The queue for the shop Bad Girl Books stretches down Oxford’s Walton Street for a good hour and a half. It’s the launch day of the UK’s only romantasy-only bookshop, and hundreds of young and middle-aged women are waiting to be let through its pastel-pink doors.
Topless adolescent boys swagger down the street. “What is this? What is going on?” They receive no reply. With white T-shirts sticking out of back pockets, they’re far less interesting than the fantastic fictional heroes awaiting inside.
Romantasy is routinely sneered at as “fairy smut”. Set in fantasy worlds, its plots are driven by the forbidden desire between a fierce heroine and a brooding dark hero. So far, so Twilight. The genre is known for its reliance on tropes, which dictate the myriad factors pulling the love interests apart (humans warring with faeries, betrayals, a rival love interest) and pushing them together (such as“only one bed”, in which events conspire to force a star-crossed pair to spend the night together). The books have the same frisson as old-fashioned cheap romances – the sheriff’s daughter stranded in a distant barn meets a lonesome rider, etc – but now dragons and the rule of the faerie kingdom is at stake.
During the pandemic, when “BookTokkers” began posting on TikTok about their favourite reads, titles like Sarah J Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series and Rebecca Yarros’ Fourth Wing found a mass audience. In 2024, British readers spent a record £552.7m on print fiction. Nearly £84m of that was sci-fi and fantasy – nearly £1 in every £7. Commercially, fantasy is surpassed only by crime and thrillers.
And romantasy readers don’t just buy the book once. A successful title may appear with stencilled edges, foil boards, an alternative jacket, a signed page or an additional chapter, prompting devoted fans to buy each new edition. Speaking broadly, the genre is read by women aged between 18 and 45.
Bad Girl Books was founded by BookTokker Starlin Marot. She used to be an unfulfilled corporate marketing professional. Last year, she began posting videos of her bookbinding hobby on TikTok. When she floated the idea of a romantasy pop-up, the video attracted around 40,000 views and more than 1,000 people had signed up to attend within two days. Her London pop-ups drew customers from countries such as Italy and Norway, with some bringing empty suitcases for their purchases. She set up her permanent Oxford shop at the beginning of July.
To build the brand, Marot took on considerable personal risk. For her first event, she maxed out £20,000 on credit cards. “My husband was furious,” she told me over the phone, giggling. “Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve wanted to set up a gift shop.” Alongside the books, there are homeware shelves lined with things like “buttery croissant” scented candles, colourful martini glasses and mugs that say “bookworm” or “infinite potential”.
And it sells. Every pop-up or event Starlin has ever convened has made a profit. Her biggest event attracted 3,000 punters. “I feel pretty confident in this community.” Her £30,000 down payment for the shop and its renovation is testament to this.
A split in the queue outside Bad Girl Books seems to reflect a divide: the younger women there seem to be modelling themselves on the brave heroines, while the older demographic show more of a resigned acceptance that real life is not a fairytale. At 40, Jill fits the latter. Two years ago her mother suffered a stroke. Feeling stressed, she turned to romantasy as a form of escape. “I open the books and I can switch off,” she said.
Jill is less romantically attached to the brooding male love interests than younger readers. Katie is in her late twenties and tells me she has never met men in real life who are similar to the heroes of romantasy. I ask her if she means that contemporary men aren’t brave or heroic. “No,” she says. “I know lots of brave men. Men in the army. Men who can defuse fights down the pub. I’m talking about the sex bit. Real men just aren’t that sexy. Real sex is just never that good.”
Amber Hamilton, author of Seven Deadly Thorns, tells me she didn’t know the answer to her book’s central mystery: who killed the king? When she reached the end, she picked the character she thought would surprise the reader most: the narrator. Some critics felt that the unreliable narrator device was not sufficiently earned throughout the text, making for a baffling ending. As one online reviewer wrote, “If she’s panicked and confused that she doesn’t know who the killer is, it makes no sense that she is the killer. No sense at all.”
The ultimate aim for romantasy’s golden children is a Game of Thrones-style screen franchise. There is precedent: the five Twilight films made around $3.3bn (£2.56bn) worldwide. Amazon MGM Studios is now developing Yarros’s Fourth Wing for Prime Video, with Michael B Jordan producing it. But before these titles can land in Hollywood’s lap, they must first be ferried across TikTok by its book mules: the BookTokkers. “Honestly, I’ll be at a book event and I’ll see a huge BookTokker in the audience, and I’ll get nervous,” Hamilton says. “The authors aren’t the main event.”
I tried to read the first book in Maas’ A Court of Thorns and Roses series, a common gateway to the genre. It opens with a girl stalking a deer in a snowy wood. “Despite myself, despite my numb limbs, I quieted that relentless, vicious part of my mind to take in the snow-veiled woods,” reads one of the sentences. The prose is unctuous and repetitive. Maas favours a vague Ye Olde Worlde atmosphere that has no real historical grounding and collapses the moment anyone speaks. Their contemporary angst rings discordantly at medieval feasting halls.
I didn’t get very far with it until one Sunday, in which I was hungover and therefore on the sofa, I reached resignedly for the book. Somewhere along the way, disdain gave way to compulsion. Eight hours later, it was time to walk the dog and, while crossing the road, I narrowly avoided being hit by a car because I was still reading.
Amid the faerie palaces and evil queens, there was less sex than I expected. Romantasy seems to operate on an economy of desire in which moments of jeopardy are turned into opportunities for horniness. Killed my best friend? Horny. Kidnapped and held me hostage? Extremely horny. And yet it still takes 250 pages before we witness a kiss on the eyelids. This postponement leaves the reader in a state of yearning in which imagination runs wildest. No doubt the tension between the wily peasant huntress and the strong, brooding prince makes for 400 very turnable pages.
And why should we force ourselves to read serious, complex books? Life is hard and often dull. Literary fiction is a genre people read for its ability to tell us something about being human. But our humanness is relentless and inescapable.
A Court of Thorns and Roses concludes on somewhat of a cliffhanger. Of course, I wanted to read the next instalment, but I was terrified of allowing myself to become a romantasy reader, because I’m a snob. I have plans to read Infinite Jest. Instead, I resorted to Google. And now I’ll spoil it for you. The heroine is magically and fatefully bound to the rival prince – immediately laying the groundwork for several more books of obstacles and yearning. I find this utterly unsatisfying. Knowledge is nothing compared with the pleasure of wanting.
[Further reading: Harold Bloom, agony uncle]