Dark romance is a niche genre that tends to elicit strong emotions. From the people who love it, it usually inspires giddiness. For people who are outside of it, it tends to evoke anger. So, if this is such a polarizing genre, who’s reading it?

This genre has a lot of complexity regarding how much horror vs romance is in each novel. To make it easier to understand, I want you to imagine the term ‘dark’ in dark romance as a spectrum.

Dark romance is the intersection between romance and horror. So, think horror when trying to understand what “dark themes” and “mature content” mean. How fun!

Dark romance is often mislabeled as romantic suspense, but anybody aware of it knows those two genres aren’t anything alike.