When I got into Yale last year, one of the first things my friend said to me was that I simply had to read Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House. It’s a new adult “romantasy” set at Yale: the university’s infamous secret societies are reimagined as temples to the occult, and the misfit main character (Galaxy Stern) ends up as a guardian of sorts, tasked with keeping the students’ arcane activities under control.
When I wander round campus now, I sometimes catch myself mapping Bardugo’s Yale over my own: there’s the Orange Street headquarters, there’s the library where that blood ritual went wrong. This double vision is natural for me. I’m 24 and I’ve always loved fantasy, enough that it seeps into my everyday thoughts and colors how I see the world. While I’m diligently poring over books on applied methods of analysis or great power competition and co-operation, I’m also parsing the mind-bending dynamics of Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing or Sarah J Maas’s Crescent City series, where a half-fairy woman with a werewolf best friend falls in love with an angel.
Before you scoff, I’m definitely not the only one indulging in the romantasy realm. Maas’s latest book, House of Flame and Shadow, recently became the third fastest-selling fantasy novel in the UK since records began. The share price of Bloomsbury, her publisher, rose nearly ten percent this week, to the highest point since it was listed in 1994. Yarros’s Iron Flame is the best-selling fantasy book to date. Sales of fiction classed as both fantasy and romance totaled $34 million in the UK last year, a significant jump from $18 million in 2022.
House of Flame and Shadow recently became the third fastest-selling fantasy novel in the UK since records began.
I kind of pride myself on being an original “romantasy” fan, before it was known as romantasy. Before the age of BookTok. I say “kind of” because my romantasy addiction can still be a little embarrassing. I have a degree in Russian and Spanish literature. I’m sometimes pretentiously serious about prose. I have London Review of Books and New Yorker subscriptions. I read Don Quixote in the original Spanish. However, when the mood strikes, there’s really nothing like sinking into a thick tome, heavy as a brick, of dragons, magic, witty heroines and brooding-yet-sensitive alpha heroes.
It’s a different kind of satisfaction to that derived from reading Kafka or Tolstoy. It’s unadulterated escapism. It’s junk food — a temporary, sugary high, all-consuming and giddiness-inducing. I surface from a mammoth reading session — these things are designed so that you can’t put them down, keeping you reading and reading until all 800 pages are already behind you — flushed and excited, and pricked with guilt. I look over at Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, which stares accusingly, half read, from my desk next to me. Great literature awaits and I’m letting myself drown in a syrupy flood of nothingness.
The relative insubstantiality of romantasy is both its greatest charm and its Achilles’ heel. It’s why it’s so ludicrously popular and why it can never be taken seriously. Great literature is a representation of society and humanity, something that tells us about ourselves. Can I really see a meaningful reflection — of myself, of the world — in a meet-cute between an angel and a fairy? Perhaps the more pertinent question is: do I want to?
Romantasy is not equipped to deal with heavy themes. Its strengths are frippery, droll remarks and high-stakes battles where no one really dies, plus cringe-inducing sex scenes where curtains are set on fire (to depict the lovers’ passion, of course). But, for those authors who work within the confines of the genre, who know its strengths and its weaknesses, who love its strengths and its weaknesses, a winning formula is struck. Delicious fun, untampered by real-world considerations, is what it’s all about and, quite frankly, I’m hooked. Keep your Times Literary Supplement subscriptions, by all means, but maybe put them aside for a moment for the werewolf at the door.
Jessica Tomlinson is a Master in Public Policy in Global Affairs candidate at Yale Jackson School
