Tempting Venom belongs to the sports romance genre, which combines an athletic setting with a central romantic relationship. In the novel, college hockey provides an important setting for Preston and Marcus’s rivalry: they play for opposing teams, and their competition on the ice contributes to the antagonism that develops into sexual and romantic attraction. Their rivalry also gives them repeated opportunities for confrontation, particularly because Preston deliberately provokes opposing players to disrupt their performance. Marcus proves unusually resistant to this strategy and eventually succeeds in provoking Preston instead.

A convention particularly relevant to Tempting Venom is the enemies-to-lovers trope, in which antagonism between the central characters develops into a romantic relationship. In Preston and Marcus’s case, their existing hockey rivalry provides the basis for increasingly personal confrontations before either character acknowledges his attraction to the other.

The novel belongs more specifically to M/M sports romance, which centers romantic relationships between male characters within an athletic setting. Rachel Reid’s 2019 novel Heated Rivalry, which follows a long-term secret relationship between rival professional hockey players Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, is an example of the category. M/M sports romances such as Heated Rivalry can use the contrast between public athletic identities and private relationships to address sexuality and secrecy. These concerns are particularly relevant to Tempting Venom, whose author note explicitly identifies both external and internalized homophobia among the novel’s subjects.

This context helps situate Preston’s difficulty acknowledging his attraction to Marcus within the novel’s combination of queer romance and competitive hockey. Their relationship develops from an established athletic rivalry into sexual and romantic attraction while remaining shaped by Preston’s internalized homophobia and Vencor’s rule that gay members are punished by death. The sports-romance framework therefore provides a context for understanding how the competition between Preston and Marcus creates many of the confrontations through which their antagonism and attraction develop.