Dark romance is romance built on menace, obsession or coercion rather than gentleness. The love interest is possessive or criminal, often a mafia figure, a captor or a stalker; the power between the two is unequal on purpose; and violence, abuse or dubious consent may appear on the page rather than being implied.
A mood, not a shelf
The label describes how a relationship feels, not where a book is filed, and that is why no retail store we read has a dark romance category. The stores that divide romance at all divide it by setting or by creature, so a dark romance sits under contemporary or paranormal with everything else. The word turns up instead as a tag, as a genre chip inside an app, as a line in a store description, or in the name of an app itself. Our page on dark romance apps and sites sets out which services use it and what each one's rules say.
What the label does not tell you
One tag covers a morally grey hero in an otherwise consensual story and fiction that depicts non-consent in detail. Those are different books for different readers, and the name does not separate them. That is the practical problem with dark romance as a search term: it describes intensity without describing content, so two services using the same word can hold very different libraries.
Dubious consent
Dubious consent, often shortened to dubcon, means the story is written so that consent is unclear, pressured or impossible to give freely. It is a reader's term and a tagging term rather than a legal one. It sits next to non-consent, usually written noncon, which does not pretend to be ambiguous at all. Several of the services that advertise dark romance ban non-consensual acts in their own rules while leaving the tag in place, so the tag and the terms are worth reading together.
The warning matters more than the tag
Because the label is so wide, the useful signal is a written content warning at the head of a story, not a chip on a cover. A warning names what is in the book. A genre tag only promises a feeling. Where a service publishes neither, the only guide left is the blurb, which is written to sell.
Where it overlaps
Dark romance borrows from billionaire romance when the power gap is money, from paranormal romance when the love interest is not human, and from taboo fiction when the relationship is one a service's rules may refuse. All of these sit inside erotic romance as the services file it.
See also spicy romance, smut and the glossary.