Chick Lit With A Dark Side

With the imminent release of Caffeine Nights Publishing’s first novel ‘Tripping’ by Darren E Laws, the author has spoken of the motivation behind writing novels that have acquired a large female readership. “I had to ask the question whether women actually like reading visceral, edge of the seat thrillers, and the answer is yes.”

Darren E Laws explained what inspired him to write ‘Tripping’. “I wanted to move chick lit to a darker place. From the feedback I received with Turtle Island when it was originally published back in 2003, I realised that women enjoy dark and thrilling fiction and that there is a large female audience out there who are growing tired of lightweight books on ‘shopping and babies’. If you read a saga novel you understand the female appetite for things a little darker.”

Whether this fascination with darker edgier fiction is a result of modern society or something that has always been simmering in the female psyche is only answerable by women themselves, but the desire to read biographical heartbreak such as the David Peltzer books or gangland fiction by Martina Cole shows a definite appetite exists.

Darren concluded. “It’s strange, I wrote Turtle Island believing it would be read mostly by men. Maybe it’s just that women are more open minded and read a good cross section of books. But, I honestly think they love going to a dark place for a while; they love being scared or challenged with their fiction. So I wrote ‘Tripping’ which is essentially a chick lit book but with a dark side, to broaden the genre and feed the hunger.”

Caffeine Nights Publishing publishes ‘Tripping’ on April 10