Crown Me Dead

Liv Zander’s Crown Me Dead has gained significant visibility through BookTok, a TikTok-based literary community that has played an important role in bringing new authors like Zander to prominence and widespread success. This more informal path to publication has also helped to accelerate the blending of various genres into distinct subgenres that offer their own unique flavor and style. The dark romance subgenre—of which Zander’s work is a part—merges the complex alternative worlds of high-stakes fantasy with the grittier elements of dark romance, emphasizing the dynamics of violent, coercive romantic relationships. Stories in this category often feature morally ambiguous male and female leads and envision sexual scenes of dubious consent, sometimes going so far as to glorify interactions involving outright sexual assault and psychological abuse. Prime titles in the dark romance subgenre include Hooked (the first installment in Emily McIntire’s Never After series) and Butcher & Blackbird, which begins Brynne Weaver’s Ruinous Love series.

While Zander’s Heartstring Duet conforms to the conventions of dark romance, her reliance on the patterns of high-stakes fantasy to create an alternative world more accurately classifies her work as dark romantasy, and Crown Me Dead also contains elements of the nascent subgenre of horror romance (colloquially known as “horrormance”).