I have spent decades reading romance — and, yes, I mean that with full professional seriousness. I have reviewed everything from Pulitzer-contending literary fiction to the kind of paperback that lives face-down on a beach towel. And yet, when Ana Huang’s Twisted series began its slow, relentless takeover of the cultural conversation in 2021, I paid attention. Not because I was swept up in BookTok’s fervor — though I understand its pull — but because the series genuinely merited scrutiny. What Huang accomplished across four interconnected standalone novels is more structurally disciplined than critics give her credit for: a group portrait of four women navigating love, trauma, and power, each book calibrated to its own emotional register while feeding a larger, cumulative world.
The Twisted series — Twisted Love, Twisted Games, Twisted Hate, and Twisted Lies — operates in the new adult register with what I’d describe as controlled darkness. The heroes are brooding and morally complicated, the heroines are wounded but resilient, and the prose moves fast enough that you forgive its occasional melodrama. Huang understands the engine of romantic fiction: longing, obstacle, surrender. Her men are dangerous in ways that feel thrilling rather than genuinely threatening, a tonal balance she manages with more skill than her critics acknowledge.
“The series centers on ‘twisted’ relationships: intense, often obsessive attractions complicated by power imbalances, past wounds, revenge motives, or societal barriers.”
What readers respond to isn’t just the heat — though the heat is undeniable. They respond to the emotional logic of characters who believe themselves unworthy of love discovering they are, in fact, capable of it. It’s one of fiction’s oldest satisfactions, executed here with a contemporary stylishness that feels native to its moment.
When you close the final page of Twisted Lies and find yourself wanting more — not just more of these characters, but more of this feeling — where do you go? I’ve spent considerable time thinking about that question. The list below is my answer: seventeen books organized not by superficial similarity, but by the specific emotional appetite each reader of the Twisted series is most likely carrying. I’ve tried to be precise about what each book offers and honest about what it demands.
For Readers Who Need Their Morally Gray Hero With a Tender, Destructive Core
The Twisted series made its reputation on men who are dangerous, brilliant, and ultimately devoted. Alex Volkov in Twisted Love is perhaps the archetype: cold by design, wounded by experience, and capable of love in a form that is as possessive as it is sincere. If that specific alchemy is what you’re chasing, these books understand exactly what you’re looking for.
Vicious by L.J. Shen
Vicious is one of those novels that operates at such a high emotional temperature that it practically singes the page. Baron “Vicious” Spencer is, as his name suggests, not a man who softens easily. His obsession with Emilia LeBlanc is rooted in a history of cruelty and a pride that won’t bend until it has to. Shen writes with a particular clarity about male damage — she doesn’t romanticize it exactly, but she does make it legible, which is more interesting. The enemies-to-lovers architecture here is constructed with genuine craft, and the payoff hits harder than most because Shen makes you wait for it. If Alex Volkov’s psychological complexity is what gripped you in Twisted Love, Vicious Spencer will occupy the same uneasy corner of your heart.
King of Wrath by Ana Huang
I’m including this because the question of what to read after the Twisted series often has a simpler answer than readers expect: more Ana Huang. King of Wrath opens Huang’s Kings of Sin series with Dante Russo, a billionaire CEO who is arranged to marry Vivian, a jewelry heiress, against both of their inclinations. The execution is Huang at her most assured — the banter is sharper, the emotional stakes feel weightier, and the cultural specificity (Vivian’s Chinese-American family dynamics) adds texture that the Twisted series sometimes glossed. This is the natural first step for any reader who finished Twisted Lies and immediately thought, “but I need more.”
The Sweetest Oblivion by Danielle Lori
This is the book I recommend to readers who loved the atmospheric menace of Alex Volkov but want it wrapped in a mafia structure with considerably more moral ambiguity. Elena Abelli, the sweet don’s daughter, and Nico Russo, the man arranged to marry her sister, exist in a world where the rules are Sicilian and the stakes are blood. Lori writes with a gothic sensibility that feels closer to literary tradition than most romance fiction — her settings breathe, her silences are eloquent. It’s darker than anything Huang writes, but shares the emotional core: two people circling each other in a dance that neither can stop and neither fully understands.
For Readers Drawn to Enemies-to-Lovers Tension That Earns Its Resolution
The enemies-to-lovers trope is everywhere in contemporary romance, but what distinguishes the Twisted series is that the antagonism feels psychologically motivated rather than decorative. Jules and Josh in Twisted Hate genuinely wound each other in ways that map onto their backstories. That’s harder to pull off than it looks. These books get it right.
Punk 57 by Penelope Douglas
Few romance novelists write conflict with as much specificity and structural economy as Penelope Douglas, and Punk 57 is her best work by a comfortable margin. Misha and Ryen have been pen pals for seven years — never meeting, never knowing what the other looks like — and when Misha arrives at Ryen’s school incognito, what he finds is a girl who has become someone he doesn’t recognize. The class-dynamics subplot gives the romance an intellectual grounding that most enemies-to-lovers novels lack, and Douglas’s dialogue crackles with the kind of wit that makes the eventual emotional reckoning feel truly earned. If Twisted Hate was your favorite entry in Huang’s series, Punk 57 belongs at the top of your list.
Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire
Beautiful Disaster is, in some ways, the original blueprint for what Ana Huang refined. Abby Abernathy and Travis Maddox have the same combustible dynamic — the controlled, self-contained heroine and the chaotic, magnetic hero who upends her carefully managed life. McGuire’s novel is rawer and less polished than anything in the Twisted series, but that rawness is part of its power. Travis is a genuinely complicated creation: reckless, loving, and capable of both cruelty and devotion in ways that feel more psychologically realistic than idealized. Published in 2011, it’s worth remembering that this novel helped establish the tonal template that an entire generation of new adult romance would follow. It shows its influences, but it also shaped them.
The Deal by Elle Kennedy
Kennedy’s Off-Campus series has been a sleeper classic in new adult romance for years, and The Deal remains its finest hour. Hannah Wells and Garrett Graham start with a transactional arrangement — tutoring in exchange for his help with a social situation — and develop into something that neither of them planned for. What Kennedy does better than most is render the institutional texture of college life: the hockey culture, the academic pressure, the specific social economies of university existence. It grounds the romance in a way that makes the emotional escalations feel proportionate rather than operatic. For readers who appreciated the campus setting of Twisted Hate and Twisted Love, this is the series to seek out next.
For Readers Who Fell for the Forbidden Romance in High-Stakes, Elevated Settings
Twisted Games is the outlier in Huang’s series — a royal bodyguard romance with genuinely political stakes, set in the fictional kingdom of Eldorra. It’s the book that proved Huang could write in registers beyond the campus or the corporate penthouse. Readers who responded most strongly to that novel are looking for something specific: a sense of world, of consequence, of love that costs something concrete.
The Professional by Kresley Cole
Cole is primarily known for her paranormal romance, but The Professional — the first in her Game Maker series — demonstrates that she can write contemporary forbidden romance with the same ferocious skill. Natalie, a graduate student, finds herself protected by Aleksandr Sevastyan, an enforcer for her Russian Mob Boss father. The power imbalance is explicit and handled with a sophistication that other novels in this space often fumble. Cole writes with a density of sensory detail that creates genuine atmosphere, and the erotic tension operates at a level of intensity that makes Twisted Games feel almost restrained by comparison. This is a more adult reading experience in every sense, but for readers ready for it, it’s remarkable.
Neon Gods by Katee Robert
Robert’s Dark Olympus series reimagines Greek mythology in a decadent, politically stratified modern city, and Neon Gods is its incandescent opening. Persephone flees an arranged marriage and finds herself in the hands of Hades — not the god, but a man who has built an underground empire beneath the city. The power-dynamic romance here is operatically staged, the world-building is original without being burdensome, and Robert understands something essential about forbidden desire: it derives its charge from the specificity of what is being transgressed. The series has sold millions of copies and been the subject of significant cultural discussion, and the praise is warranted. This is currently one of the most exciting ongoing series in contemporary dark romance.
Magnolia Parks by Jessa Hastings
Hastings writes romantic fiction as if she were writing a novel about romantic fiction — self-aware, stylistically ambitious, and genuinely interested in what it means to be addicted to a person who is not good for you. Magnolia and BJ have one of contemporary romance’s most compulsively readable toxic relationships, and Hastings doesn’t shield you from the damage. The social world she constructs — London’s wealthy, interconnected young elite — is drawn with the eye of someone who actually understands how those worlds operate, which gives the novel a specificity that most high-society romance lacks. For readers who responded to the glamour and intimacy of the Twisted universe, Magnolia Parks is a more literary, more emotionally punishing variation on the same frequency.
For Readers Who Want the Interconnected Standalone Structure with a Different Emotional Texture
One of the quiet pleasures of the Twisted series is its architecture: each novel stands alone, but the characters weave through each other’s stories in ways that reward sequential reading. That structural choice produces a cumulative emotional satisfaction that’s different from what you get in a single sweeping narrative. These books understand that.
Flawless by Elsie Silver
Silver’s Chestnut Springs series has been recommended alongside the Twisted books with enough frequency that the comparison is worth taking seriously. Flawless opens the series with Cade Eaton, a rodeo cowboy of considerable emotional unavailability, and Summer Hamilton, a pop star seeking refuge from a life that has become unmanageable. Silver writes ranching culture with an anthropological precision that gives the romance genuine geographical and social texture — this is very specifically a story that could only happen in this landscape. The friends-to-something-more slow burn is executed with more patience than is typical of the genre, and the emotional payoff is proportionally more satisfying. It is lighter than the Twisted series in its darkness, but it matches it in emotional intelligence.
The Fine Print by Lauren Asher
The Dreamland Billionaires series opens with Rowan Kane, a billionaire heir grudgingly sent to manage a struggling theme-park empire, and Zahra, a designer employee whose ideas might actually save the place. Asher writes grumpy-sunshine dynamics with a lightness of touch that makes the emotional escalation feel natural rather than engineered. What distinguishes this series from generic billionaire romance is the specificity of the professional context — the theme-park world is rendered with enough detail to feel like actual research rather than generic backdrop. For readers who particularly loved Twisted Lies and its fake-relationship structure, The Fine Print offers a similarly constructed dynamic with equally satisfying resolution.
The Maddest Obsession by Danielle Lori
The second book in Lori’s Made series follows Gianna Allister and Christian Allister — connected to the world of The Sweetest Oblivion — through an ice-cold slowburn that is one of the most genuinely tense I’ve encountered in this genre. Lori has a gift for rendering emotional repression: the romance works precisely because both characters are so determinedly not having it. If you’re drawn to books where the connection between characters communicates in silences and glances before it communicates in words, this is a rare specimen done right. The emotional climate of this novel is closer to literary fiction than to genre romance, and that’s exactly what makes it memorable.
For Readers Ready to Go Darker Than the Twisted Series Goes
This is the section I write with the most care, because the books here require a different kind of readerly commitment. The Twisted series is dark romance with guardrails — the darkness is psychologically real but the world is fundamentally safe, the heroes are ultimately redeemable. The books below remove some of those guardrails. They are not for every reader, and I mean that as description rather than warning. They are for specific readers, and those readers will know immediately who they are.
Corrupt by Penelope Douglas
Corrupt is the book that gets mentioned most consistently alongside the Twisted series by readers who want more intensity, and the comparison is apt. Rika Fane’s reunion with Michael Crist on Devil’s Night — an annual event in their wealthy social world where the young men of this insular community engage in elaborate, dangerous games — is staged with a psychological sophistication that puts it in a different literary category from most dark romance. Douglas understands atmosphere as a narrative device; the sense of dread she constructs in the opening sections of this novel is genuinely literary in its execution. Michael operates in moral territory that is genuinely ambiguous rather than conveniently gray, and that’s uncomfortable in a way the best fiction often is. This is the book I recommend to readers who found Alex Volkov too controlled and too redeemable.
Haunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton
I’ll be direct: Haunting Adeline is a substantially darker reading experience than anything in the Twisted series. Carlton’s stalker romance between Adeline and Zade operates at a register of psychological intensity that the Twisted books deliberately avoid. It is not a comfortable novel. It is also, I’ll admit with some reluctance, a technically accomplished one. Carlton constructs dual perspectives — “The Manipulator” and “The Shadow” — that create a genuine formal intelligence underneath the provocative surface content. I include it here not as a direct recommendation for every Twisted reader, but as a map of where the genre goes when it removes the emotional safety net entirely. Know what you’re getting into. For some readers, this is exactly what they’ve been searching for.
Hooked by Emily McIntire
McIntire’s Never After series reimagines fairy tales as dark romance, and Hooked — a Peter Pan retelling — is its most successful entry. James “Hook” Barrie is an arms dealer who becomes obsessed with Wendy Darling, and what McIntire does cleverly is acknowledge the moral weight of the original myth even as she distorts it. This is a book about a man whose desire for vengeance and whose capacity for love exist in genuine, unresolved tension with each other. McIntire doesn’t resolve that tension cheaply. For readers who loved the revenge-driven psychological architecture of Twisted Love, Hooked offers a more explicitly fairytale-inflected variation on the same obsessive-hero template, with stronger plotting than most in its subgenre.
God of Malice by Rina Kent
Kent’s Legacy of Gods series is the darkest entry on this list and deserves its own honest assessment. Killian and Glyndon navigate a world of elite university power structures that is overtly brutal in ways the Twisted series carefully manages. Kent writes psychological dominance and submission with a clinical precision that is genuinely distinctive in the genre — her heroes don’t just operate in moral gray areas, they actively theorize their own darkness. This is not a book I’d recommend as a first venture into dark romance, but for readers who have exhausted the Twisted series and its more comfortable neighbors and want to understand where the genre’s extreme operates, Kent’s work is an essential education. Check content advisories carefully and proceed accordingly.
For Readers Who Love Lyrical Prose and High-Society Drama with Romantic Weight
The Twisted series is not particularly known for its prose style — Huang writes with an efficiency that prioritizes momentum over language. But some readers come to these books carrying an appetite for writing that has a more self-conscious literary quality. These books offer that without sacrificing the romantic intensity.
The Ravenhood by Kate Stewart
Stewart is perhaps the most underappreciated writer currently working in new adult fiction, and The Ravenhood trilogy deserves considerably more critical attention than it receives. The series — beginning with Flock — follows Cecelia Horner into a small North Carolina town where she becomes entangled with a secret society of men operating their own moral economy. Stewart writes with a poetic economy that is genuinely striking; her sentences are compressed and her imagery is precise in a way that distinguishes her from virtually everyone else in this genre. The romance at the center of the series carries the weight of myth rather than fantasy, which makes it more demanding but also more lasting. For readers who want to feel that the book they’re reading has genuine literary ambition alongside its romantic heat, this is the best-kept secret in the genre.
A Final Note on Reading Widely
The Twisted series is a genuinely accomplished example of what contemporary new adult romance can do when it takes its own emotional logic seriously. Huang is not a maximalist — she doesn’t overwhelm you with detail or drown you in sensation. She constructs emotional situations with efficiency and populates them with characters whose wounds are legible and whose healing feels proportionate. That’s a particular skill, and it explains the series’ remarkable reach: Netflix acquired the rights to adapt the series into a television show in January 2025, and a graphic novel adaptation was announced by HarperCollins imprints in late 2025 — a level of multimedia traction that reflects genuine cultural saturation, not just algorithmic virality.
The books on this list are not replacements for the Twisted series. Nothing will replicate the specific pleasure of those four novels read in sequence, the way the world accumulates across the interconnected stories, the way Ava and Jules and Bridget and Stella feel like an actual friend group you’ve spent real time with. What these seventeen books offer is something different: they extend the conversation about desire, damage, power, and love that the Twisted series opens. They approach those themes from different angles, with different levels of darkness, different prose registers, different cultural settings. Read them in whatever order your specific emotional appetite dictates.
The best reading life is one in which every book you finish opens a door to three more. The Twisted series, whatever its critical standing, does that generously. Where you walk through those doors is your own particular journey.