We’ve been discussing the strange space between genre romance and what is typically referred to as Women’s Fiction, but that’s not the only place where we see romance cross over into other genres. In fact, the romance genre is rather famous for having something for everyone. Thrillers? We got ‘em. Outer space? We’ve been there. Elves? Werewolves? Witches? Wizards? Vampires? Necromancers? You name it, there’s romance for it. Wanna take it back in time? We got historical romance, but let us also show you the steampunk, the gaslamp, and the timeslip. There’s monster romance that includes largely bipedal but non-human romantic protagonists. There is even, believe me, horror romance (not to be confused with dark romance, which is a whole other thing).
Romance readers’ frustrations with those books that fade into the WF space tends to stem from the expectation of a dual* protagonist story arc that has strong romantic elements and an HEA or HFN ending, and the reality of the story not meeting the expectation. But that can happen in these other crossover spaces, too! And, depending on where those crossover books fall on their own gray area spectrums, they also may receive mixed responses from romance readers.
Genre crossover books that are definitely romance
There are indisputably sci-fi and fantasy books that fall squarely under the romance umbrella. Often these books center on fantastical wish fulfillment and are really sexy.
Consider Ice Planet Barbarians (or almost any Ruby Dixon book), the first of a long series in which human women are stranded on an alien planet and find themselves mated to giant blue aliens whose culture and bodies are basically designed for their physical pleasure. Are there other adventures going on? Yes. Is the central idea the romance between the human woman and the sexy alien? Also yes. We could say similar things about C.M. Nascosta’s Morning Glory Milking Farm or Stalked by the Kraken by Lilian Lark.
But, although fantasy wish fulfillment is one market we see in this space, we can also dial back the erotic components of the story and still have unquestionably romantic fantasy, sci-fi, thriller, etc., stories that straddle genres, using the beats of both styles’ generic arcs to spin a tale.
Oak King, Holly King by Sebastian Nothwell succeeds in this regard by both unquestionably following the narrative arc of a fantasy novel while also centering the story’s plot on the way the protagonists are connected to each other because of the problem they must overcome. They are brought together because Shrike doesn’t want to die in the fae realm, and Wren is supposed to be able to help him. In order for both of them to be able to live in either the fae or the human realm, they must succeed in their quest to save Shrike. Forced proximity romance, anyone?
Then there’s Ann Aguirre’s Strange Love, which plays on many of the hallmarks of the sci-fi romance described above, but it’s more than just kinky fuckery with an alien (a non-humanoid alien, no less!). Rather, Aguirre uses the sci-fi setting of a very alien alien and a distant planet to explore connection and what it means to be a person. The end result is an absolutely fabulous, heartwarming romance.
Good cross-genre romance is not limited to sci-fi and fantasy; romantic suspense also frequently inhabits this space. The most successful romantic suspense is able to interweave a romantic narrative with a thriller narrative, such that the reader believes in the relationship while also feeling like their stomach has moved up into their throat because of the clear and present danger. The Final Hour series by Juno Rushdan features a ton of high-stakes, save the world action that puts the protagonists of each of those books in a forced proximity situation that instantly answers those questions Ingrid loves: Do you see me? Do you choose me? And can I count on you? The romantic problem at the end of the book might be that they have to figure out that the feelings they’ve been having aren’t just about the danger bangs, or maybe it’s that they just have to manage to survive the action, but we are left in no doubt that the romance was real by the end of the story.
Romantic suspense books will sometimes resolve the “I love you” portion of the romance early, maybe even at the halfway point of the book, as we see in Tal Bauer’s Enemies of the State, but that’s typically because we want something to root for when we’re wondering how it’s even possible that these characters are going to manage not to die by the end of the book. There’s only so much tension a reader can take at one time, after all. Or it’s possible that the romantic thread will be an underlying slow burn, one that the protagonists don’t fully clue into or admit to until the very end. Take for example Vanessa Gray Bartal’s The Bun and the Gun, a romantic suspense that’s also a rom-com, and which allows the audience to laugh at the protagonists’ foolishness as they constantly deny that they’re anything more than friends until BANG!
But keeping the romance as a more subtle thread can run into the iffy territory of genre crossover in which the romance might not actually feel like a primary thread of the storyline.
Genre crossover books that are arguably romance (but also, maybe not)
Look, sometimes genre crossover books just don’t quite hit as romances. This does not mean that they’re bad books, or that we didn’t enjoy them or that they’re not worth reading. We posit that genre crossover books don’t work as romances for two possible reasons: 1. tension between conflicting genre conventions and 2. an excess of plot that overshadows the romance.
Genre conventions don’t always get along
In the genre crossover space that we’re talking about today, we’re looking at books that are using two genre conventions, but sometimes the conventions of the non-romance genre are used in such a way that they disrupt the romance beats. We’ve made an effort to find a few books in different genre spaces to illustrate this, but if you’re not a constant reader in a genre, it might be challenging to know how the beats of different genres conflict.
Let’s start with an accessible example: Rulebreaker by Cathy Pegau. We’re starting here because Pegau is drawing on the beats of a heist story, which many readers are probably familiar with; think Ocean’s 11 or The Italian Job. To wit: identify the target, assemble the team, do the job, something goes wrong, high-stakes action shenanigans!, resolution. In this case, Liv is recruited to infiltrate a mining company as the assistant for the head of R&D in order to facilitate some corporate espionage. As she does so, she falls for her new boss. However, because Pegau so successfully hits the beats of a heist story arc, the romance story plays a smaller role. Liv and Zia don’t even meet until a third of the way into the book, and Zia doesn’t become a real character with a personality besides “boss” until past the halfway point. Instead, the first third of the book is focused on assembling the team and preparing for the job. These are crucial elements to building the readers’ connection to the heist, but impede the reader’s ability to build connection to the love interest.
The broad beats of two competing genres are also apparent in Letters and Lies by Colleen Donnelly. Although this book starts with a heartsick heroine who has been dumped via letter, the story turns into a classic western novel when she decides to get on the train to find her erstwhile fiancé anyway and ends up being the out-of-towner who exposes a corrupt bank and coordinates an elaborate scheme to return the town to its people. While the original premise of the book is certainly romantic—and heaven knows our heroine is trying her darnedest to wrap up the nonsense in town so she can get back to it—the plot sharing between romance and western skews heavily towards western simply because there is so much intricate plotting involved in saving the town.
Sometimes this dynamic is less about the beats of the plot, and more about how the story is executed. For example, high fantasy is (generally speaking) less interested in the interiority of the characters than the plot; in fact, some very successful fantasy novels don’t feature fully realized characters at all, but rather symbolic figures (the everyman, the witch, the sidekick). We’ll occasionally come across hybrid fantasy-romances that lean into similar flat characterization with greater emphasis on symbols and plot; one example of this is Mermaid Steel by Jay Hartlove. (Holly would argue that A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness also falls into this category.)
But probably the number one reason that readers would argue (in a squeaky voice that’s trying to make the argument without being the seagull all over somebody’s picnic) that a book might not really be a genre romance is that the romance is sidelined by all the other plot happenings.
All that other plot is in the way
Other plots overshadowing the romance is one reason that Holly does not tend to be interested in romantic suspense (and with the reader contract as the grounding force of genre fiction, we can’t blame her!), and this is often a critique of romantic suspense. Is the romance as developed as the action plot? Do we buy into the relationship as the protagonists run for their lives / try to save the world / avoid dying?
Sometimes reader reception is affected by where the protagonists begin the story. For example, Holly and Erin both read books from Adriana Anders’s Survival Instincts series, but they had different responses to the romance components within the romantic suspense because of the difference in the initial relationship between the protagonists. In the case of Whiteout, Angel and Ford already know each other when the book opens. A relationship is established before they go on the run across Antarctica, and then the external forces propel the romantic attraction. On the other hand, in Uncharted, Leo and Elias meet for the first time in Chapter 4. The romance can’t start until we’re already 10% into the book, and we have to negotiate a burgeoning romance while 1. spending time in other POVs in locations separate from the protagonists and 2. dealing with head injuries, flying bullets, near drownings, freezing temperatures, and general survival. Not a whole lot of space there to sit and chat over dinner.
Or sometimes it’s not a matter of a book trying to achieve two (or more) things and not quite getting there, it’s that the marketing and categorization just might not be quite right. The Grave Between Us by Tal Bauer is the second in a series about two FBI agents dealing with serial killers in Des Moines, Iowa. The preceding book, The Murder Between Us, is a true romantic suspense, wherein the agents meet and work together for the first time while also falling in love. But if we consider that a romantic story arc is going to involve romance-related struggle and growth between the protagonists, that’s not what we get in The Grave Between Us. The relationship is never in jeopardy. The book is an absolutely enthralling thriller, but it’s marketed as romance. Subtitled on Amazon as “M|M Romantic Suspense”, and categorized on Goodreads as “Romance > M M Romance” (by a large margin), the marketing is indicating genre romance to a prospective reader. It makes sense within the scope of the author’s brand, absolutely, but standing on its own, the book might not meet genre romance convention expectations.
This is not something isolated to romantic suspense. Similarly, Bears Behaving Badly by MaryJanice Davidson was initially categorized under romance when Erin found it on NetGalley, but it was later moved to only the Sci-Fi/Fantasy category (so you can see how things can be fluid). And the shifting category makes sense; Annette and David work together and both have crushes on each other, and there’s an ongoing punchline about them having a relationship, but the story is definitely centered on the mystery of one at risk werecub. Annette and David get together in the end (and the dirty talk! Wow!), but Erin wasn’t totally sure if the next book would be continuing their story or if their romance was just…over. It was a really fun book, but the romance component didn’t leave Erin feeling satisfied the way a genre romance typically would.
Or consider K.F. Breene’s Magical Midlife Madness, the first in the Leveling Up series. Jacinta is immediately attracted to sexy barkeep Austin, but she has to put any attraction she feels on hold to deal with a bunch of other stuff…like the haunted house she’s inherited, extremely weird aging retainers who came with the house, and some very unusual small-town politics. When would she even have time for romance? Well, she manages…but it’s certainly not the only (or even primary) issue at hand for her.
We’ve talked about several series here so far, but different genres use series in different ways, so let’s explore the crossover space there, as well.
Trilogies and Series
Can you imagine if Jack Reacher had a long-term partner? Or remember how stressful (and slightly unsatisfying) the love triangle was in the Hunger Games series? We all love a series, but they can play with genre conventions and mess with reader expectations depending on their structure.
Series are an author’s bread and butter, a way to hook a reader and keep them excited to stay in the world the author has created. This is true regardless of genre. Readers might have feelings about how interconnected a series should be (this is extremely variable), or how many books they’re willing to invest in (typically it’s fewer than 8 if you’re curious). But in romance that usually means a series of books each with its own unique set of protagonists. It’s also known in Romance Circles that there’s an indie publishing trend to break a relationship arc into trilogies or duologies, with cliffhangers at the ends of books 1 and 2 (if applicable) to get more page reads or book purchases out of one romance arc. (Sometimes our book cynicism does show, but we also acknowledge marketing is marketing.)
In genre crossover series and trilogies, those expectations we mentioned earlier (a dual* protagonist story arc that has strong romantic elements and an HEA or HFN ending) might be played with a little more than what we typically see in contemporary or historical romance. We’ve already explored how genre crossover books might run into gray areas where the “strong romantic elements” are concerned, but here we’ll explore how genre crossover trilogies and series, many of which are traditionally published (different to contemporary indie trilogies and duologies, which are almost unheard of in trad pub romance spaces), will play with the romance HEA or HFN as well.
First of all, this seems to be a trend primarily in a fantasy space, especially in urban fantasy, in which there’s a primarily external problem driving the plot—typically a combination of one problem driving the individual book and then one overarching problem driving the series—with a significant romance subplot. We’re thinking of series like the Nevada Baylor trilogy portion of the Hidden Legacy series by Ilona Andrews or the Ashes & Dust trilogy by Jenn Burke. The trilogies handle the relationships in slightly different ways: Nevada sends Connor away at the end of the first Hidden Legacy book, and their relationship seems solid at the end of book two, only to be rattled by external forces in book three; whereas, Evan and Colin have a pretty good HFN at the end of their first Ashes & Dust book, only for that to be thrown into chaos at the end of book two and resolved in book three. Or we might even see a trilogy like Allie Therin’s Magic in Manhattan, in which each book ends with its own HFN that makes the relationship just a little stronger each time they overcome a new problem.
As we know, the ONE RULE for a genre romance is that it will be a story with a romance throughline with a happy and optimistic ending. But by throwing a relationship into turmoil with each subsequent book in a series, these trilogies and duologies are muddying the waters of the protagonists’ happy afters. The rage Holly felt upon discovering that the second book in the Region Two series by Janet Walden-West was not, as expected, about a new couple, but rather about throwing the HEA from Book 1 into complete and utter chaos, cannot be overstated. There’s another book, so the relationship is on the rocks again? After we just read 300 pages to get to a happy ending? (Or, if we didn’t get to a happy ending and didn’t know we were looking at a cliffhanger, we might get ragey.) It’s changing the contract with the reader, which is always a risky move in a genre space.
Another thing to consider, because everything is tied to everything else in this discussion, is how author brand plus a series with romantic elements can play into categorizing a series as romance and perhaps mess with reader expectations. Let’s take a look at two long-running series by the same author: Guild Hunter and Psy-Changeling. Nalini Singh sold her first book to Silhouette in 2002, and she has multiple contemporary romance series, so she’s definitely a romance author, but she’s most famous for her fantasy romance series, which have extremely enthusiastic followings. Both series share many features—they are, after all, by the same author—but they are also structured quite differently when taken on the whole.
Psy-Changeling is (currently) a 21 book series, and each book is for a unique couple. The world is large, and characters from throughout the series come and go, but indisputably each book relates to one romantic story arc and one external plot arc while also expanding the larger Psy-Changeling world’s story arc. Compare this to the Guild Hunter series, which is (currently) a 15 book series, but which primarily follows Archangel Raphael and Guild Hunter Elena as they try to prevent the world from descending into chaos as global powers shift. In this series, we don’t even get a story that’s not centered on Raphael and Elena until book 4, and books 2 and 3 aren’t focused on Raphael and Elena’s relationship but on global power games. In fact, 7 of the 15 books feature Raphael and/or Elena as a protagonist. In scope, Guild Hunter behaves much more like a fantasy series than like a romance series. It includes genre romance, but it also includes books that would not be categorized as genre romance, and the plot moves forward throughout the series as a fantasy series does. Even Angel’s Blood, the first book, while an enthralling romance (if you don’t think Raphael is an asshole), ends on something of a cliffhanger. Where did Erin pick up every single one of these books from the library stacks? In the romance section, heart sticker on the spine and all.
Conclusion
As we’ve said before, the romance genre is capacious and there’s space for so many stories! At the same time, it’s evident that, no matter which direction we travel from the clinch-covered center, we will invariably run into fringes of the genre. In which case, the question might not so much be “is it a romance” as “does it succeed in its goals?”
*Dual is for ease of use, but would include poly romances by virtue of all protagonists being co-protagonists in the narrative.
Books we discussed in this post:
The Smut Report 
1 thought on “The Great Smut Debate: Genre Crossovers”