Dark romance fantasy is one of the popular genres for the book reader. There are many fantasy and paranormal tropes with heavy or soft romance in this category. Teens and young adults like this very much because it fits this age very easily. Most dark fantasy romance movies are based on books like Twilight, Maleficent, Huntsman, Red Riding Hood, etc.
7 Dark Romance Fantasy Books (Fictional & Myth)
If you like dark romance books, you are in the right place. I have a big list to present as a fantasy and romance lover. Now I will review the top 7 dark romance fantasy books to read anytime. Let’s go!
1. Rhapsodic: The Bargainer
The Bargainer series consists of Rhapsodic, A Strange Hymn, The Emperor of Evening Stars, and Dark Harmony. The series starts with Callypso Lillis, who is not an ordinary girl, but a siren. She killed her stepfather, so she finds a card leading to Desmond Flynn’s bargainer. Des decides to help her clean up her mess, but not for free. The bargainer is always bargaining for a price for a favor that he might try to collect in the future whenever she asks him for a favor.
Callypso would collect a beat that would form a bracelet around her wrist, and it’s the bracelet that Buddhist monk wears a lot. She starts to develop a crush on Des, and she calls him back again and again. So she ends up having a lot of beads on her bracelet, which are favors that need to be repaid eventually. But something happened, and he went away, and they were separated for seven years until he came back again. As it turns out, Desmond is the bargainer. He is also the king of the Night Kingdom and the other world filled with fairies.
Des comes back after seven years and tells Cally that he needs her help. There were a lot of female soldiers missing, and when these women were returned, they were lying idle in a casket. They’re in a permanent state of being asleep, and there’s a baby with them. It’s a demon baby. But these babies can prophesy, and they prophesy they are bad stuff for both Desmond and Cally. Then men keep disappearing as well. It’s all the doing of a guy called the Thief of Souls. So that’s the gist of the entire story.
At the beginning of the book were presented with a question of why Des had to leave Cally seven years ago. As we keep on reading, we finally get to see the answer. If you love dark romance with fantasy elements, then try this trilogy.
Author: Laura Thalassa
Average Customer Review: (4.5 out of 5, on Amazon)
Category: Paranormal & Urban Fantasy
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Kindle
2. A Promise of Fire (The Kingmaker Chronicles)
It follows a young lady called Cat, who lives divided into three different kingdoms. She is running away from people from her past. She has a sinister and mysterious past, although we don’t necessarily know what that is when we first start reading her story. We know that she is trying to hide away from many people who have been horrible to her in the past. So she’s hiding in a circus, which is always a good thing, but it quickly becomes something different.
It will be a mysterious story about her life and how she was escaping and evading these captors, and the magic that she had. It’s evident early on that she has a powerful magic that she’s trying to keep hidden within the circus. She doesn’t escape because the character who captures her has a magical rope that manages to trap her. Things start to get a bit iffy as time goes on, and they start to form this love relationship.
However, even with all of that said, there are some steamy erotica moments within this. The ideas of these magical powers and how the world was set up were interesting. Our main character has Dragon Breath, which is she can melt people. Although it has some fun elements at first, we get another character named Griffin.
Author: Amanda Bouchet
Average Customer Review: (4.5 out of 5, on Amazon)
Category: Greek & Roman Myth & Legend, Dark Romance
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Mass Market Paperback | Kindle | Audio CD
3. A Touch of Ruin (Hades X Persephone)
This series may be good if you enjoy Greek mythology because it retells Persephone and Hades. Persephone is a journalism student, living like a normal mortal human being. She wanted to experience human life and wanted to get out of her mother’s control.
Hades is the god of the underworld. He also owns a club in the human world where he makes a lot of like bargains and deals with human beings. Generally, Hades is the winner who doesn’t play fair. So one night, Persephone’s friend drags her to the club. They get in, and it’s hard to get in, so they’re super excited.
Persephone goes to the VIP section because she’s invited there, and she ends up playing a poker game with Hades, and she accidentally deals with Haiti. So Hades says that she has six months to create life in the underworld, and if not, she will have to stay in the underworld. Persephone is an impossible task because she has no control over her powers. She has not been able to create any form of life yet. That’s the context of the series. This series is perfect for somebody who loves dark romance fantasy.
Author: Scarlett St. Clair
Average Customer Review: (4.6 out of 5, on Amazon)
Category: Dark Fantasy Erotica
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle | Audio CD
4. Radiance (Wraith Kings)
The story is about a girl named Ildiko and a man named Brishen. They’re from two different royal kingdoms. There’s the unessential royalty as in the royalty, but they’re not important in royalty. So they’re pretty much used as pawns in a scheme of kings and queens. So it is about how friendships can grow into something more beautiful, stronger than anything. They end up loving each other more than they ever realize that they would ever love each other.
This book takes care of the emotion of the action they’re doing instead of the detail. Some sex scenes in books are a bit too detailed. The two main characters focus more on the emotion of what they were doing for each other than the actual detail of what they were doing. So this is in a different realm entirely.
Author: Grace Draven
Average Customer Review: (4.5 out of 5, on Amazon)
Category: Paranormal Romance
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Kindle
5. Her Soul to Take (Souls Trilogy)
Her Soul to Take is a new adult dark horror romance that follows Rae and Leon’s two main characters. Rae is a paranormal investigator. She has a YouTube channel devoted to paranormal investigations and goes hunting. One day, she meets Leon, who is, in fact, a demon.
They meet, and they have some conversations. It’s not too in-depth or anything like that, so she summons him one day. He has this reputation for being this deadly demon who kills anyone, anything that summons him. As you can probably tell, it’s a dark romantic fantasy, so he doesn’t kill her. He falls for her and vice versa.
So Leon ends up wanting to protect her by all means necessary. Her soul to take is the first book and will be a trilogy. The author does note that the trilogy will be interconnected stand-alone. The content and trigger warnings follow graphic sexual scenes, violence, horror elements.
Author: Harley Laroux
Average Customer Review: (4.5 out of 5, on Amazon)
Category: Dark Fantasy, Erotic Thrillers (Best Seller)
Available: Paperback | Kindle
6. Black Sunshine: A Dark Vampire Romance (Dark Eyes)
The story of this book follows our main heroine, Lenore Warwick. She’s twenty-one and a college student. She starts to feel as someone is watching her. Then she gets kidnapped by a mysterious vampire bounty hunter, and it’s a romance between her and the vampire bounty hunter.
We see the main heroine gets kidnapped and adjust to her new surroundings. You also get a lot of info-dumping in the middle part of the book, which slows down the pacing of this book. The writing becomes a little bit more clunky denser because we’re trying to convey all this information to our main character, who is new to this world.
It’s a dark romance fantasy book, and the author includes trigger and content warnings at the beginning. If you are looking for some dark fantasy, steamy vampire goodness, this is going to be the book for you.
Author: Karina Halle
Average Customer Review: (4.3 out of 5, on Amazon)
Category: Vampire Suspense, Paranormal & Urban Fantasy
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Kindle
7. A Curse So Dark and Lonely (The Cursebreaker Series)
This is a Beauty And The Beast retelling with a little bit of a twist. As a dual perspective story that follows our two main characters, one being the cursed prince and the other being a girl named Harper. The curse works because this perpetual season will restart our prince, Rhen.
If he does not succeed in these three months, having a girl fall in love with him, he will turn into a rage monster that goes around and kills a bunch of people. He’s killed people close to him in the past because he cannot control this monster once this happens. He goes back to his human form, and the season starts over. The way to break this curse is to make a girl fall in love with him within the season.
They have not been successful thus far, which is why he has his guard named Grey go into this world. He’s permitted to go into our world once a season to pluck a girl out of the world and hope that she will fall in love with the prince. If he fails in having Harper fall in love with him, then he’s going to forever stay as a beast. So the circumstances are high. He is pretty much hopeless, doesn’t feel like there’s a chance, and Harper is constantly thinking. There’s a lot of character growth that’s explored throughout the story.
Author: Brigid Kemmerer
Average Customer Review: (4.5 out of 5, on Amazon)
Category: Dark Fairy Tale & Folklore Adaptations
Available: Audiobook | Paperback | Hardcover | Kindle
More Dark Romance Books: 5 Books Like All The Ugly And Wonderful Things
Table of Contents
