There's a new portmanteau in town, and it's ready to pick a fight with Romantasy. So says the Bookseller with a fascinating insight into the latest trending tags on BookTok. That portmanteau is Dystomance. The word derives, of course, from “dystopian romance.” It marks a resurgence in interest in dystopian books.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
I have to say the word hardly trips off the tongue like Romantasy (it sounds to me like something I might be informed about at a car service, crossed with an unfortunate medical condition, and blended with the occult). The Bookseller points to more than 27,000 videos with 150 million views using the tag #dystopianbooks.
And readers are drawn particularly to dystopian books with a romantic twist (with romance acting as a subplot or side quest to a dystopian focus). Interestingly, the two writers cited as primary drivers of interest are hardly newcomers: Suzanne Collins and Veronica Roth, both of whom are currently revisiting the world of their best-known series.
Indies Riding the Wave
But I was particularly drawn by the citation of a self-published title that was both propelling the trend and riding its wave, H. M. Wolfe's Daggermouth, which demonstrates (as with Romantasy) that this is a genre where readers care about stories and characters, not the provenance of publication.
So what might this mean for us as writers? Well, I would offer the following observations. Romantasy feels like it has been with us forever. And whilst the Urban Dictionary informs me that it has actually been with us since at least 2008 (longer than I would have imagined), that's still under two decades and it is only in the past half a decade that it has really become “a thing” referred to by that name.
Still, it has already far outlived its early 2020s hype contemporary NFTs. And whilst the word is new, the thing it describes is less so. Likewise, whilst trends and the titles that go with them come and go, loyal readers tend to remain loyal readers. So it may become harder for new Romantasy writers to blow up after going viral on TikTok (to make a suitably dystopian mixed metaphor), those already writing for a fanbase are unlikely to see that drop off a cliff.
What Dystomance Signals
Dystomance may or may not drive the next big wave of new readers. But the emergence of newly minted portmanteaus I would suggest will do two things. First, it will drive the purists who hate the “books as aesthetic accessory” turn, driven by social reading trends, even more bananas than dark academia, the Etsification of candles scented like crumbling leather, and three-hour YouTube videos compiling mood music for evoking old libraries.
But second, it demonstrates the continued appetite for reading in general and new genres, mashups, variations, and perspectives in particular, and that will present plenty of new opportunities for audiences to discover us.
Finally, I would note something a little wider. I reported many times during Covid that dystopia was very much in the descendant. And we saw “cozy” become the go-to for a frightened world. This new trend shows the dystopian dragon is stirring from its slumbers. And it's not, as you will recall, the only sign of the darker turn in readers' tastes. I reported at the start of the year that horror and dark romance had been predicted as big growth areas. For those of us who struggle to cozify our fiction, these might be encouraging times.
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