This article examines the rise of dark romance from the fringes of self-publishing to a bestselling genre. After surveying definitions of dark romance, the article provides a detailed chronology of the genre’s formation, situating its development as a product of both digital self-publishing’s technological affordances and the socio-political context of twenty-first-century popular feminisms. Intervening in long-standing discussions around fantasies of non-consensual sex, the article argues for dark romance’s depictions of ‘problematic’ romantic courtships as a readerly engagement with a kink imaginary, an activity which implicates both textual and metatextual levels of consent. The article provides a participant-grounded, alternative lens to sexual script theory through which to read dark romance: as a textual-narrative alternative to lived practices of BDSM more commonly addressed by scholarship.
---
Perhaps no popular genre has been placed so consistently in a defensive position as has romance fiction. Romance novels have been dismissed as poorly written escapist texts at best and anti-feminist propaganda at worst; romance readers, accordingly, must suffer from poor taste or poor morals. Under this microscope, when not ignored entirely, many in the romance fiction community have embraced the idea that the genre itself could find a happy ending – with ‘[problematic] tropes’ left to the genre’s history, rather than its present or future (Watson 2022, 69). One critical front of this modernization has been in the importance of establishing clear, affirmative sexual consent between a book’s protagonists, helping distinguish between what bloggers Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan (2009) have called the ‘Old Skool’ and the ‘New Skool’ romance novel. But if the mainstream of the genre has seen the decline of non-consensual bodice-ripping, the last decades’ renewed push to write into existence a world of healthy heterosexual courtship is complicated by the rise of dark romance. Emerging as a self-published genre in the early 2010s, dark romance novels regularly stage those forced seductions now scarce in the cartoon-cover contemporaries on romance bookstore shelves.
---
The most significant complication of analysing (or discussing, or even reading) dark romance is that there is no consensus on what it is, even amongst participants. Indeed, as this article will demonstrate, ‘dark romance’ has not always referred to a genre: first used as an analytic term, it became a genre in the 2010s and now approaches something akin to a supra-genre or mode.
---
The genre’s whiteness – of its characters, as well as its most visible authors and readers – is especially notable. As an overwhelmingly self-published genre, dark romance is particularly subject to the algorithmic bias and discriminatory exclusion that puts authors of colour at a disadvantage (Amarikwa 2023). With characters intended to be read by a broad audience, pressure for ‘good’ representation may also contribute to this lack of diversity.
---
Traumatic backstories are commonly leveraged across romance subgenres to inform the psychological obstacles separating lovers, but dark romances usually mobilize these histories as the origin point of a continued belligerent character. Aggression, extending to manipulation, terror, and physical violence, often marks protagonists’ dealings with other characters and each other. A violent dynamic between protagonists is a key component of dark romance for many participants, and absent for others – if not actively avoided.
---
Between 2010 and 2011, three self-published novels anchored a cycle that would soon become a genre category: Kitty Thomas’ Comfort Food in 2010, followed by C. J. Roberts’ (2011) Captive in the Dark and Aleatha Romig’s (2011) Consequences. Thomas (2025) describes being told by authors that her novel directly inspired many others, and these three writers would soon be joined by authors including Pam Godwin, Nina G. Jones, Skye Warren, Pepper Winters, and Anna Zaires. These early authors and texts were known not only for dubiously consensual or non-consensual sex, but also obvious brutality in the form of abduction, torture, entrapment, sex trafficking, and psychological manipulation, and, as readers came to identify these texts with one another under the identifier of dark romance, they became definitional of the genre.
---
dark romance began its contemporary life through a self-described clustering of texts that pushed perceived generic boundaries. Ultimately, dark romance did not emerge solely from a romance fiction tradition: while the texts grounding the new dark romance genre – and the discussion around them – drew significantly from popular romance fiction and its gothic intersections, it was also significantly influenced by (erotic) horror, thriller, and erotica traditions, including fan fiction.
---
Circulatory and market conditions actually encourage two conflicting developments: an increase in disturbing or absurd content likely to generate social media discussion, and the taming of the protagonists’ relationships for broad appeal.
---
This relationship between kink and trigger points to the second function of self-disclosure, which is interpretive: framed within a discourse of reader care, paratexts provide readers with advance guidance on how they should engage with a work’s material. Discussing fan fictional navigations of dubious consent and non-consent, Milena Popova emphasizes readers’ need for authors to demonstrate through tagging that problematic representations have been included ‘consciously and deliberately’ (2021, 143). Paratextual disclosure becomes the primary reference point for fan fiction readers to distinguish dubious consent as an artistic choice from those scenes left unproblematized in ‘mainstream media’ (2021, 156). While Popova uses romance novels as a foil to argue for the activist nature of fannish practices of consent, dark romance has similarly used ultravisible paratexts as a marker that the work is deliberately engaging with violence and power in its romantic narrative. Even in the absence of a content note or warning, generic affiliation with dark romance may be understood as a comparably clarifying paratextual contract for initiated readers.
---
Whether a scene depicts an undesirable assault by an assailant or a desirable fantasy with the love interest may then become a practice of reading, determined by the reader’s response to the author’s proposal; when aligned, author and reader use the text to play out a fantasy of non-consent. In practice, author–reader consent transforms the undesired trigger into a desired kink.
---
One of the many ways to understand dark romance’s work is as a semi-private and imaginative, rather than public or relational, outlet for erotic interests that may otherwise be funnelled into a more traditional BDSM practice. Such a framing not only recognizes these novels’ status as simultaneously literary and erotic objects, but expands the boundaries of kink to include literary-narrative permutations.
Here's the abstract:
---
---
---
---
---
---
---
---
---
---