Dark romance: Mzansi love stories with teeth

There is a version of this page written by people who have never read one of these books. It goes: dark romance is for damaged women. It is a warning dressed up as a description, and it is wrong.

The truth is duller and much more interesting. The woman reading this tonight read something gentle last week and will read something gentle next week. She is not a dark romance reader. She is a person with more than one side, and tonight she is in the mood for the one where the man is not safe.

It is more common than you think

That is the first thing worth saying out loud, because most people who like this believe they are the only one they know.

They are not. This is one of the largest romance categories in the world, and the women reading it are the ones sitting next to you at the school gate, in the taxi, in the pew. Nobody announces it. That is the only reason it looks rare.

If you have never tried it, the mistake is starting at the deepest end because that is what got recommended to you. Start shallow. Read one where the danger is a situation rather than a man, see how it sits, and go further only if you want to. Nothing on this shelf is a test.

The night the car dies

No Signal, by Zakes Mdluli, is where most readers should begin.

Zinhle and Njabulo have been together seven years and never anyone else. Then the car dies on a Waterberg gravel road — no signal, no traffic, one weathered board pointing eight kilometres down a farm track. They walk. The farm at the end of it is not what the board says it is, and the thing nobody is wearing turns out to be the least of what is going on there.

It works as a first dark romance because the danger arrives from outside the relationship. Two people who trust each other completely are put somewhere that tests it. You are never asked to root for a man who frightens you.

The ones who planned it

Then there is the register where somebody has been waiting for you, and did the arithmetic long before you walked in.

The Roommate Agreement is three chapters and one revelation: he picked the flat, planted the advertisement and waited seven months for the right person to answer it. Sindisiwe is short on rent again. The rent was never about money.

Paying In Kind is the same shape with the temperature up. Nomi is six weeks behind, her landlords invite her to dinner, and the menu is her. The Viewing puts it in a flat too perfect and too cheap, with an after-hours agent who is far too beautiful and a black kitten that keeps trying to warn her.

Read one of these and you will understand the genre's actual engine. It is not cruelty. It is the moment the floor tilts and you realise the conversation you thought you were having was a different conversation the whole time.

When the danger is the entire book

93 Days is the longest thing we publish and the darkest.

Ayanda Mabandla is two months into a job at a small Koue Bokkeveld newspaper when the most feared killer in the country asks for her by name. Vusi Hadebe has ninety-three days before they fly him to the gallows in Gaborone and he will speak to nobody else. She never understands why her — and by the time she does, it is far too late for either of them.

Sixty-three chapters. Do not start here. Come here once you already know you like the feeling.

The dark ones that are also love stories

The genre's best-kept secret is that some of these end well, and earn it.

The Tenant, by Nontsikelelo Mabaso, is the gentlest thing on this shelf. Irene Mavuso runs a backyard laundry in Chiawelo. A man arrives at her gate with a battered toolbox and six months' rent in cash, and quietly fixes the things she had stopped noticing were broken. Six weeks later she finds out what he is, and what her ex-husband did to both of them.

Good Girl is forty chapters about a twenty-one-year-old owed fourteen thousand rand by an ex who has vanished, who drives to Umhlanga to ask his estranged father for it, is mistaken for somebody else entirely, and kneels anyway. The Spirit's Slave is the only one with something on the other side of the mirror.

What we will and will not do

Every character in every story on this shelf is an adult. That is the one rule and it does not bend.

Past that, these books go where the genre goes, and they can, because of the thing you already know: you are holding the book. You can shut it. That is precisely what makes it safe to want something on the page that you would run from in a parking lot.

What we will not do is careless. The men are written as men rather than monsters with good jawlines, and the women are never stupid — they see it coming and walk in anyway, for reasons the story makes you understand. Every one is set somewhere real: a Waterberg farm road, a Durban block of flats, a Johannesburg high-rise after hours. Black South African characters, illustrated throughout with art made for these stories.

If you want the wanting without the teeth, Slow Burn Romance is next door. If you want the negotiated version, where everything is agreed in advance, that is BDSM Stories.

Start free

Chapter one of every story here is free — no signup, no card. Start with No Signal if you are new to this, Paying In Kind if you want to know quickly whether it is for you, and 93 Days when you are ready to lose a week.