The Completely Depraved Truth About BookTok

CULTURE

Investigating the new smut economy

By Nathan Baker · November 10, 2026 · 12 min read

Helping a friend market his book earlier this year, I fell down a rabbit hole where masked men chased women through the woods to the delight of thousands of thirsty goonettes. Men in biker helmets humped selfie cameras, saying things like, “how does it feel being fucked on top of a stranger’s grave?” What I had discovered was the dark romance BookTok community, a horny book club of female readers on TikTok.

Morning Glory Milking Farm went viral in 2025. I wanted to believe it was just an exaggerated example of female desire. Something meme-worthy for the masses. I wasn’t fully aware of how dark women’s desires had become, or the booming cultural complex that was feeding off them.

BOOKTOK & THE SMUT BOOM

BookTok began as an innocent space for young women on TikTok to talk about literature. It exploded in popularity during COVID. The media gushed and marketers drooled. It was described as “the last wholesome place on the internet” in a 2020 spotlight piece by The Guardian.

But it didn’t take long for this corner of the internet to lose its innocence.

According to Pew Research, women read more on average than men. And they’re largely reading Romance novels, the highest-grossing fiction genre, which accounted for $1.44 billion in revenue from 2022-2023. This surge in revenue overlapped with the rise of BookTok, where romance sales saw a 52.4% increase from 2021-2022, followed by another 34.6% increase in 2023.

But “Romance” is doing a lot of legwork here. The real story is the explosion of smut.

As data journalist Daniel Parris⁠ put it: “Smut is a tongue-in-cheek term embraced by romance readers to describe stories with explicit emphasis on sexual content. The moniker becomes even more playful when combined with romance subgenres. There’s fae smut (fairy romance with an erotic tilt), werewolf smut, hockey smut, and countless other micro-categories that guide readers to their preferred story format. Once a word meant to describe soil-feeding fungi—smut has been reclaimed as a term of endearment.”

“Romance” took a dark turn in 2025. Brenna Connor, U.S. books industry analyst at the market research firm Circana, noted: “This year, I am watching a shift away from rosier romance subjects like romantic comedy and new adult romance in favor of authors and titles with darker themes.”

Dark romance is now dominating the space. Browse the #BookTok hashtag on TikTok and you’ll see women raving about books like Lights Out by Navessa Allen. It’s about an ER nurse named Aly Cappellucci who likes to look at the TikTok thirst traps of an anonymous masked man known as "the.faceless.man." The masked man is Josh Hammond, an IT professional and hacker who stalks Aly throughout the novel. He’s also the biological son of an infamous serial killer, which is why he hides his identity with a blue skull mask.

One night, Aly drunkenly messages the.faceless.man and asks him to break into her house. He takes her up on the offer and a morally gray relationship ensues, where they act out her fantasy of being hunted, including the kinky use of guns, restraints, and a unique form of knifeplay:

‘I stabbed the knife down. Straight into the corner of her mattress. She clapped her hands over her mouth to muffle her horrified scream. I crooked a finger at her, beckoning her forward. “Come here, Aly,” I said, wrapping my other hand around the knife handle so there would be no mistaking my intent. “I want to watch you ride it.”’

Lights Out is having an impact on female sexuality. One reviewer wrote: “Prior to reading Lights Out, I wouldn’t have said I was a masked stalker romance girlie. New kink unlocked.”

Another said: “This book is spicy. The trigger warnings are long for a reason. If you’ve got some kinks or want to unlock a new kink, this book might be a fun one to check out. Mask play, knife play, anal, consensual non-consent. The list was uh pretty long.”

There’s also “Romantasy,” another hot subgenre on BookTok where even mythical creatures are becoming objects of desire. Conversation around the Empyrean Series by Rebecca Yarros trends toward a dragon character named Tairn that women are apparently attracted to.

While the series doesn’t feature explicit human-on-dragon smut, it’s generating demand for it.

Tairn, as a dragon, isn’t the romantic lead. A young woman named Violet is forced to attend a dragon-riding school. She forms a bond with Tairn while learning to “ride” him. The dragon has a commanding and booming personality that has inspired an enthusiastic fandom, leaving many women with a strange attraction to him that transcends species.

BOOK BOYFRIENDS

As women are falling for fictional characters like the.faceless.man and Tairn the dragon, men on TikTok are taking notice and capitalizing on the demand. Enter: MaskTok, the BookTok-adjacent subculture where men aim to fulfill the fantasies of dark romance readers. These men take on the role of the “book boyfriend,” what is typically a male main character (MMC), often masked, that readers develop a crush on.

There’s Scream for Us by Molly Doyle, a “reverse-harem” dark romance novel where three masked men at a Halloween party pursue the female main character (FMC), one of which wears the ghost mask popularized by the Scream movies.

There’s Dark Obsessions by Effie Campbell, a “dark mafia romance” involving a man in a skull mask who’s stalking the FMC. She has a boyfriend who has become distant, leading her to feel a horny sense of excitement for this masked stalker that has creeped into her life. She receives a mysterious invitation from the stalker to meet him in a forest to play a “game.” She goes along with it and ends up getting chased by him through the woods. He eventually catches her, pins her down, binds her, and she likes it.

This is a scene that’s frequently reenacted in MaskTok videos. Search “dark obsession chase” or “dark romance chase” on TikTok and you’ll see countless videos dramatizing the same scenario.

The men of MaskTok pump out thirst trap content on the daily, playing into all the dark romance tropes. Obsession. Control. Possessiveness. Stalking. Abduction. Psychopathy. Knifeplay. Ropeplay. And masks. Always Masks.

It’s a sophisticated form of male pickmeism, where men go to extraordinary lengths to appeal to women by performing whatever they find desirable. It’s also a way to make a living. A perfect setup to say “OF link in bio” after you’ve developed a cult following.

MaskTok creators come in a variety of flavors. Ghost mask. Skull mask. Ski mask. Then there’s the biker helmet guys, who represent another BookTok-adjacent subculture: BikeTok.

The rivalry between MaskTok and BikeTok is an inside joke in the BookTok community. Both represent the mysterious and morally gray bad boy book boyfriend archetype. The men behind MaskTok and BikeTok are competing to take the throne of best book boyfriend.

To win the hearts of the BookTok gooners, BikeTok creators started performatively reading Haunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton, a dark romance and psychological thriller novel that went viral on TikTok as women shared their shocked reactions to its graphic sexual content, disturbing themes, and dangerously obsessive male protagonist. It features one of the most popular and controversial book boyfriends: Zade Meadows. The book really doesn’t have anything to do with motorcycles, yet the biker boys of TikTok have adopted the Zade Meadows persona, making female fans of the book swoon.

The book comes with a slew of trigger warnings. Stalking and obsession. Sexual assault and non-consensual acts. Violence and murder. Human trafficking and child sacrifice. Mental illness and trauma. Trigger warnings as menu text.

The story involves an FMC named Adeline Reilly who is being stalked by Zade Meadows. When Zade’s not busy breaking into Adeline’s house and leaving her roses, he’s focused on his mission to stop human traffickers. He started out as a hacker who saw the horrors of sex trafficking and child sacrifice on the dark web, leading him to form a vigilante organization that combats traffickers and takes down corrupt governments. He’s also 6’7” and independently wealthy. He has been described as “the walking red flag with devotion so unhinged it rewires your standards.”

When Adeline brings a guy home from a club one night, Zade gets jealous, captures and tortures the guy, then sends his severed hands to Adeline to demonstrate how possessive he is over her. He later breaks into Adeline’s home and rapes her multiple times. He even penetrates her with a gun. Adeline eventually falls in love with him.

Women go crazy for Zade Meadows. They’ll post videos saying why they love him, and it’s usually in reference to some quote from the book about how obsessed he is with the FMC. Lines like, “Baby, you rule the fucking kingdom, and I will gladly bow to you.”

Zade is described as handsome with black hair and heterochromia, meaning each of his eyes is a unique color, one being black and the other a striking blue. He’s buff, tatted, and has a scar that runs across his face. Did I mention he’s 6’7”?

He’s often depicted in fan art. TikTok is brimming with AI-generated Zades. But fans don’t have to wait much longer to see Zade in-the-flesh. In July, author H.D. Carlton announced that Haunting Adeline is being made into a movie, set for a 2027 release.

The actor has not yet been announced. If his looks fall short, something tells me he won’t get the rape-pass.

BOOKTOK SOUNDGOONERS

We’ve covered what the smutty world of BookTok looks like. Now for how it sounds.

Meet DARQ DAGR, the man behind the hot new BookTok-inspired dubstep craze: Smutstep.

The MaskTok guys have brought the book boyfriend to life on-screen. DARQ DAGR has given the book boyfriend a soundtrack.

He gives life to dark romance clichés with raspy vocals and growls recorded over pulsating basslines and hard-hitting beats. The lyrics embody the power-imbalance tropes found in the genre, with lines like “ON YOUR KNEES” and “AS I DEVOUR YOU.” A lot of the lyrics are crowd-sourced from his audience of BookTok fangirls.

The growls are a big part of DARQ DAGR’s appeal. His audience makes requests to hear him record growls in their mask of choice. He’s done growls in the ghost mask, skull mask, biker helmet, and a wildcard creepy clown mask. His audience requests quote-reads from their favorite book boyfriends. He’s done several videos imitating Tairn the dragon.

In a recent interview with 404 Media, DARQ DAGR said: “Most of my content is based off of people making requests in the comments. It's like, all right, you guys want this? Well, I'm gonna make it, but I'm gonna go the dark romance route and make it super aggressive, because I want to make dubstep out of it, and people are like, ‘That's fucking dope.’”

All in all, guys are doing all kinds of goofy things to give the BookTok girls goosebumps. Some are savvy enough to make a profit from it. A TikTok creator can typically earn between $400 and $1,000 USD for 1 million qualified views through the TikTok Creator Rewards Program. For a successful creator, that could translate into $5,000 to $20,000 a year. “Pretending” to rape girls online turns out to be a decent side-hustle.

THE PUSHBACK

Women aren’t a monolith. When you see some millennial scold lecturing the world about enthusiastic consent from behind a selfie-cam, she’s not speaking for all women. When it comes to female popular opinion, dark romance has emerged as a clear fault-line.

One side of the internet is women on their knees ready to serve Zade Meadows. There’s another side that’s signing petitions to stop the film adaptation of Haunting Adeline from being made.

There’s a side of TikTok that wishes BookTok would go back to the innocent days of the early-2020s, before MaskTok and BikeTok became synonymous with the community. Ever since Haunting Adeline was self-published in 2021, one side of the internet has been raving about it while another side has been asking concerning questions.

It’s a book that many women say shouldn’t carry the “romance” label, and should instead be labeled as horror. Other women argue that this is what dark romance is, a category represented by “morally gray” book boyfriends. Some argue that the dark themes are a coping mechanism for women who have faced sexual assault and abuse.

BOOKTOK REPORT

Some common trends emerge beyond the masks, dragons, and growling DJs. Obsessive devotion. Primal masculinity. Dominance. Control. Obsession. In this world, the ideal man is consumed by you and consumes you. He’s dangerously possessive. He’s ready to break into your home and take you by force. The animalistic growls of Smutstep and domineering dragons of Romantasy even play into this daydream of raw and unrestrained masculine desire.

One may have a rape fantasy while strictly exploring it in a “consensual non-consent” environment. Or maybe they’ll make the exception for Zade Meadows.

Men have been given a lot of grief about consuming porn. About the male gaze. About ogling Sydney Sweeney’s boobs like retarded apes.

And that’s fine.

But we’re not alone in our gooning.

Sure, guys might watch some rough stuff that they might not even participate in IRL given the opportunity. But whatever guys are watching, what women are reading seems far darker.

At this point, I think we can call it a draw.