A man two stops behind her on the train for nine years, with an alphabetised list of every book she pretends not to read. A captor at the end of one road, the spare key in his pocket and a door he has never once locked from outside. A man on the threshold of the woman he hurt, with the sentence he has practised on every train of the last decade and the no she is, at four-twelve on a Wednesday in October, about to make him hear. Dark romance lives where desire and violence share the same room, the same body, the same hour; the work is what the lovers do with what cannot be undone.

What's inside

· 1,000 prompts across 50 chapters

· 10 worked examples with safety notes and flash / short / novel expansions

· Chapters on obsession, captivity, gothic, stalking, doomed lovers, queer dark romance, and the trauma arc

· Consent, aftercare, and content-warning scene templates

· A resource map of sensitivity readers, clinicians, and reading on consent, accountability and repair

For writers who want their desire grounded, their consent named, and their grief honest — with attention to whose pain is spectacle and whose is cost.