“Women’s issues horror fiction” has bloomed into its own hot subgenre, and no one is more thrilled than me. On some level, this subgenre arches back across generations (see: the gothic novel)—but I’m referring more specifically the spate of novels that has crashed onto the market since 2021 or so: Consider, for example, Sarah Rose Etter’s Ripe, Mona Awad’s Rouge and All’s Well, Eshani Surya’s Ravishing, Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation as an earlier proto-entry (yes, I count this one, sue me), Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers, Helen Phillips’s Hum, Sierra Greer’s Annie Bot, or Rachel Harrison’s Play Nice.

This is a highly commercial subgenre with mainstream crossover appeal. These books take the pacey, voicey style of commercial fiction, throw in something weird—like a floating black hole, a faintly post-apocalyptic setting, or a skin cream that eats your memories—and then use that combo to highlight a societal horror that American women face today. Love it.

But even while underscoring the tools of control that the American patriarchy uses against women—beauty standards, eating disorders, capitalism, the expectations of motherhood, male sexual demands, etc., etc.—the vast majority of these books share one additional element:

A cis, heterosexual romantic subplot.

In other words, the characters within this subgenre, even while freeing themselves from makeup or their terrible sexist jobs, still lock themselves into a patriarchal structure.

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I am not immune to this. In my recent novel, Until Death, I aimed to highlight the horror of the wedding-industrial complex. American wedding culture combines wild expense, unreasonable demands from friends and family, and intense cultural pressure to make women feel like garbage. In Until Death, I blended an aggressive voice (the novel’s first line is “In January, I looked at my mother and thought, Someone should kill her”) with a commercial plot, some very weird creepy plants, and . . .

. . . A will-they-won’t-they Hallmark-style romance subplot.

The romance is far from the focus of the book. (Romance readers have not failed to notify me of this.) But it’s still there. You could argue that a book about weddings kind of has to have a romantic arc, but . . . why?

Why, in a book that’s basically explicitly saying, Hey, the expectations and pressures of our patriarchal society are bad, did I make sure to caveat that this part—the romance part, the hooking-yourself-to-a-man part, the part that all the rest of the patriarchal standards are founded on—this part, we should keep?

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In Rouge (by Mona Awad), dress shop clerk Mirabelle, mired in the cold and muddy waters of Montreal, returns to southern California upon her estranged mother’s mysterious death. There, she’s sucked into the web of the creepy medspa that enthralled and probably killed her mother.

I love Rouge. As a novel, it’s deliciously tense, marvelously evocative, emotionally complicated, and thematically tight and resonant. And as a takedown of the beauty industry that throttles American women every day—all while making us believe it isn’t a throttle, but an embrace—it’s crystal-clear and pulls no punches. Rouge is an intensely female book, a pushback against the patriarchy.

It also offers Mirabelle not one but two love interests. And the novel’s final image depicts Mirabelle not with her mother (though the last scene with Mirabelle and her mother did make me cry), but Mirabelle with a man.

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Same with Play Nice [Rachel Harrison]. One of the epigraphs to Play Nice is: “Behind every crazy woman is a man sitting very quietly, saying, ‘What? I’m not doing anything,’” from Jade Sharma’s 2016 novel Problems. The book is an excavation of the protagonist Clio’s relationship with her family, following her parents’ ugly divorce, her mother’s death, and her mother’s attempt to tell her own story. One of the book’s very straightforward takeaways, so straightforward that I don’t even consider it a spoiler (it’s in the epigraph!), is: Men like to pretend women are crazy for their own benefit.

In other words, like Rouge, Play Nice is coming for the patriarchy. Rouge executes its takedown on a larger scale, eviscerating the patriarchal beauty industry, whereas Play Nice’s scalpel is smaller; it targets the patriarchal dynamics within our own relationships.

Yet Clio also gets a male love interest.

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Finally, Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers takes aim at what might be the oldest, ugliest, most insidious patriarchal expectation of all: that mothers be perfect all the goddamn time.

At the start of the book, single mother Frida finds herself in an impossible situation, and she’s forced to leave her toddler alone for two hours. For this, her child is taken away and given to her father and her father’s girlfriend, and Frieda is sent to the titular “school for good mothers,” a cross between a prison and a reform school.

What’s interesting is that there is also a school for good fathers. Obviously, in real life and in the book, fathers are not held to the same impossible standard as mothers. But the parallel school presents an opportunity for Frida to—yes indeed—fall in love with a dude.

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I want to be really clear: I love all these books. I once met Jessamine Chan, and I told her, quite truthfully, that I wouldn’t care how long it took me to publish a book, as long as the book I eventually published was half as good as The School for Good Mothers. Rachel Harrison is an icon. And I am such a huge Mona Awad fan, I attended one of her launch events in costume.

And none of these novels are true romances. It would be a lie to say that Rouge ends in a happily-ever-after. Frieda’s romance in The School for Good Mothers is actually bad for her, although it can be argued that this is not due to the romance itself, but because of the expectations of the school.

But still, why do even our wildest, most feminist, most horror-steeped book-howls insist on heterosexual love? Why, even when we drive home the message that men and their systems treat women badly, do we insist that being in a relationship with a man is desirable?

This paradox troubles me because I grapple with it in my own life. I wrote a book about why weddings, if not marriage, are bad for women. I actually do believe that marriage, structurally, is bad for women. And yet . . .

And yet, I got married.

And I gave the protagonist of Until Death a love interest. Even after I put her through wedding hell.

How can I justify my own decisions?

Part of it is the book market. We do live in a patriarchal society, and the market lives within the confines of that society. A book that says No, being with men is bad, actually, might be a little too spicy, a little too niche, for the commercial subgenre that is “women’s issues horror fiction.” A romance subplot is an easy way to give a book a shot at a wider audience, especially considering the popularity of romance.

And heterosexual romance, if you can manage to strip the patriarchy away from it (can you?), is fundamentally about love. In my personal life, I wanted to marry my partner. I thought about it for a very long time, and ultimately I concluded that I felt a sense of warmth and safety with him that I did not believe possible until I encountered it. I still do. To cut myself off from that would feel like a cruelty I was inflicting not on Society or Men, but on myself. I decided—maybe naïvely, only time will tell—to believe that my partner and I could build our own happy, healthy, equal marriage within the confines of a system that usually doesn’t look like that. And I wanted Until Death’s protagonist to feel the same way. Why should she, after the harrowing events of the novel, be cut off from love? Why, in the name of structural justice, should she have to suffer more?

But it’s because I continually confront this paradox in my life, and in the pages of my own work, that I find it so disturbing when I encounter it elsewhere in the genre. Even when we are yelling about the box of the patriarchy, it feels like we are failing to acknowledge the walls of the box. I am worried, in fact, that we cannot even see the walls of the box. I am worried that we think we are in a fairly large, room-sized box, but we’re actually in a Matilda-style Chokey. I am worried that the walls of this box are a whole lot closer to our bodies than we would ever care to admit.