Hi all! I'm a horror/sci-fi reader, I stick to "dark" subject matter pretty strictly, or so says my Storygraph analysis! I want to expand my reading horizons and I'm curious if there's any dark romance/romantasy books that have a horror bent. Thinking like witches and romance and magic but also GORE and EVIL. I read Bunny recently for the first time and it made me interested in finding a place where fantasy romance and horror cross over. Like, sexy romantic but also horror.
But I'm not sure what would fit that bill. Any suggestions? 😍🔮🗡🩸🕯⚔️🌘💀
by Familiar_Leg5246
3 Comments
The Black Jewels series by Anne Bishop
Witches, demons, insanity, graphic torture, sexual slavery, regular slavery, dismemberment, implied cannibalism. This is not a complete list of content warnings because I didn’t finish the series. It’s too much for me and I use whips and chains recreationally in real life. Yes, this is a romance novel.
Isabel Cañas does horror romance really well.
The Hacienda- typical gothic horror, woman marries man whose first wife died under mysterious circumstances, moves into his haunted old house, the young, handsome priest is the only one able to help her.
Vampires of El Norte- childhood sweethearts separated. He thinks she’s dead, she thinks he abandoned her. War reunites them, and they must rely on each other to survive against both vampires and racism.
The Possession of Alba Diaz- Young woman gets engaged to her male friend to avoid being married off to a creepy old man. They flee to her fiancé’s house in countryside to avoid a plague. She gets possessed by a demon, and her fiancé’s hot alchemist cousin is the only person who notices.
If you don’t mind it being sapphic, A Lesson in Malice by S.T. Gibson is the best example I’ve seen of “horromance” that actually felt like both.