My Dark Romeo

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of sexual content and emotional abuse.

My Dark Romeo is a work of contemporary romance. True to the expectations of the genre, the novel employs literary tropes to inspire its primary conflicts, stakes, and themes. The most notable is the enemies-to-lovers trope, which fuels the inception and trajectory of Dallas Townsend and Romeo Costa’s complex romance. However, the authors also employ the arranged marriage, billionaire romance, and forced proximity tropes. Huntington and Shen establish immediate tension between the protagonists and intensify the narrative atmosphere using these familiar genre tropes.

In the enemies-to-lovers trope, the main characters “start out as enemies with either extreme hate or dislike actually hiding love and affection” (“The Ultimate Guide to Romance Genre and Romance Tropes.” She Reads Romance Books). Throughout the novel, the protagonists ultimately “end up overcoming that hate and falling in love” (“The Ultimate Guide”). These narrative principles apply to Dallas and Romeo’s relationship. Dallas hates Romeo after they get engaged because he’s taken her from Madison Licht, her family, and her home in Chapel Falls. Romeo hates Dallas because she’s petulant, immature, and sassy. He only marries her to secure the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) position at Costa Industries and emotionally manipulates her as a pawn in his game of revenge. However, because Dallas and Romeo have an innate chemistry, they soon become sexually intimate—a connection that grows into deep emotional love.

In My Dark Romeo, the arranged marriage and forced proximity tropes are entangled. In romance novels featuring arranged marriage tropes, the main characters are forced into marital unions “by other parties” and thus haven’t chosen to enter these relationships of their own volition. In My Dark Romeo, Dallas and Romeo become engaged after Romeo intentionally mortifies Dallas at the debutante ball—forcing her father to “give her over” to him to preserve Dallas’s reputation. This antiquated approach to marriage is a literary allusion to William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1595); it is also a symptom of Dallas and Romeo’s upper-class, conservative world. Because they’re forced to marry for money and reputation, Dallas and Romeo are thrust into forced proximity with each other. They must share a life and a house in Potomac. Dallas doesn’t have any friends or transportation in this world. She also doesn’t have any social, academic, or vocational outlets. She is thus trapped in a “gilded cage” with her new husband and has no choice but to try to make the relationship work.

The novel’s three primary tropes also create literary allusions to Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s classic fairy tale Beauty and the Beast (1740). In Beauty and the Beast, Belle becomes trapped in Beast’s sprawling, lonely mansion. The only outlet she has is the mansion’s library, where she disappears into fictional worlds to withstand her physical and relational entrapment. She also relies on her friendships with the witty staff to survive her new life. These same narrative principles apply to Dallas’s experience in My Dark Romeo. Dallas is trapped in Romeo’s palatial home and turns to books and Vernon and Hettie to quell her loneliness. These overlaps between the two stories lend an archetypal resonance to My Dark Romeo and the novel’s explorations of love, transformation, and trauma. The novel is also in conversation with other dark romance novels, including Chloe Gong’s These Violent Delights (2020), Brynne Weaver’s Butcher & Blackbird (2023), and Ana Huang’s Twisted Love (2021).