Confession time. Pull up a chair.
I'm coming out as a romance author. And this is how it hit me.
Listen. I’ve fought this for years. But now I’m outing myself… I am a romance author.
Why did I fight against it?
Are you comfy? Need some snacks? Because this is a bit of a Thing. Read on…
Possibly the two most villainised genres in popular fiction in recent decades are romance and horror. The publishing landscape has blown this out of the water. These are two of the hottest genres in fiction sales right now… and a lot of this was borne from INDIE PUBLISHING (shouting for those in the back — especially those in the Ivory Tower). It took a really long time for The Ivory Tower to catch on that they weren’t listening to what readers wanted. They’ve figured it out now, but that’s a whole different story.
Dollar signs talk. But not for Indies.
We’re still out here in the trenches, waiting for someone’s golden light to shine on us. Some indie authors sit at the Cool Kids table. But most of us don’t. We’re just over here by ourselves waiting for one of the popular kids to smile at us, or maybe prevent someone else from beating us up.
When I wrote my debut, Beguiled by Night, I got rejected 75+ times from agents. I decided to self-publish under my own imprint, and finally felt confident enough to share it with early readers — several of them said it was a gothic romance. I recoiled for a number of reasons.
A) I am not a usual reader of romance. I didn’t set out to write a romance.
B) I thought I wrote a horror novel about a vampire. Who brutally kills people. With blood and violence.
I threw my hat in the horror ring.
Well… in retrospect, that might not have been the best decision.
As a cross-genre author, it is so incredibly hard to sell a book. To find an audience.
MY GOD.
It’s so hard.
Although some people (you know who you are 🫶🏻) have embraced me in the horror community, most wouldn’t touch my work. It’s slow, quiet, character-driven horror. It isn’t driven by horror tropes. It’s — (gasps) literary horror, a dirty word in any discussion of books. Slap the word literary on and everyone has a fit. Somehow, over time, literary has come to be equal to “snobby.” “You’re saying you’re better.” “You’re saying the words are fancier.” BULLSHIT. Everyone needs to learn the definition of literary fiction, just as they seem to love gatekeeping every other literary genre. Here it is, so you don’t have to look it up. I think this article from Writer’s Digest says it best:
“For a general understanding, literary fiction focuses on style, character, and theme over plot—unlike most genre and commercial fiction.” — Michael Woodson*
*Allow me to insert a giant middle finger to Wikipedia, which has the current definition of literary fiction as “having artistic merit.” Fuck right off with that, Wikipedia. It’s wrong. Literary fiction is just a distinguishing factor. Not a judgement.
But let’s get back to the romance.
Some, who took a chance on me, were pleasantly surprised about the love aspects of Vauquelin’s story. They were readers who (like me) do not normally seek out Romance, and — in fact — might take a wide berth around it.
But something occurred to me recently. People say the same things about horror.
“Oh, I don’t do horror.”
“I hate horror, too ____.”
‘I don’t read romance.”
“I hate romance, ugh, too ____.”
And then came the dawning moment.
These are two genres that everyone loves to hate… and why is that? In reality, they have many things in common, and this was a huge (*mind-blown*) moment for me.
Allow me to give you a list.
Both force us, as readers, to confront things we are uncomfortable with (facing our deepest fears, whether it’s love, spiders, getting slashed to death and bleeding out on a floor, or opening our hearts and exposing it to the ones whose love we desire).
Both show vulnerability (rejection of love, exposure of weaknesses, exposure of faults: i.e., if I show you this, you might either kill me or kiss me. Or maybe just kill me).
Both show the fight against what we really want. How much we want to live (or not) and what it would take to keep us alive.
I could go on (and on) but the thing is… horror and romance are basically a giant Venn diagram of The Human Response. The Human Experience (and yes, this often involves monsters).
I’m not saying all horror needs romance, or vice-versa. Sometimes we want a good slasher or possession story, and sometimes we want to be swept up in a feel-good comedy or love story that makes us feel all squishy inside.
There are horror stories that will have you on the edge of your seat. They might have you rallying that the villain gets their just desserts, or maybe you’re rooting for the “protagonists” — that they’ll get revenge, or walk away whole after a horrible experience. You don’t always get that. With horror, there are no guarantees. Sometimes you might walk away and rock in a corner or have nightmares for a few weeks. They give you nothing redeeming. And that is okay, if that’s what turns your crank. There are others that will leave you with a feeling of redemption, for a variety of reasons.
In the romance world, there are stories that will carve your heart out of your chest with a wooden spoon and leave you huddled in a quivering mass because either you want that… or you want that for the characters… but with romance there are rules. You cannot call it a Romance if it doesn’t have an HEA (happily ever after). If it doesn’t have an HEA, it isn’t a Romance. Period. End of discussion.
Horror doesn’t have those rules.
But can’t we have a…
This is where dark romance comes in.
I railed against it for years, mes ami(es), but here is the confession…
I am a dark romance author.
But my work, and I know that my writing partner and soulie
will agree about hers, is ultimately about…The human (monster?) response.
Mine — our (meaning mine and Beverley’s) — work is about characters. How events affect them. How OTHER characters affect them, whether they want to kill them or seduce them.
Love is a part of human existence.
Sex is a part of human existence.
I still find it hard to believe that people are fine with seeing a human body bludgeoned beyond recognition, eviscerated, driven to the brink of insanity either on page or on screen, but GOD FORBID you describe/show two people expressing love or having sex. (*cue pearl-clutching*).
It says a lot about our society that we’re a-ok with violence and blood and guts and NOT a-ok with kissing… or tenderness… or…
Sex and horror.
They’re excellent bedfellows.
Take my vampire, Vauquelin.
Sex for him (almost) always ends in death. A means to an end. Until it isn’t: the moment where he can’t bring death, only pleasure. And he wants to preserve it. Pour toujours.
And then take everything that has happened with me and
: our forthcoming work is unbridled…we are character-driven-authors and we began this book as a gift/reward to ourselves. We never thought we would publish it. It was a fun exercise, a love letter to our characters. After all, we are slaves to our our characters… always. We just gave them free rein. It was freedom… it wasn’t writing toward a market or what readers would expect from us. Because no one else would ever see it except us.It got really filthy… and really violent. But it was their story, not ours… and we just wrote it down.
The result blew our minds.
Again and again.
A Conclave of Crimson is beautiful horror and on-page beautiful sex. And we are not ashamed. We own this, this beautifully, unapologetically queer, horrific, bloody, sexy story... we are so, so proud of it. And we can’t wait to share it with you. More soon.
You’ll never be ready.
We aren’t even ready. But we’re bouncing on the balls of our feet.
Because this is our fucking book.
Even if no one else loves it as much as we do, this is OUR BOOK. Our desert island, just-give-me-this-one-book-in-the-insane-asylum book.
xx
nicole (and beverley… aka nicoverley)
I loved this post, Nicole. Straight from the heart! I wish you and Bev every success and all the happiness you deserve.
I read this last night and wanted to come back to this to say I appreciate what you said. I think there are many of us that wonder where we fit in the world of fiction, as we often blur the lines of genre and explore themes we may not be comfortable. This was a very thoughtful piece, thank you for writing it!