Quotes from Roz Kaveney

What then, is dark fantasy? I would argue that it is a genre of fantasy whose protagonists inhabit the world of consensual mundane reality and learn otherwise, not by walking through a portal into some other world, or by being devoured or destroyed irrevocably, but by learning to live with new knowledge and sometimes with new flesh.

His mother was, as they say, of good family, but the father who died before he knew him was a tradesman. And his mother's Catholic family had a trade too, to which he did not feel even the slightest bit drawn, and that trade was martyrdom. Thomas More, beheaded for refusing to condone Henry VIII's schism, was his great-grand-uncle; an uncle was imprisoned and exiled for being a Jesuit; his brother died in jail of plague for harbouring a priest.

The way he examines his conscience for bad faith is very much of his time, and yet also very modern, almost postmodern.