Romantasy & Fantasy Reading List
(Tristan & Isolde by John Waterhouse)
As promised, a break down of recommendations in the romantasy genre. And if you want a brilliant defense of this genre, watch Natalie Wynn’s most recent video lecture on Twilight and romance.
The Originals
Back when I was a voracious twelve year old who loved love stories, Tolkien, King Arthur, and world-building while also having a growing penchant for “smut” and fanfiction culture (the internet fanfiction chatboards of the early 2000s were a wild and liberatory place for a queer young adult. A place to “take back” stories that deliberately didn’t want to include us”)I encountered several books that kindled my passion. Here are the original fantasy and what I’ll claim are romantasy books that claimed my heart.
Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
I will never forget stealing this book from my mom’s pile of beach reads on a family vacation and reading it in one gulp. I also loved the next two books in the series but felt that Gabaldon would have been better served by a tight ending rather than expanding the series beyond its natural arc.
And yeah, the TV show is HOT and the intro song is a brain worm.
Vampire Chronicles and Mayfair Witches by Anne Rice
If there is one writer to whom I owe the most, I think it may be Anne Rice. I found her books as a young adult struggling with queerness, PTSD, and a longing for books with moral universes big enough to encompass the darkness I knew firsthand. Lestat, Louis, Claudia, Armand, Marius, and all of Rice’s amazing characters met me and held me. It didn’t surprise me years later when I learned the first of the series Interview with a Vampire was written after the premature death of her daughter. These were realms where shame and guilt and sorrow were composted with the long arc of many lives and expansive eroticism. I also reveled in Rice’s ability to laugh at genre. To break the rules.Her writing is impeccably historically researched, lush, and literary but she also loves to include “spicy” queer scenes that are as outrageous as anything you’d find in a bodice ripper. Her books including the Mayfair Witches series showed me that a love of historical fiction, poetic prose, and scandalous spice could be united in one story.
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