Adeline’s desire: conversation between paranoid and reparative readings of eroticism, relationships, and sexual behaviours in the dark romance Haunting Adeline

Dark romance, a subgenre of romance, contains sexually explicit taboo kink plotlines that mimic gendered power dynamics. This study critically analyses the feminine and masculine voices in Haunting Adeline, a popular dark romance novel, through the lens of broader cultural and historical contexts, employing feminist debates around eroticism and pornography, scholarship around outlaw emotions and unruly desires, and affect theory. First, we analyse both voices together and individually using Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) to determine how they differ and are the same. Secondarily, content analysis of thematic components in the feminine voice related to eroticism, relationship, and sexual behaviour using mutually inscribed paranoid (focus on risk and pain) and reparative (assuming pleasure and hope) readings are placed in conversation with each other. The reparative lens reveals how the novel may serve as a counternarrative to Haunting Adeline as a feminist ‘bad object’, offering readers emotional complexity and erotic autonomy, while the paranoid lens highlights risks and cultural anxieties. The work argues that dark romance can be both subversive and/ or problematic, depending on the reader’s interpretive stance.