What is a morally grey hero? A morally grey hero is a love interest who lives between heroism and villainy: someone who makes choices outside conventional morality for reasons the reader can understand, even when she cannot endorse them. He is not a villain, because he has a line he will not cross and a…
6 min read
What is dark fantasy romance? Dark fantasy romance is a love story set in a fantasy world where magic has a price, power is dangerous, and the romance has to survive both. The “dark” is a measure of consequence, not of how explicit the story is. That consequence looks like bargains that bind, courts that…
8 min read
A romance trope is a recurring situation readers recognise on sight: enemies who become lovers, one bed, a bond nobody chose. Tropes are not clichés; they are promises. A reader who picks up an enemies to lovers story knows what feeling she is buying, and the writer’s job is to deliver it in a way…
6 min read
What is dark romance? Dark romance is a love story that reaches its happy ending through territory most romance avoids: obsession, revenge, power that is not shared equally, and characters whose choices you can understand without endorsing. Two people still end up together, and the ending is still earned. The road there is darker, the…
10 min read
The cauldron was found in a bog in County Roscommon by a farmer named Paddy Coyle, who was digging drainage ditches and expecting to find nothing more interesting than the usual complement of waterlogged timber and Bronze Age butter. What he found instead was a vessel of hammered bronze, three feet across, decorated with figures…
9 min read
The gallery opening was by invitation only, which in the art world of contemporary London meant that approximately four hundred people had been invited, of whom three hundred had come for the free champagne, ninety-seven had come to be seen, and exactly three had come for the art. Mira Castellano was one of the three….
9 min read
The shop at 17 Veil Street had no sign. This was deliberate. The people who needed to find it would find it, drawn by word of mouth passed in undertones at kitchen tables and whispered across pharmacy counters when the pharmacist had nothing left to offer. The people who did not need to find it…
11 min read
Snowbound in a Yorkshire abbey, a cataloguer opens the last locked bay and finds one man’s journals from 1538 to last week, and what finishing the list will cost him.
13 min read