A Truly Filthy Book
Haunting Adeline and why it won the internet
If you spend time in the book corners of TikTok and Instagram, you have noticed that a lot of the posts are about romance, specifically “dark romance.” If you’re unfamiliar with the term, dark romance is a subgenre of romance with LOTS of graphic sex, morally-gray characters, and behavior from the male character that would, in other genres, classify them as the villain: stalking, kidnapping, abuse, and non-consensual or dubious consent sex. A sign you’re about to read dark romance is that the blurb will say something like: “check the trigger warnings. Your mental health matters.”
Not to be critical, but many of these books are lacking in the elements that make a good book. Yes, they have red-hot scenes in them. Yes, the behavior of the characters is outrageous. And yes, they technically have a plot. But they’re not GOOD.
But one stood above the rest. Haunting Adeline was originally self-published and then was so wildly successful it got picked up by a publisher, where it did massive numbers, largely thanks to TikTok.
This one is a genuinely good book, as opposed to many of the others. So I thought I’d break down 1) Why it picked up so much buzz and 2) Why the quality endured through the smut.
The Tropes: Haunting Adeline has a little bit of everything that a lot of readers love—A murder mystery, a ghost, a sassy heroine with an equally sassy best friend, dangerous men, and a felling you never know what will happen next. It’s not a one trick pony and seamlessly blends the tropes of dark romance with paranormal and crime thrillers.
The Triggers: The things our main guy does to our main girl are utterly shocking and make for great social media content. Were you shocked? Appalled? Allured? So many opinions. So many reactions. So fun to make videos about and debate in the comments sections.
The Subtle Nod to Conspiracy: Our main guy (in addition to being a stalker) is also a hacker dedicated to hunting down powerful people who do terrible things in secret. It was subtle. There was no callout to current-day politics. But let’s just say there were some commenters who call Haunting Adeline “Q-Anon Porno.” Again, it got people talking. Got them to take sides. Is the author signaling her allegiance to one side or the other? No one knows, but it sure added to the buzz.
The Character Work: Adeline is a masterfully done, fully-realized woman. The things she does all make sense. Who she is and why makes sense. Often with these books, the main girl is written in such a way that she could only be a character in a book. She could never be real, because real people don’t think or act that way. Our main guy (Z), is also fully formed, though there was one big contradiction I won’t get into here. But no matter who was on the page, it felt like they could be a real person who exists in the world.
The Writing: The plot did a teensy bit too much for my liking… but other than that, the writing was fantastic. Plot, character, dialogue, description, structure. All excellent. I can’t say the same for many of the genre cohorts.
The thing about writing spicy romance is that it isn’t enough to keep a reader invested. Yes, they buy the book for the sex, let’s not be coy. But if the story and characters aren’t up to snuff, they’ll either DNF it or read it through, then forget they ever read it all. Neither of those are what we’re going for.
LAST ONE!
I have exactly one signed paperback of the Black Magic omnibus left. If you want it on your shelf, you can snatch it up here:
