Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses sexual assault and sexual abuse.

Dark romance is a controversial genre that uses themes and elements from both the horror and romance genres, mixing narrative tropes and techniques from each. Romance focuses on the ways in which characters meet and fall in love, often in idyllic or romanticized settings. Popular romances tend to use stock character archetypes, traditional gendered performances, and elongated sexual scenes to convey the narrative arc from meeting through to a committed, monogamous relationship. Dark romance uses horror and suspense themes to question the relative morality of the characters involved in the romance, casting their love story in a contextual setting that is meant to disturb or unsettle the reader while maintaining the elements of eroticism and romance.

Dark romance does not always involve sexual assault, abuse, or murder, but Carlton uses these topics in Where’s Molly?, much as she does in her other novels, to push the boundaries of this genre. As with Carlton’s other works, the trigger warnings included in the opening of the novel speaks to the fact that it leans into the more disturbing elements of human sexuality and sexual expression.