How the World Fell for ‘Romantasy’
23rd January 2025
In an opening chapter of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville captures the American scene in the whaling village of New Bedford, Mass. There are “savages outright, many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh”; “Green Vermonters and New Hampshire men”; lunks and hicks and “bumpkin dandies” in beaver hats and swallow-tailed coats “girdled with a sailor-belt and a sheath knife”. Polite society may have responded with horror to these sights, but Melville understood that this wild diversity, ferment and lawlessness was the essence of his country.
New Bedford has come for the publishing industry — for its “Big Five” publishers and its MFA-trained fiction writers — in the form of Romantasy, a new genre rewriting all the rules, perhaps for the better. The portmanteau term, for the uninitiated, means “any fantasy novel that has romance as the main plot or a strong side-plot”, according to Katie Cunningham, owner of Kiss & Tale books in Collingswood, NJ. The books also tend to be hashtag-friendly, include explicit sex scenes, and wildly sample from the folkloric palate of tropes and subgenres established by previous narratives: Hades and Persephone, love triangles, friends-to-enemies, shapeshifters, slavery, Greek Gods, dragons, and vampires, to name just a few.
The speculative fiction community term is ‘paranormal romance’.