In the autumn of 2010, Lynne Freeman, a family-law attorney and an unpublished author, put the final touches on her first novel, “Blue Moon Rising.” The story revolved around a teen-age girl named Anna who falls in love with a werewolf and learns that she has magical powers. It was a fantasy, but it drew on Freeman’s own experiences growing up in Alaska. For years, Freeman had been fiddling with the material, imagining and reimagining characters, revisiting childhood memories. She even dreamed about the idea, and kept notes on it in a shoebox in her bedroom. In 2002, after becoming pregnant with twins, Freeman lost one of the babies and gave birth prematurely. Long nights lay ahead. She spent them caring for her son and working on her book.
A few months after she’d finished, in December, 2010, Freeman signed with an agent, Emily Sylvan Kim, the founder of Prospect Agency, a small firm based out of Kim’s home, in New Jersey. Kim, a slight woman with a youthful aura and a bright, clenched smile, struck Freeman as a kindred spirit—she’d launched her own business, just as Freeman had, and she’d even briefly attended law school. For the next three years, Freeman and Kim worked together to expand and refine the manuscript.
Kim sent pitches of “Blue Moon Rising” to more than a dozen publishers. The results were discouraging. “I thought the writing, the storytelling, in this manuscript was simply wonderful,” one e-mail read, but “we are . . . looking for things that fall into a newer territory.” Another editor wrote,“While the writing is really great and Anna was a very likable heroine, I worry that there are not enough new and different elements to the story here that would set it apart from the rest of the novels in the competitive paranormal/romance/YA market.” By March, 2014, all but one of the publishers had rejected the book, and Kim and Freeman parted ways. Freeman withdrew her outstanding submission from the final publisher, a press called Entangled.
In 2021, Freeman and her son, now a senior in high school, stopped at a bookstore in Santa Barbara on the way to receive their COVID vaccinations. Freeman, lingering in the young-adult section, picked out a book called “Crave,” by the author Tracy Wolff. She liked the cover: black with a large, bloodstained white flower in the center. It reminded her of “Twilight.” By the time she got home, she was already noticing muscle pain and fever from the vaccine. She began reading the novel, which was published by Entangled, and experienced a panic attack, the first she’d had in five years.
Freeman immediately spotted similarities to her own unpublished book. The main character was named Grace, not Anna, and her love interest was a vampire, not a werewolf, but in both stories the heroine moves from San Diego to Alaska after members of her family are killed in an accident. She lives with the only two relatives she believes she has left, both of whom are witches. A female rival slips her drugs. There’s an intimate moment under the northern lights. In a climactic scene, an evil vampire kidnaps her, and she ends up accidentally freeing a different vampire, whose return is said to herald the end of the world. (In Freeman’s planned sequel and Wolff’s actual ones, this vampire replaces the previous hero as the main character’s primary love interest.)
In addition to what Freeman felt to be the books’ obvious similarities, “Crave,” to her mind, contained details that could only have come from her, from her life. The novel’s opening scene describes flying in a puddle jumper above the Alaskan landscape. Freeman’s grandfather had been a bush pilot: she recalls reminiscing to Kim about what it had been like to go up in his tiny plane. A fantastical chessboard figures early on in “Crave”; a wall-size painting of a fantastical chessboard hangs in Freeman’s office. Wolff’s heroine is revealed to be a gargoyle. Freeman collects gargoyles—they guarded the path to the front door of her former home.
A Google search revealed that Tracy Wolff was a nom de plume for Tracy Deebs, a star client of Freeman’s former agent, Emily Sylvan Kim. Kim had introduced Freeman and Deebs at a Romance Writers of America conference in 2012. (Wolff and Kim claim to have no recollection of this meeting.) The name Stacy Abrams, which appeared in the acknowledgments section of Wolff’s book, was another pinprick. Abrams was the editor who had fielded Freeman’s book submission at Entangled. Freeman grew convinced that Kim and Liz Pelletier, the publisher and C.E.O. of Entangled, had shared the manuscript of “Blue Moon Rising” with Wolff and used it as the basis for the “Crave” series.
On February 7, 2022, Freeman, who had hired a lawyer, sent a letter threatening legal action to Kim, Wolff, Entangled, the company’s distributor Macmillan, and Universal Studios, which had optioned a film project based on the “Crave” books. “I really assumed that they would just apologize and fix it,” Freeman said. But, two days later, the Entangled counsel issued an icy response stating that “neither Pelletier nor Wolff ever heard of Freeman, read her ten-year old manuscript nor were aware of any details concerning the Freeman work.” The attorney added, “The agent, Kim, recalls nothing of this manuscript.” Freeman’s allegations were “speculative, unfounded, and easily rebutted as fanciful.” A month later, Freeman filed a copyright-infringement lawsuit. The litigation, which is ongoing, has cost Freeman several hundred thousand dollars and the defendants more than a million dollars.
The “Crave” series belongs to a powerhouse genre known as “romantasy”—romance plus fantasy. Stories have mingled love and magic for centuries, but the portmanteau crystallized as a market category during the pandemic. Works such as Sarah J. Maas’s novel “A Court of Thorns and Roses,” about a nineteen-year-old girl who falls in love with a fae high lord, surged in popularity, offering escape to readers stuck at home, often with company that was harder to view as enchanting under the circumstances. “The genre really caters to this perspective of, ‘If your life were going to be different, if you were plucked out of this reality, what would your dream reality be?,’ ” Emily Forney, an agent who works with young-adult and fantasy authors, told me. Romantasy sells a lightly transgressive form of wish fulfillment that holds out the enthralling promise of sex with vampires, manticores, werewolves, and other types of monsters and shape-shifters. (There’s even a “cheese-shifter” paranormal romance, by the author Ellen Mint, in which characters can turn into different types of cheese.)
In the past several years, the genre has attained a remarkable fandom. Print sales of romance novels more than doubled between 2020 and 2023. Meanwhile, the number of romance-focussed bookstores in the United States, with whimsical names such as the Ripped Bodice and Beauty and the Book, has swelled from two to more than twenty. Romantasy is helping to drive that boom. Publishers Weekly reported in October that five of the ten top-selling adult books of 2024 were written either by Maas or by her fellow romantasy icon Rebecca Yarros: the authors, combined, had sold more than 3.65 million copies of their novels in the first nine months of the year. A National Endowment for the Arts survey found that the number of Americans who reported finishing a single book in a year declined about six per cent between 2012 and 2022, but romantasy’s mostly female readers seem exempt from that downturn. They gather at midnight release parties and ardently break down their favorite titles on BookTok, a literary alcove of TikTok, where the hashtag for Maas’s series, #ACOTAR, has earned more than a billion views.
Many of these readers are millennials who grew up on “Harry Potter” and “Twilight” and expected more of the same once adulthood struck. Maas was among the first to acknowledge the sexual maturation of her audience. Although “A Court of Thorns and Roses,” published in 2015, featured mild erotic content by romance standards, it was far steamier than most Y.A. (“We moved together, unending and wild and burning, and when I went over the edge the next time, he roared and went with me.”) Love scenes in the later books went further, often adding anatomical specificity. In 2020, Maas’s publishers changed up their marketing strategy, causing the series to be rehomed in the adult section. “It birthed this genre of romantasy,” Cassandra Clare, the author of the best-selling fantasy series “The Mortal Instruments,” told me, “which to me is books that contain a lot of the tropes that make Y.A. popular but also have explicit sex in them.”
In some respects, romantasy has the feel of young people’s literature. The themes are Pixar-coded—forgiveness, compassion, overcoming adversity, celebrating difference—with a swoosh of black eyeliner. Cat Clyne, an editor at the Harlequin imprint Canary Street Press, described the genre as more welcoming than twentieth-century fantasy, which many readers now see as sexist. Romantasy “is emotion-positive—it’s about communication and falling in love,” she told me. “There’s less emphasis on world-building” and more on representing “strong female characters.”
Despite the genre’s egalitarian spirit, the most prominent romantasy authors are white. A reductive but not entirely spurious industry archetype has emerged, of temperamentally if not politically conservative women, often mothers, who find in their writing a means to success outside a traditional career path. “Twilight,” the precursor to today’s paranormal-romance novels, transformed Stephenie Meyer, a Mormon stay-at-home mother of three, into a millionaire. Yarros is a mother of six and a military spouse who began writing when her husband was deployed to Afghanistan. Like Freeman, Wolff first attempted commercial fiction after her son was born prematurely. Between 2007 and 2018, she published more than sixty romance, urban-fantasy, and young-adult novels, but it was not until she wrote a vampire-gargoyle love story that she shot to the top of the New York Times best-seller list. In April of 2024, Publishers Weekly reported that the six-volume “Crave” series had sold more than three and a half million copies worldwide.
All genre fiction (and arguably all fiction) is patterned on tropes, or received bits of narrative. But tropes have assumed a new importance in the creation and marketing of romantasy. On BookTok, users sort and tag titles by trope (#morallygreymen, #reverseharem, #daggertothethroat), allowing authors to tune their creative process to the story elements that are getting the most attention online. Entangled, “Crave” ’s publisher, gives visitors to its Web site the option to browse its selection by tropes such as “enemies-to-lovers” and “marriage of convenience.” Entangled editors fill out a form for every work they acquire; on the version of the form I viewed, there were fields in which to specify “tropes,” “paranormal elements,” “authors similar to,” “Heat level” (on a five-point scale from “mild” to “scorcher”), and the ratio of romance to suspense (from a maximum of 100/0 to a minimum of 20/80).
