We did a reveal on Twitter and Insta a while ago, but failed to introduce our murder-babes here, so I’m rectifying this. Nita Pan and I commissioned Jenn St-Onge to create a coloured bust of our villainous murder babes, Tosh Haraldson and Sasha Shaw. If you want to sign up to beta this project when it’s complete (currently it’s about 2/3ds done with 57K words on the page), contact Nita @NitaPanWrites on Twitter and Insta, or via her website www.nitapanwrites.com, and she will sign you up.
Here’s a few Twitter teasers relating to our project…
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsWhat if the hero was a villain all along too? #EldritchGirls #amwriting #WritingCommunity https://t.co/XYhsPWE9Kb
— Nita Pan is taking a writing break. (@nitapanwrites) July 14, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsCurrently writing a dark slasher-romance (forbidden love, workplace romance, blood & guts, eldritch horror, enemy-lovers in lust triangle, fake dating, chaotic bi hitman falls for burlesque dancer who kills ppl on camera in snuff films) with @nitapanwrites called #EldritchGirls
— C. M. Rosens (@CMRosens) July 8, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsWell, @CMRosens and I do have something in the works… #amwriting #EldritchGirls #darkromance #pulpfiction https://t.co/VunOVepKrW
— Nita Pan is taking a writing break. (@nitapanwrites) April 13, 2020
Meet Tosh & Sasha
Twitter: Princess_jem4
Insta: Princess_jem4
So, to recap:
-morally bankrupt MCs
-villain/villain romance
-no redemption arc, instead you get a [devolving further] corruption arc
-pulp fiction style with spare, lurid prose and OTT everything
-goremance / slasher-romance / dark romance
-cannibalism
-chainsaws and scissors
-homages to various slasher franchises
-forbidden workplace romance
-sex and violence / violent sex / sexy… violence? *shudders*
-gangsters and organised snuff film productions
-eldritch abominations and related body horror
-fake dating, including meet-the-parents-under-false-pretences
-a Ferris Wheel ‘date’/date
-lust-ridden triangle
-drunken confessions
-pain/fear/knife play kink
-ABBA soundtrack
DISCLAIMER: if you read Eldritch Girls, please don’t go out and kill people and say the book made you do it. Ideally, don’t kill anyone at all. We’re not actually advocating the cannibal lifestyle.
Goremance Musings
Well… as romance subgenres go, this one is not exactly mainstream. There’s no clear definition available if you just do a basic search, so you have to dig a little further to find tags and examples.
Here’s a fun example: Clockwerk Pictures’ indie horror, Roses: A Goremance, a short (under 20mins) film incorporating all the gore of a horror short with romantic themes.
Goremances are out there, and there is a growing appetite for them. Just search ‘villain romance’ in Twitter and see a range of writers and readers weighing in on why they want more, and what they’re currently working on. There’s a lot of vampire fun in this mix, of course, because blood and romance works so well with this particular horror monster staple.
It’s a search term that yields results on Wattpad, certainly, with 2.2K stories if you search with this term alone. Refining results by adding #romance and #gore tags filters that down to 346 stories (this search was conducted 18/07/2020). However, if you search #Goremance (rather than just ‘goremance’ as a term not a tag), you get… nothing. If you search just #romance + #gore together, you get 9.5K story results. So it’s clearly more that the term itself isn’t widely used as a tag, even in the indie writer community, rather than there’s no audience for a gory romance tale.
Reviewers use the term too: M. K. Hobson’s Veneficas Americana series is described as a Goremance in one review of Book 2, The Hidden Goddess, but the series isn’t sold or marketed in this way.
It does seem to be a term that’s on the rise, though, and hopefully we’ll see more books falling into this category! I might do a longer post musing more on goremance later.
What do you think about goremances, and do you have any recommendations? Pop them in the comments!
C. M. Rosens 