Introduction

‘Dark tourism’, both as a category and as an analytical tool, has developed considerably in the past two decades. Lennon and Foley’s Dark Tourism (1996), Tunbridge and Ashworth’s Dissonant Heritage (1996), Ashworth and Hartmann’s Horror and Human Tragedy Revisited (2005), Sharpley and Stone’s The Dark Side of Travel (2007), as well as individual articles by Seaton and others reflected a growing interest in the field that stemmed in part from increasing access to sites in countries in eastern Europe and beyond. ¹ Many more publications, sometimes developing discipline-specific lines, have since been added to the list, including Skinner’s Writing the Dark Side of Travel (2012) and White and Frew’s Dark Tourism and Place Identity (2013). ² Not confined to dry and academic discussion only, the tourism industry, where interpretation and theory is tested and, if thought viable, absorbed and developed further, is no slouch when it comes to new ideas and opportunities. But an alliance between terms such as ‘tourism’ and ‘dark’? What sort of recalibration was required to pull those two, seemingly incongruent, terms together? What did they mean; was it realistically possible to combine leisure with commemoration; and, in any case, what sorts of dangers might arise from a union of terms that ran so dangerously close to cancelling one another out?