Behind the Book Trend: Dark Romance
All about the very NSFW genre blowing up on TikTok
Trigger warning: The following discusses books with plot lines portraying sexual acts with dubious or no consent.
A couple of months ago I was trading books recs with a friend over text (one of my love languages) and she mentioned that her library hold just came in for a book she’d been hearing about called Lights Out by Navessa Allen. This friend and I tend to share similar reading tastes, so I downloaded a sample to my Kindle, no questions asked.
Cut to a few weeks later—the night of the inauguration, in fact—and I was at dinner with another group of friends, talking about what we were reading. “It’s about a trauma nurse who’s obsessed with a thirst trap Instagram account run by a masked man,” I explained. “And she leaves a comment saying she wants him to break into her house and what she wants him to do to her… and he does.”
“Like, a rape fantasy?” one friend asked, as non-judgmentally as one can ask such a thing.
My mouth popped open like one of those wall-mounted singing fish.
The book is hot—5 chili peppers on the spice scale—and the author is savvy in her portrayal of the female main character’s desire for and enjoyment of said act(s), which makes it more digestible, but when you boil it down… yeah, it’s a book centered on a rape fantasy.
Mind you, the people around the table were close friends and one is in a smutty book club herself, but suddenly I felt mighty uncomfortable about the book I’d been enthusiastically recommending seconds earlier. I felt even skeevier because of the timing—remember it was mere hours after the inauguration. Here we are in an era when women’s reproductive rights are regressing, and even more at risk under the new administration—what does it mean on a more macro level that I enjoyed this book?
And lest you think it’s a niche book, it’s not.
At present, Lights Out, which came out in August 2024, has spent 14 weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Publisher’s Weekly estimates it’s sold 65,758 copies year-to-date (and it’s only February). And it’s one of 2 dark romances currently on the NYT Best Sellers list that involve sexual acts with dubious—or, in the case of the other title, flat out zero—consent. (The other is 2021’s Haunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton, which I have not read, but has done an awe-inducing 21 weeks on the list.)
Keen to understand the popularity of this genre and how others feel about these books, I put out a call on Instagram stories for dark romance readers to help me dive deeper.
