Gazingly (Lovingly) Into the Abyss—Introducing Horrormance, the New Genre-Blending Sensation

While stories that blend elements of romance and fantasy are not a new phenomenon, the meteoric growth of romantasy, driven largely by BookTok, has seen the genre become a true powerhouse in the book world. Walk into almost any bookstore and you are greeted with a table of BookTok sensations, many of them fantasy stories with romance at the center and plot beats familiar to the romance genre.

(What Is Romantasy, Anyway?)

As a writer who has always loved crafting stories with a heavily romantic element, I’ve watched the rise of romantasy with both excitement and artistic inspiration. It’s gratifying to see romance pulled to the forefront of the fantasy genre. But in my own writing, I found myself craving something darker, more intimate and visceral.

Enter: Horrormance.

The goth sibling to romantasy; a genre-blend of horror and romance resulting in a wonderfully spooky, swoony read. While romantasy is all about fantastical high concept stories—court intrigues, high-stakes plots, and richly detailed secondary worlds—horrormance is closer to home. It’s rawer, sharper, with speculative elements that are grounded in the real world. 

Take, for example, the destructive obsession between two boarding school students in C.G. Drews’ Don’t Let the Forest In, the cannibalistic coming of age in Camille DeAngelis’ Bones & All, the cultish forest-horror love story in Skyla Arndt’s Together We Rot and the sensuous, demonic romance of Isabel Cañas’ upcoming The Possession of Alba Díaz. 

While romantasy offers escapism into other worlds, horrormance drags the reader into a close-up experience of nightmarish reality. As Julia Kristeva writes, horror “beseeches, worries, and fascinates” particularly when grounded in the familiar. With the addition of a romantic subplot to a horror story, the characters’ emotional arcs gain an added layer of tension and depth. And while Kristeva argues the allure of horror is separate from desire, I see horrormance as the perfect way to meld these experiences together. 

The thrill of fear, the thrill of love, both elicit a strong psychological reaction. There’s a similar loss of control, a removal of comfort and safety. Both fear and love have the allure of the unknown. In horrormance, readers can experience danger, terror, and love in a contained space, within the confines of fiction. 

It's no secret that the monstrous and the horrifying has an overwhelming appeal. My social media feed right now is awash with Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu: film stills of swooning women clad in white gowns, themed candles and perfumes, sarcophagus-shaped beds… Nor is the desire for the monstrous new. Think of the Twilight craze. Even I, who first picked up the book as a cynical postgraduate student, wasn’t immune to the charms of brooding vampire boy Edward Cullen.

The draw of the monstrous has been a constant for almost my entire life. There was my childhood disappointment when the Beast turned back into a prince, my heart-fluttering obsession with Jareth, the goblin king—of course I would have stayed in his labyrinth—and the Crayola sketches I drew of Anjelica Houston as the beautiful, terrifying Grand High Witch. 

I even began an English lit PhD on the appeal of the monster, attempting to put into words just why the scene in Jonathan Demme’s 1991 Silence of the Lambs, where Hannibal Lecter seductively drags his finger over Clairice Starling’s hand, was so stirring. In the end I left behind academia, but my life is still devoted to exploring love and horror. And while I’ve experimented with various genres—my gothic romance duology Lakesedge and Forestfall, my dark fantasy Unholy Terrors—it wasn’t until my latest book, Tenderly, I am Devoured, that I realized horrormance is where I feel at home.

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After three fantasy books, I wanted to lean even more inward with my storytelling. To intensely focus on the minutiae of character experience, with the interiority of the main character taking a central role in the plot. By weaving together my favorite romance and horror elements, I crafted Tenderly, I am Devoured. 

A flower-threaded horror, set in an isolated coastal town where local gods are worshipped and appealed to for bountiful harvests, the story centers on 18-year-old Lacrimosa Arriscane. When she’s expelled from her prestigious boarding school and returns home to find her family on the point of financial ruin, she agrees to marry their god—Therion—in exchange for the prosperity of her family’s salt mine. But her betrothal goes horribly wrong, and she must seek help from Alastair Felimath, the brilliant yet arrogant boy who was her first heartbreak, and his alluring older sister Camille. 

Throughout the book, Lark is haunted by both the immortal and the real. Her academic future has been shattered by her expulsion, and her bond to Therion threatens to pull her from the mortal world. Body horror, chthonic hallucinations, and the wrath of Lark’s spurned god-husband play out alongside a delicately unfurling love story. The romantic bonds between Lark and Alastair, and Lark and Camille, provide space for her to overcome not just the supernatural horror of the chthonic realm, but also the rawer, no less devastating, human cruelties she has experienced.

Ultimately, whatever the blend of genre—romantasy, horrormance, or otherwise—I celebrate the fact that there are countless ways for readers to become immersed in new experiences and new worlds, and for romantic stories to continue to be at the front and center of the bookish world.

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