This article examines two recent works of dark romance, a subgenre of contemporary popular romance in which romantic fulfilment coexists with fear, violence, transgression, power inequalities, and the threat or reality of sexual assault, reading them as contemporary Gothic romances in which horror and romantic elements collaborate in complex ways. While Gothic romance has often been read as a mode in which romance moderates or weakens Gothic excesses, I argue that in the texts I examine here, Amelia Wilde's Beast of Bishop's Landing trilogy and Sam Mariano's Descent, the romance elements—and in particular popular romance's most central convention, the happily ever after (HEA)—can become sources of horror in themselves. Focusing on the role of intertextuality, I explore the ways in which the presence or absence of fairy-tale, Gothic, and romance intertexts are used to shape readers’ expectations of the HEA and to guide whether that ending is experienced as emotionally satisfying, disturbing, or both. Intertextuality, I argue, functions as a key device through which dark romance manages reader expectation, pleasure, fear, and consent.
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By contrasting two superficially similar recent romances with captivity plots, Wilde’s Beast trilogy and Sam Mariano’s Descent (2021), I will examine how these narratives use intertextuality—like, for instance, the inclusion of that first edition of Jane Eyre in a central sex scene—as a way to guide readers’ responses to the narratives’ happy endings.
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This article centres on close readings of two dark romance narratives: Amelia Wilde’s Beast trilogy, which I treat as a single text because it is one cohesive story with a happy ending at the conclusion of the third book, and Sam Mariano’s Descent, a standalone novel. I pair these texts because, while they share a number of key features—including contemporaneity and broadly similar plots—they negotiate the relationship between romance and horror in markedly different ways. While dark romance is a varied genre and no two individual texts can be taken as representative, these texts are also not exceptional; the tropes, plot structures, and textual strategies examined here are widely recurring within dark romance, including elsewhere in the work of both authors. My analysis is thus intended to have wider applicability beyond my chosen texts.
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the contemporary dark romance [...] tends to locate Gothic affect primarily in the central relationship rather than in the supernatural.
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As mentioned earlier, I chose to examine Descent and the Beast trilogy in this article because they have similar starting points and take them in different directions—the starting point being that these are stories in which the female main character is imprisoned and raped by the male main character. (I will go on to discuss the texts’ depiction of consent in more detail, but want to note here that while I think rape is an uncontroversial description of at least some of what happens in each text, Beast never uses the word in the context of the central relationship. Descent, very unusually for a dark romance, uses it repeatedly.)
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While “dark romance” is a fairly recent subgenre label, it has a distinct paratextual function. First, it is a general-purpose content warning, and thus also a content advertisement. [...] Second, “dark” signals that the reader should approach this text as a fantasy space rather than a normative one.
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While popular Gothic romance has often been read as a mode in which romance moderates or renders “safe” the texts’ Gothic excesses, these two texts suggest an interpretive model in which the HEA itself becomes a site of affective instability. In Beast, intertextual frameworks provide readers with interpretive tools that allow them to negotiate and potentially soften the text’s elements of sexual violence and power imbalance, even as those elements persist into the ending. Descent, by contrast, withholds such frameworks, meaning that a reader will confront a happy ending that is legible as such only through an acceptance of the MMC’s absolute control. In both cases, the experience of reading is shaped not simply by what the texts depict, but by how they guide or restrict readers’ interpretations of what is happening. Rather than asking whether dark romance is empowering or regressive, this article has argued for attending to how it might feel, and why: how Gothic horror and romantic and erotic fulfilment are made mutually constitutive, and how the HEA can activate rather than resolve the lingering unease produced by the entwining of romance and the Gothic.
Here's the abstract:
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