It’s been a very long time since I’ve written an opinion piece where I’ve jumped into it as a freeform stream of consciousness as opposed to a thoroughly researched piece that’s been plotted and structured, so I hope you’re ready for a heck of a ride. I know I am cos I have no idea what’s coming next.
Hang tight… and be prepared for tangents—
The idea for this piece started when I picked up a book called Dream Man by Linda Howard to read. In order for me to set the scene and contextualize which I love to do, you need to know that the book was likely written in 1991 or 1992 and published in early 1994. This was a traditionally published book and for those who know, the time to market for a trad pubbed book is long and windy.
Dream Man, I discovered, was one of the earlier romantic suspense books written back in the day when romantic suspense started to take off. Before then Linda Howard was writing for Harlequin’s Silhouette imprint.
If you’re curious, the Harlequin Silhouette line of category romances was focused on being aggressively American contemporary stories with working-class or regional settings. Those books were raw, filled with intense emotional conflict, and the pacing much faster what readers were used to in the past. The line launched in 1980 and Linda Howard’s first book with them was published in 1984. You should also know the Silhouette imprint no longer exists and has been absorbed into other Harlequin imprints.
So, all of that to say that I’d heard of Dream Man. Heard that it was highly popular and held up as one of the best romantic suspense books of the era of early romantic suspense. And I’d heard of Linda Howard though I don’t think I’ve ever read any of her books.
To start, Linda Howard’s writing craft is bang on fantastic. Her opening paragraphs which I shared on my Substack kicked ass. I can see why, at the time, it was such a popular book and so highly lauded. A lot of my romance reading buddies back in the day raved about it. I just never got round to reading it.
I managed to get 23% into the book before I gave up. And I can already hear some of you saying, “But Deanna, why didn’t you finish it if you thought the writing was great?” Because as much as Linda Howard was a badass when it came to writing craft, I HATED her hero and the heroine was no prize either.
Dane Hollister was aggressive, coercive, borderline abusive, and even when he was actively falling for Marlie, he was resentful, belligerent, and a bully. He was angry about wanting Marlie and he showed it in his actions.
Marlie, on the other hand, was not a doormat—thank goodness for that, but she took his aggression too easily, forgave too easily, and was isolated, emotionally repressed, and distant.
Neither of them were a winning combination when it comes to a romance couple for me. I did not want Dane as a book boyfriend because he frequently used his size and his aggression to intimidate Marlie and to force her to do what he wanted. And he was a bully. Have I mentioned that yet? It bears repeating.
Also that whole bully romance thing—I never got it. I wrote about it, and I never got it. Because why would you fall in love with a dude who bullied you horribly, only to forgive him and swoon over him anyway?
We are not in kindergarten anymore, people. If that three-year-old boy pulls your pigtails because that’s his emotionally stunted way of showing you he likes you, that might be okay at age three, but it is not okay when you’re an adult.
It reminds me of this story I’m going to tell you about this guy I went to school with—see? Tangent…
Well, this guy—I was fortunate that he never bullied me and I do not know exactly why—but he bullied everyone else. Horribly. And yes, we’re still friends. We stayed friends through high school, uni days, his parents attended my wedding to Hubby, etc. I still chat occasionally with his brother. If he or his brother ever read this, they’d know I was referring to them, and that’s okay because him being a bully back in high school was no secret. We’ve discussed it extensively over the years as adults.
My point—he was a giant bully and he made many people’s lives miserable. One day, when we were chatting, he told me that as an adult, he tried to make restitution and apologize to everyone he bullied back during our school days. He contacted everyone he could and apologized for being such a dick to them. I think there was a reasonable amount of healing and forgiveness, except for one girl.
I remember her clearly. She was a brilliant, clever girl, and for whatever reason, she became the target of his bullying. When he eventually tracked her down to apologize and ask forgiveness, he told me she said no. Instead, she said to him that he made her life a misery, she had to change schools because of him, and she still carried the scars from those days of his bullying her. So no, she was not going to forgive him, and he was going to have to live with the fact that he hurt her horrendously.
So yeah, no. I do not understand bully romance. At. All. I’ve only ever read one where it was sort of maybe okay, and even then, it pushed some boundaries for me into places I was unwilling to go.
I eventually reached a point where, as much as I loved Linda Howard’s writing, I needed to stop reading the book because I hated her two main characters. I could admire her writing and execution of craft, but that did not compensate for the fact that I could not connect with her characters.
To understand why, you have to look at the timeline.
Dream Man being written in 1991 reflected the social and cultural mores of its time. We were still deep in the bodice ripper era, but the ripping was moving away from pirates and Vikings to cops, soldiers, and millionaires. We traded historical settings of the high seas and rogue pirates or dashing dukes for the (then) modern trappings of police stations, men in uniform, and carrying guns and badges instead of swords.
From the early to mid-1990s, we as a romance community—both authors and readers—were still trying to figure out whether to rip those bodices or not.
It was also the time when authors like Kay Hooper, Sandra Brown, Iris Johansen, and many of their ilk transitioned from the (then) contemporary romance to romantic suspense, and that balance between romance and suspense was still finding its feet.
Fast-forward a decade to the late 2000s, and those boundaries were getting tested hard. I remember reading a book back in the late 2000s which caused a huge stir and got called out for being rapey. The author almost got canceled for it. I’d read the book and thought it was edgy, gothic, and intense, but I’d also grown up reading historical romance from Mills and Boon, early Johanna Lindsey, Brenda Joyce, etc., in my late teens and early twenties, so my reaction was understandably different to the majority of the readers out there.
And then came the cultural earthquake. The grassroots conversations around consent that started in the mid-2000s gained viral traction and the hashtag in the late 2010s—October 2017 to be exact. Suddenly, the consent pendulum swung with violent momentum. Everyone was talking about it.
As readers, we worried that the alpha heroes we loved would become too soft, and as authors, they worried about characters not seeking and giving enough consent. And the consent pendulum swung too far one way or the other until we, collectively, as an industry figured it out.
Too much asking “is this okay?” felt like the author was shoving consent and #metoo down the readers’ throats. Too little of it felt like the author was not being sensitive or aware enough of the cultural shifts of not just readers, but what was happening to people in the real world.
And romance as a genre has always been on the bleeding edge of all the shifts associated with the human condition, because the romance genre was about the human condition. It was about connection, communication, relationship, and it was about people meeting, going on a journey, falling in love, and wanting forever with each other.
For romance to not represent the shifts in how we view and treat people as a whole would mean we were failing as a genre.
I’m not landing on one side or the other of the argument, but I think that the romance industry took a long time to figure out the Reader Contract and understanding what readers expect or want from their romance reads. And then packaging and labeling those books correctly so that readers KNOW what they are getting.
Readers today don’t get upset if books are graphic, dark, violent, or light, fluffy, sweet, or spicy, smutty, clean. They get upset when authors and publishers do not fulfill the first piece of the Reader Contract agreement which is the commercial packaging and genre signaling using the book covers.
Take Dane Hollister as the ultimate case study.
In 1994, Dane was packaged and sold as a standard, red-blooded mainstream alpha romance hero. He sat on supermarket spin-racks as a mass market paperback with a moody shadow and Venetian blinds on the cover, signaling mystery and alpha masculinity—because back then, a dominant cop throwing his physical weight around was just another Monday in the romance aisle.
If you published Dream Mann today with a standard, mainstream romantic suspense cover, modern readers would review-bomb it into the sun. Why? Because the packaging would feel like a betrayal of trust.
But if you were to flip the coin, what happens if you take that exact same overbearing, intimidating hero and package him today under modern Dark Romance?
Slap on a matte-black aesthetic, distressed typography, and clear content warnings, and modern readers will devour him by the tens of thousands. Why? Because the Reader Contract was honored before they ever turned a single page. They weren’t promised a healthy, emotionally available boyfriend. They were promised a morally gray, coercive anti-hero, and the packaging gave them the informed consent to enjoy the ride.
A reader will read a dark romance if the book tells them it’s a dark romance at a glance. That means a dark cover, maybe a stylised object cover, maybe a hero covered in tattoos. And a reader will read a fluffy light romance when they know that’s what they are getting with a bright, illustrated cover.
I talk a lot about the Reader Contract in my work with my authors. And I repeat ad nauseum that they need to fulfill the Reader Contract not just in what’s inside the book, but what’s on the outside cover because that’s the first thing they see. What’s on the cover outside needs to match what’s written in words on the inside.
Most of the commercial packaging and cover design that I do is less about designing a gorgeous cover (though that’s part of it), and more about making sure that if your book is a space opera, there’s a space station on the cover.
And if your book is a contemporary action romance, there’s a hero on the cover in a setting which shows off who he is and where the book is set.
Is he a European prince in the Swiss Alps? Hot guy in a bespoke tailored suit against the backdrop of a snowy mountain.
Is he a spy operating undercover in the Middle East? Hot guy in earth-toned shirt and pants coming out of an old tunnel.
Which brings this whole meandering loop right back to why I put Dream Man down at 23%—and why the publishing partner and strategist in my head couldn't stop analyzing what Deanna the Reader was feeling in her gut.
If you’ve stayed with me this far, this has been a long, meandering look at how, as readers—because I’m always a reader first and foremost—we’ve shifted as the world changed around us. And this leads to our expectations evolving over the years.
If I had picked up Dream Man and read it in 1995 or even the early 2000s, perhaps my reaction to it would have been different. Maybe I would have tolerated Dane being a giant brute with the emotional range of a dill pickle. Maybe I would have tolerated Marlie being emotionally unavailable.
But I didn’t.
I read it in 2026, after 15 years working in publishing, focused on the romance genre, and becoming a publishing partner. Where a large part of my job is advising my authors on what modern readers want while still holding onto their creative souls and unique author voice.
And in 2026, I can admire Dream Man as a beautifully written book in terms of craft and writing execution. But I can also objectively say the characters are not for me. It does not make Dream Man a bad book. It just makes Dream Man a book of its time, and for me, the people in the book and therefore the book itself, did not hold up to who I am today as a reader.
For me, as Deanna the Reader, it means that I should not read too many books written pre-2010s because I’ve changed so much as a person. I’d like to think I’ve grown and matured as a reader, even as I’ve matured in age. I am fifty-five after all.
I know who I am as a reader much more clearly now versus when I was in my teens, twenties, or thirties. And I would like to think that as I age, my reading boundaries will continue to broaden or contract as I change—but that’s a whole different topic and a whole different article if you’re ever curious about my thoughts and stance on it.
At this point, after all that meandering, I would usually invite you as a reader to provide me with your thoughts on the topic. Maybe you have fully formed opinions landing on one end of the scale or the other, maybe not. But I sincerely hope this gave you a little food for thought. Either way, I’d love to hear from you, so drop me a comment below, or you can also find me on Substack (I hang out there most these days), through my newsletter, via email, or on Facebook (less so on Facebook tho—it’s gotten a bit crazy on there).
xoxo, Deanna.
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