Success Quote by Laurell K. Hamilton

Hamilton’s line is a quiet rebuke to the way genre gets treated like a psychological confession. She’s talking about horror and dark fantasy, but the real target is the familiar demand that readers justify their pleasures as if taste must be defensible in court. The opening move is democratic and disarming: intensity isn’t unique to “serious” literature; it’s a feature of any form that actually hits its audience. That’s a cultural poke at the prestige economy that assumes devotion to romance, vampires, or gore is somehow lesser than devotion to realist fiction.

The rhetorical pivot is the question she refuses to answer: why do people enjoy darkness? She doesn’t offer a therapeutic alibi (“it’s catharsis,” “it’s trauma processing”), because she knows those explanations can be both true and beside the point. Instead she foregrounds opacity. Desire, fear, fascination: the engine is felt before it’s legible. In the genre world Hamilton helped popularize, readers don’t just consume; they attach, binge, debate, identify. That intensity is often pathologized, especially when it involves erotic or violent material. Her insistence on not “dreaming” of answering for others is an ethical stance as much as an artistic one: it refuses to medicalize the audience.

Context matters: Hamilton’s work sits at the crossroads of horror, paranormal romance, and explicit sexuality, arenas routinely policed for what they supposedly say about their fans. By declining to psychoanalyze, she protects the reader’s sovereignty and, by extension, the genre’s legitimacy. The subtext is permission: you don’t owe anyone a neat narrative about why the shadows feel like home.