A woman is kidnapped at her best friend's party. During her captivity he learns that her father is one of the most powerful gangsters in Italy and that the reason for her kidnapping is none other than training to become the next leader. She accepts her fate and ends up becoming one of the most powerful criminals in the country. This story, one of many categorized as dark romance on the literary platform Wattpad, is not free of violence or explicit sex. And more and more readers – the majority are women – are asking for this type of content.
“Until a few years ago, there were hardly any sex scenes in romantic comedies. They were an addition, but if they didn't appear, nothing happened. Now, however, they are a claim. This is often reported in the editorial pages. Female readers like there to be spice, that is, spicy sequences, and if the environment in which the plot takes place is dark and low-life, the better. Christian Grey, from Fifty Shades of Grey, next to him is very decaffeinated,” acknowledges Paloma Fernández-Pacheco, editor of Plaza
Mafias, sadomasochism, incest, very marked power dynamics or even physical mutilations presented as something erotic are some of the ingredients that appear in its pages and that cause controversy, in part because many of the readers are minors. “It is difficult to control what is consumed. Something similar happens with video games. What is in the hands of the publishers is to put this content with the greatest possible care, warning the reader of what they will find inside. Many could ask that these books not be translated, but censorship would not be a solution, since they could also be accessed in the original language, which is usually English. In fact, it is common when a novel is very popular that users do not wait for the translation of the second part,” reflects Fernández-Pacheco.
The United States is the birthplace of dark romance. Most of the stories come from there, which are gaining more and more strength in Europe, especially in France, Germany, and increasingly in Spanish-speaking countries, such as Spain and Latin America, where their own authors in Spanish are beginning to emerge. The Colombian Eva Muñoz is one of the names that resonates the most after publishing her saga Pecados pleanteros, made up of the volumes Lascivia and Lujuria, both bestsellers. “One of the mottos of my writing is to show that love does not always come in good ways. We have many vanilla romance novels that always show how the hero falls in love and everything ends well and it seems that love heals everything. But what happens when this is not the case and when a gangster or a villain falls in love? “I like to explore the other side of the coin,” she notes.
The author accepts the criticism that the genre receives, although she does not share them. “I see it as when we read a fantasy book and we close it and we know that everything remains on those pages. The same should be with dark romance. You go out into the street and you don't want to run into a gangster who kidnaps you. Just because I have chosen these protagonists does not mean that I want that for my life. The same with the readers. I think it tends to be exaggerated and demonized a lot. Just as we know how to distinguish between reality and fiction with fantasy, we can also do it with dark romance.”
On the other hand, he assures that there are several positive contributions of the genre. The main one, that “opens the reader's mind a lot and helps to understand many aspects that we do not necessarily have to be used to. With Fifty Shades of Grey, for example, a new world opened up, that of BDSM erotic practices and fantasies, until then quite unknown. Furthermore, the people who did practice it naturalized it and finally felt that there was nothing wrong with doing it,” says Muñoz.
Although novels of this type have always existed, several booksellers whom this newspaper has consulted have noticed a significant increase in shelves since the pandemic. In part, this is due to the splendor of networks like TikTok, which grew rapidly in users during the months of confinement and are increasingly gaining ground when it comes to recommending readings among the youngest thanks to the help of booktokers. Raquel Brune, alias @raquelbookish, is one of them, and explains that “these were niche stories that were intended for a very specific audience but with the arrival of TikTok they have expanded their audience. This has allowed them to go viral and capture the attention of publishers, since, until now, many were self-publications.”
Montena and Crossbooks are two of the youth literature labels that have invested the most in dark romance in Spain. Of the latter, editor Cristian Escudero insists that “these works were already there, mostly from 2015 or 2016, but they have now become popular thanks to new ways of communicating readings online. And it is precisely thanks to the networks that we publishers have realized that there is a much larger audience than previously thought that wants to enjoy dark romance and, although it is intended for an adult audience, there are many young readers. Where is the editorial limit? In our case, we publish stories in which there is consent and we discard many others in which there is not.” Penelope Douglas is one of the most popular names in her catalog, although other names such as H. D. Carlton and the phenomenon Hunting Adeline also stand out in the genre, or Emily Mcintire and her Hooked, a proposal that invites you to travel to the Neverland of the hand of the darkest Peter Pan.
The fact that these stories make the leap from virtual platforms to paper has fueled debate about their content. However, “it is a conversation that has been going on for some time in the sector and that became popular with editorial phenomena like After, which exposes a toxic relationship between the protagonists. Most readers are adults and know that what is happening is wrong and that these are issues that should not be romanticized. But it is true that if younger and more impressionable people read it, it can cause harm,” admits fellow booktoker and writer Andrea Izquierdo, known on social networks as @andreorowling.
One of the paradoxes that emerge is how in the era
