I sometimes have a really difficult time reading dark erotica in contemporary settings. It’s fairly popular (if you know what you’re looking for) to find kidnapping, and sexual slavery, and rape erotica. There’s a lot of absolutely fantastic authors like Skye Warren, Kitty Thomas and C.J. Roberts (who I call the triforce of rape fantasies), and their stories make you feel.

I mean they take your guts and twist them until you just can’t read any more – but you can’t stop, either. They are horrific and arousing and sexy and sad all at once.

I love their plots, but I find them so emotionally draining because of the baggage I carry in, and just how realistic they sometimes seem.

My partner and I have a hard time writing contemporary novels in general, but it becomes an impossible task when you throw in these dark elements of society. We end up feeling so guilty and terrible that it just gets put in our scrap pile.

This isn’t to say anything against the authors I named above, of course. In fact, it makes them more amazing to me because they were able to write such powerful, heartwrenching work. You can tell that a lot of them went into their books, and they’re just amazing.

But Joshua and I have to scale things back, and that’s one of the reasons we love writing in scifi and fantasy universes. There’s less baggage, there’s less emotional triggers, and while that can be both a good and a bad thing, for us it gives us more freedom.

Not just the freedom to write these dark erotic stories, but to really make the world something that would contribute to the setting. I know grimdark is often a word used in fanfiction for it, but I like to use it anyways. It conveys a mood and atmosphere to a work, and it’s one that definitely suits dark erotica.

This is also what we want to read. Fantasy and scifi is the perfect setting for these dark sexual slavery, rape, kidnapping stories. There are so many books out there that hint at the seedy underbelly of these fantastical societies, but there’s still so few authors that are writing fantasy and scifi erotica. It’s something we want to read, and have been looking to read for years, so for us it’s just the natural step that we should write it.

Often times, in our writing process, I’ll come up with an idea I want to write. Sometimes it’s something simple, like I really want to write about a dominant male. We’ve written tons of books with dominant men, mostly because of me, and the further it gets from reality, the darker it gets, typically.

For instance, our Naughty Tiffany series deals with a lot of taboo relationships – 18 year old student/teacher, daddy/daughter, brother/sister, gangbang, sexual harassment, dubious consent – but it’s light hearted. It’s still sexy, it’s still dark, but it isn’t as gritty as it could be. Part of this is because of certain vendor’s limitations on what we can write, but part of it is also because of our own hangups.

Meanwhile, Demon’s Den contains autoerotic asphyxiation. Threats of death. Huge insertions. Dangerous sex without safewords. It packs in a lot of really dark fetishes… and it’s a fantasy inspired by Dungeons & Dragons and World of Warcraft. Into Shadows is a serialized novel that we’re in the process of publishing that explores a world ruined by war, and class warfare. It’s a hard hitting story that really explores very human, contemporary issues but in a fantasy setting. I think it allows us to more honestly criticize society without getting drawn into the realities of politics and criminal activity and gender roles in specifics.

For us, it’s just easier to explore these things when the characters aren’t in a contemporary setting, and it allows us a lot of emotional freedom. We can bring up issues without needing to provide solutions, or just start a conversation about the things going on in our world that we can or should change.

So yes, for us, dark and taboo erotica in a fantasy setting is what we’re truly passionate about. What about you? Do you prefer the realism of contemporary, or the separation and enjoyment from fantasy?