So I know my last post indicated that I don’t generally read romance, but what am I reviewing? A romance anthology. Allow me to explain – I don’t generally read romance. There are some authors I read1, but for the most part, I don’t read books that are strictly romance genre. Now… about Beautiful Tragedy.

As a general rule, I will peruse the “read now” section of the romance genre on NetGalley if I’m in a reading slump and I’m really interested in getting out. Why? Because most romance novels are cute, fluffy, and easy to breeze through. While the anthology that is Beautiful Tragedy is easy to breeze through, it’s anything but cute and fluffy. Oh, it has its moments, but… the general gist of these stories is anything but cute and fluffy.

This anthology of romance stories contains six stories of romance that involve the macabre. There’s a story about demons and angels, another one about a zombie apocalypse, another about ancient vampires, one about an accidental (or is it?) murder, one about a type of Nazi camp, and finally one about a dream. I have to say, the demon/angel one and the one about the accidental murder were my favorites of the six stories. I also enjoyed the one about the dream and zombie apocalypse.

Some of the stories in this book are just snippets from full-length novels. As I recall, the story about the demon/angel and the one about the dream are for certain excerpts from full length novels. But they give you enough of an idea of the full length novels to make you decide if you want to continue the story. I know I definitely want to continue the story for the demon/angel book.

I found the writing of all six authors to be easy to read. It didn’t take me long to actually read the book – I could have finished in one sitting if I’d had time to just sit and read. But of course, I had other things I needed to do, so I had to stop reading every so often. I finished the book in 24 hours though, if that says anything.

I loved the poems written by Helle Gade at the beginning of each story. I felt that she wrote the poems after reading the stories or perhaps wrote the poems, then asked the other authors to write stories based on them. The poems added just that little extra something to the stories.

I recommend this book to anyone who likes romance, but also likes the macabre.