These aren't your granny's bodice rippers — modern romance novels take spice to a whole new level
From faerie sex to hockey sex, level of explicitness acceptable in books is on the rise, expert says
Ripped bodices and heaving bosoms are so passé.
And so are the days of hiding your smutty book behind a respectable bestseller. Because today's steamiest romance books are the respectable best-sellers themselves — and they come wrapped in deceptively modest covers.
If you've noticed fiction books are a lot spicier these days, you're not alone. And if you haven't noticed, it may be because they're hiding in plain sight, at your favourite bookstore and on the New York Times best-seller lists, chock full of the kind of explicit sex scenes one might associate with letters to Penthouse rather than a traditional bodice ripper.
"When I pick up a rom-com nowadays, I'm no longer fooled by the cartoony cover. I know it means there are spicy scenes in there, but this book really went to town on them," wrote Goodreads user Yun in a review of the hockey romance novel Icebreaker by Hannah Grace.
Today's romance books may have cutesy covers, but the pages contain "things that would have been shocking certainly even 10 years ago," said Duncan Stewart, a consumer-forecasting analyst for Deloitte who lives in Toronto and specializes in media and technology, including book publishing.
He noted that the level of sexual explicitness considered acceptable in books has "undoubtedly" been rising for years.
Romance and romantasy (a subgenre combining romance and fantasy) are driving book sales in both the U.S. and Canada, with sales up 235 per cent in Canada in the first part of 2024 compared to the previous year, according to BookNet Canada.
Flip through the pages of most popular books in the genre and you'll find sex scenes that are toe-curling — to use a favourite expression of the BookTok community on social media platform TikTok.
Books like Rebecca Yarros' Fourth Wing and her followup Iron Flame, Sarah J. Maas' A Court of Thorns and Roses (the five-book series is usually shortened to ACOTAR), and Hannah Grace's Icebreaker have spent the better part of the last two years on best-seller lists.
These books are about dragons, faeries and hockey players, but they're also about *censored string of expletives* in a throne room, *more censored expletives* with the High Lord, and *heavily censored graphic descriptions* until you never look at figure skating the same way again.
"In order to create ever-bigger thrills and more provocativeness, writers amp up the thing that their genre is known for. If it's a thriller, the crimes get more frequent and bloodier, and if it's a romance, the sex gets spicier and smuttier," Stewart told CBC News.
"It's a way of constantly provoking a reaction from your reader."
The rise of SmutTok
In a niche corner of BookTok, there are more than a million videos tagged #SmutTok. There, readers share and freely discuss their favourite erotica or spicy reads, often rating them using hot pepper emojis on a scale of one to five.
The ACOTAR series, Fourth Wing/The Iron Flame, and Icebreaker are frequently mentioned (the latter is often rated four peppers).
BookTok's rise during the pandemic really helped bring visibility to the already popular romance genre, according to Carly Watters, a senior literary agent with P.S. Literary Agency.
It used to be that people felt the need to hide the romances they were reading, she explained, and that's partially why e-books were a popular format for romances.
"But now, people are very much more willing to show the covers and willing to kind of talk about it more openly because it has been more normalized," said Watters, adding that she believes escapism also plays a role.
"When the world is really scary, whether it's economics, or climate change or politics, there's a lot of things that people want to escape from in their downtime. And books are definitely something that they're turning to."
A more acceptable form of pornography
But while BookTok has helped fuel the recent spike in romance sales by allowing younger readers to find new titles, erotic fiction has been popular for a long time, and can be traced back millennia, according to the Cambridge World History of Sexualities.
A 1984 study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior suggested that erotic romance books are "a form of 'soft-core' pornography that women find socially acceptable and nonthreatening."
Modern, mass-market romance novels were re-energized in the 20th century with early titles like Gone with the Wind, according to the New York Public Library's blog. They picked up steam in the 1970s with more explicit material like "the bodice ripper." Romance publisher Harlequin (which is Canadian, fun fact) dominated in the 1980s and '90s. In the 2000s, romance novels started reflecting their diverse audience with more representation and inclusivity.
The Outlander and Bridgerton series were just a couple of spicy successes in the '90s and early 2000s. Then came the boom in the wake of 2011's Fifty Shades of Grey, the wildly popular erotica trilogy by E.L. James.
Fifty Shades was also central to de-stigmatizing erotic literature, according to Duncan. In other words, people felt comfortable reading it on the bus.
Spice market still going strong
In 2012, an article in Publishing Perspectives noted that erotica was igniting book sales, but wondered if it was possible to sustain the momentum that followed Fifty Shades. Turns out, it was.
Fourth Wing is currently No. 8 on the New York Times bestseller list for combined print and e-book fiction, its 70th week on the list. ACOTAR is No. 12 in its 33rd week on the list. And Icebreaker spent 44 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list for paperback trade fiction in 2023, reaching the No. 1 spot by the end of November that year.
Meanwhile, graphic Harry Potter fan fiction is picking up steam, the aforementioned hockey romance books are so popular that fans have been accused of sexually harassing NHL players, and if you're feeling festive, there's an entire booming "Christmas smut" genre that would make Santa blush.
"I don't know that I will ever look at tinsel the same again," wrote one Instagram user in her five-star review of Canadian author Bailey Hannah's Christmas at Fox Ridge (she gave it a four on the spice scale, this time using flame emojis).
"The market for spice is still going strong. The market for romantasy is still going strong," said Watters, noting that she doesn't see it shrinking anytime soon — not when publishers are creating new subsidiaries specializing in romance, signing on more authors and making sure they have editors dedicated to the genre.
"There is a big investment across the board," she said. "And if the books are selling, then the publishers are going to continue to publish more books in that category."
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