This is about the "true crime" genre, not about "dystopian romance" in the romance novel sense. However, it does include an extended comparison between romance and true crime, so I thought it was worth including.
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Romantic dreams are often at the heart of the true crime narrative. At first glance, true crime would appear to be the obverse of the romance novel, the bloody photos and lurid descriptions of true crime standing in stark contrast to the gauzy cover illustrations of popular romances. Yet while the formula for the romance novel entails the pursuit of a woman by a domineering, masculine lover, and ends in marriage, the true crime book typically picks up where the romance novel leaves off, and exposes the controlling, sexually dominant male as a dangerous killer—one who preys on the very woman who believed his promises of romantic fulfillment, and who married him. In the romance novel, that is, the heroine marries the rapist; in the true crime book, good policemen sacrifice their lives in order to put him behind bars for the rest of his life. (937-938)
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True crime books and romance novels share a drive toward satisfying a presumed desire. But while in the romance novel, this consummation takes the form of marriage, in the true crime book the drive is toward punishment. For in true crime books, the killer is always caught and punished, after committing heinous crimes. (938)
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Many true crime books concern what happens to women who take romance novels too seriously: the genres talk to each other. A subgenre of true crime is the narrative of gullible women who are lulled by the romantic promises offered to them by psychopaths. Even the titles of these books often function as ironic commentaries on heterosexual romantic fulfillment: Dying to Get Married, Till Death Do Us Part. While Jan Radway’s readers reinterpreted their husbands’ distant or churlish behavior in the positive light of the romance novels, the true crime readers I spoke with tended toward a less rosy view. (938)
This is about the "true crime" genre, not about "dystopian romance" in the romance novel sense. However, it does include an extended comparison between romance and true crime, so I thought it was worth including.
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