He reaches into his jacket and comes up with a small knife. “Don’t move.” I hold still. I hold my very breath as he slips the blade between my skin and the first strap. It’s surprisingly warm, likely from being so close to his body. The strap gives easily beneath the sharp edge. And then another, and another, and another, until I’m standing before him completely naked. He snaps the blade closed and takes a step back, sweeping his gaze over me from my head to my feet and back again. “Better.”
Feeling hot yet? Katee Robert’s Neon Gods, a fervid reimagining of Hades and Persephone, has drawn impassioned fans, and Robert’s books have sold more than a million copies. Once, this was the type of spicy paperback you’d hide in an issue of The New Yorker or devour in your bath late at night, if you indulged at all. But the genre is having a moment. Print sales of romance novels in 2022 soared to 32.3 million, up 51 percent from 2021.
Thank TikTok and Gen Z for the current renaissance of romance and erotica, the subgenre that focuses on sexual discovery. While you previously had to dig through the badly stocked romance section of a physical or online bookstore, you can now find the steamiest new releases by scrolling through #SpicyBookTok’s most popular influencers, including @pjandbooks and @aaliyahreads.
Romance devotees have a wealth of options, from mostly wholesome beach reads—including one called Beach Read (by Emily Henry, about rival writers)—to erotic fan fiction based on, say, Harry Potter or Jurassic Park that’s so steamy you’d be flustered to read it in public. “Hockey romance was the rage for a while,” says Meredith Clark, a senior editor at Mira Books, an imprint of HTP/HarperCollins. Everything, it seems, is fair game.
“TikTok is giving curated recommendations from influencers.... driving people to very specific books,” says Clark. If you find secret-identity romance titillating, look to Love, Theoretically, by Ali Hazelwood, about a physicist and college professor who moonlights as a fake girlfriend for extra cash. Its various fan videos on TikTok add up to more than 200 million views. Or if you want to sink into a rom-com about rom-coms, Better than the Movies, by Lynn Painter, is a BookTok favorite, with a related hashtag amassing 96 million views as of February.
Once, this was the type of spicy paperback you’d hide in an issue of The New Yorker or devour in your bath late at night, if you indulged at all.
Many literary critics still frown on raunchy romance novels, dismissing them as schlocky chick lit. But enthusiasts refuse to be shamed. “There’s a tendency to assume that anything that exists outside that specific category [of literary fiction] isn’t well written, or it’s lowbrow.... and that doesn’t serve to benefit anybody,” says Clark of the genre. But who cares? “If you like something, that’s the most important thing.”
In other words, the world is on fire, so you might as well read what you want to. “We’ve known for a long time that sales of romance increase when things in the world are bad, and things are pretty bad,” says Leah Koch, co-founder of the Ripped Bodice bookstores, devoted entirely to romance titles.
Since opening the original Los Angeles location with her sister, Bea Hodges-Koch, in 2016, and the Brooklyn outpost last year, Koch has been an outspoken champion for both the genre and its fans. Literary romance, she says, “still needs defenders, and I’m one of them.” Now “people are much better at recognizing societal and internalized misogyny, and young people in particular care less what other people think about what they’re reading.”
The assumption that “popular” is synonymous with “inferior” is not specific to books—just look at Taylor Swift, Barbie, or pretty much anything that’s beloved primarily by women or those who identify as such. “If people enjoy it, that’s not a bad thing,” says Matt Starr, co-creator of Dream Baby Press, who, with Zack Roif, launched Perverted Book Club in 2022 to host IRL readings of erotica.
In any genre, you have art that’s perceived as serious and well crafted, and then you have very campy things, says Roif. “You have things that skew more serious and you have things that skew a bit more playful, and we’re trying to toe that line a little bit,” says Roif of the reading series. “At our fan-fiction nights, we try to curate a diverse range of stories. There’s something for everyone out there,” he says. “We have 18-year-olds to 85-year-olds—and a lot of people leave telling us they’re inspired to explore.” And by “explore” he means delve into erotica.
Community events such as Perverted Book Club are beginning to bring romance and erotica fans out of the shadows, literally and figuratively. As Starr explains, “Fan fiction was designed to [be] read alone in your bed at night, and now you’re in a room full of 300 people laughing and cheering and hearing these crazy stories. [It] becomes a communal experience.… And I think it does really de-stigmatize [the genre].”
Even if you’re not prepared to stand in front of a crowd and recite a passage by Anaïs Nin (whose work has recently inspired a natural-wine bar and bookstore, Anaïs, in Brooklyn), there are other ways to connect with fellow readers. At the Ripped Bodice, “there’s an interesting phenomenon.... which is customers talking to each other,” says Koch. In New York, “which is considered somewhat hostile, you’ll see someone who’s reaching for a book, and then a total stranger is like, ‘Oh, I love that,’ and then they start talking and walking around the bookshop, picking stuff for each other. I definitely think that is.... unique to romance readers.” It sounds like the beginning of a beautiful love story.
Hannah Baxter is a New York–based writer whose work has appeared in Allure, the Cut, Harper’s Bazaar, and Elle. Her mental-health newsletter is Anxiety Beer