Dark Fiction Grew Across the Board in 2025, Not Just Romance

Circana BookScan’s mid-2025 report put psychological thrillers up 29%, dark fantasy up 23%, and horror up 13%.

I’ve written about dark romance’s bestseller-list gains before, the self-pub share, the imprint wave, all of it. What Circana’s tracking here is a different, wider story: the appetite for dark material isn’t isolated to romance readers picking spicier covers. Psychological thrillers, dark fantasy, and horror are all growing at the same time, in the same market, alongside the genre I actually cover. That’s not four separate trends. That’s one reader mood showing up everywhere at once.

It also reframes something I hear a lot, that dark romance is a fluke, a TikTok accident that’ll fade once the algorithm moves on. A single genre spiking is easy to write off as a trend. Three adjacent categories climbing alongside it, tracked by the same data firm that tracks actual point-of-sale numbers, is harder to wave away. Readers wanted fiction that goes somewhere uncomfortable, and they were buying it across every shelf that offers it.

One caveat: the report is from June 2025 and doesn’t spell out the exact period behind those percentages, so read them as a snapshot of 2025 growth, not a live number. I don’t think this changes what any of us are already reading. It just means the rest of the industry is finally catching up to the mood the dark-romance corner of the internet has been living in for a while.

Bloodthorn · suvienur.com