In a world of doomscrolling, romantasy offers a welcome escape

Given general events, you could be forgiven for missing a significant publishing milestone. Last week, the record for adult fantasy book sales was smashed, reaching a figure surpassing any since the record began. 

Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Splintered Harmony sold 1.7 million copies in pre-sales and day one sales. And that’s just in English. For the girls in the know, this will come as no surprise, as it is the sixth instalment of the A Court of Thorns and Roses, or ACOTAR franchise. It’s been long awaited, with five years passing since the fifth book in the series was released; until recently, fans thought it was the conclusion of the beloved series. 

But keeping it to a tidy five volumes wouldn’t have been very romantasy, renowned for long novels and longer series. For those of us who have read until the end of book six, we have consumed more than three thousand pages. The romance-meets-fantasy genre may well be keeping the global publishing industry profitable and the very idea of reading for fun accessible to a large audience. 

The genre is a worldwide phenomenon, and as one of its defenders, I can understand why. 

These books are gripping, propulsive and about fairies and quests. They’re the perfect way to tune out the responsibility and horror of the real world; with swords. They’re smutty, they have absolutely nothing to do with spreadsheets, inflation or traffic. And most importantly of all, these series of novels are not on our phones. It’s basically a mental health intervention to stop scrolling, plough into a 500 page novel and make it to the end. 

It must be said that one of the key appealing factors of the genre and Sarah J. Maas’s enormous body of work in particular, is the sex. It turns out fairies are into it. I think one of the reasons millions of us around the world are willing to cast our phones aside, sit down and tuck into hundreds of pages of made up flying creature stories is the tension, the build up and the er, release of the romantic storylines. With a female author and usually a female perspective, characters you’re invested in and a total commitment to everyone feeling safe and economically secure, it’s actually hot. 

It’s certainly a reason to keep reading from book four to book five. 

As for this latest novel, well you can tell that Sarah J is a woman who has sold a lot of books and knows it. Famously, attempted screen productions of her books have failed, as she has maintained all of her rights and wants a high level of involvement in all creative aspects of any possible adaptation. 

She has brought that energy to the latest ACOTAR release, which comes with a “how-to” guide at the start. I’m not sure I loved being told to flick to the back at the start before reading the full book, then having some random nonsequential snippets thrown in at the end. The book we were gratefully delivered in October was originally one part of a book so long that it couldn’t be physically glued together as one book, so she explains. So in fact the rest of that tome will be published in January. We’ll soon get another sugar hit, but it did mean book six ended strangely and somewhat abruptly.

The latest book does smack somewhat of an author whose editors are sitting back and letting her cook. There were a lot of pages dedicated to meetings. Not of the sexy rendezvous variety, but of the agenda-having and diplomatic overture variety. 

But believe me when I say, I don’t care. Being engrossed in a book series like this is something I haven’t experienced since my childhood. Sending deranged voice notes to friends about the plot and characters at all hours and digesting the fan theories on the internet is something that we rarely experience contemporaneously together for prestige tv anymore, let alone the sixth instalment of a book series.

So if you’ve had very little idea what I have been talking about so far, or are interested in demons, fairy politics and love affairs of different varieties, I highly recommend picking up a romantasy book. It’s good for publishing, and it’s good for your attention span. You won’t learn anything, but that’s ok, you’ll have plenty of friends to talk to about it.