The genre that refuses to lie about what longing actually feels like — the dependence, the asymmetry, the moment when wanting someone becomes indistinguishable from being remade by them. See Dark Romance.
Dark Triad
A psychological concept grouping narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Characters with dark triad traits appear frequently in psychological fiction as antagonists who are charming, strategic, and indifferent to the damage they cause.
Dramatic irony
When the reader knows something the protagonist does not. In dark fiction this is rarely a comic device; it is the engine of dread. The reader watches the character walk into the room and has to keep reading because they already know what is in it.
E
Eros and Thanatos
Freud’s pair of drives: Eros (life, connection, desire) and Thanatos (death, destruction, undoing). Dark fiction often places characters at the intersection of both drives, where desire and self-destruction become difficult to separate.
F
Folk horror
A subgenre of horror rooted in rural landscape, ancient practice, and the horror embedded in community and tradition. British folk horror (from The Wicker Man through to contemporary weird fiction) is one of Portal Avalon’s key aesthetic inheritances.
Forbidden desire
Attraction that collides with a rule the character would otherwise keep — a marriage, a profession, an oath, a friendship. See the forbidden-desire tag.
G
Gaslighting
A sustained pattern in which one person makes another doubt their own perception, memory, or sanity. Not a single lie but a long-term campaign that replaces the target’s reality with the perpetrator’s preferred version. Example: The Perfect Victim.
Gothic
The oldest mode in dark fiction. Inherited houses, secret passages, ancestral guilt, weather that knows things. The Gothic register does not require ghosts; it requires the sense that the architecture is keeping a record.
I
Intermittent reinforcement
A psychological mechanism in which reward is delivered unpredictably, creating a stronger and more persistent drive than consistent reward would. In relationship contexts, intermittent reinforcement is a hallmark of psychologically abusive dynamics — and of addictive attraction in dark fiction.
L
Liminal space
A threshold — literal or psychological — where ordinary rules do not apply: a hotel corridor at three in the morning, a salt marsh at twilight, a portal between worlds. Dark fiction is structurally interested in liminality because that is where transformation is permitted.
Love bombing
The opening move of a particular kind of coercive relationship: a flood of attention, generosity, and intimacy designed to short-circuit the target’s ordinary caution. Followed, characteristically, by withdrawal. Example: Love Bombing.
M
Manipulation
The broad family of techniques by which one person obtains compliance from another without using either honest persuasion or open force. Includes gaslighting, love-bombing, triangulation, and intermittent reinforcement. See the manipulation tag.
Modern Gothic
Contemporary fiction that imports Gothic structures into present-day settings — corporate offices, suburban houses, hotel chains, university faculties. The portal is still there; it just has a key-card reader.
N
Narcissistic injury
The disproportionate rage or withdrawal a narcissistic person experiences when their sense of superiority is challenged or ignored. In fiction, narcissistic injury drives some of the genre’s most dangerous antagonist behaviour.
Narcissistic supply
In clinical literature, the attention, admiration, or emotional reaction that a narcissistic personality requires from others in order to maintain self-cohesion. Dark fiction treats supply as the hidden currency in coercive relationships: the protagonist eventually realises that what she is producing for her partner is not love but fuel.
Negative capability
Keats’s concept: the capacity to remain in uncertainty and doubt without an irritable reaching after fact or reason. The best dark fiction requires negative capability from the reader — the willingness to sit with ambiguity, without resolution.
Noir
A tonal register: morally compromised protagonists, urban or interior settings, fatalism. Noir overlaps with dark fiction at the level of mood but tends to prefer first-person voices and city geographies.
O
Obsession
Desire that has refused to negotiate with reality. In dark fiction, obsession is rarely glamorous; it is the slow narrowing of a life around an impossible object. See Obsession & Control.
P
Psychological thriller
A thriller whose stakes are interior — sanity, memory, identity — rather than physical. Most of Portal Avalon’s Dark Psychology collection sits in this register.
S
Slow burn
A pacing strategy that delays gratification — sexual, violent, or revelatory — in favour of accumulated pressure. Dark fiction is structurally inclined to slow burn because dread is a sustained register; jump-scares interrupt it.
Shadow self
Jung’s term for the unconscious repository of traits, desires, and impulses that the conscious self refuses to acknowledge. Dark fiction often works by bringing the shadow self to the surface, making the character confront what they have suppressed.
Supernatural
Forces, beings, or events that operate outside the laws of the natural world. Distinguished from horror by emphasis: the supernatural mode includes folklore, omens, and ritual without necessarily aiming at terror. See supernatural tag.
T
Triangulation
A manipulation technique in which a third party — real or invented — is introduced into a two-person relationship to provoke jealousy, competition, or insecurity in the target. Common in narcissistic and coercive dynamics.
Trauma bonding
The psychological attachment that forms in relationships characterised by cycles of abuse and affection. Trauma bonding is the reason victims of abuse remain attached to those who harm them; dark fiction examines this without judgment.
U
Uncanny
Freud’s term, after Schelling: the sensation produced when the familiar is rendered subtly strange. The room is yours; one chair has moved. The husband is yours; one sentence is wrong. The uncanny is dark fiction’s house frequency.
Unreliable narrator
A first-person voice whose account the reader is given reason to mistrust — through inconsistencies, gaps, or revealed motives. In dark psychology the unreliable narrator is sometimes the victim; in gothic fiction, sometimes the witness; in our blog on the technique, both at once.