Even if you didn’t fuck your stepbrother, incest play provides way to burn off lingering fumes of primitive childhood impulses that didn’t make much sense to us at the time. It’s a wonderfully American phenomenon, the run-off from the tidal shift of our sexual revolution. Sex with your stepsibling, therefore, isn’t just a device in erotica. The divorce rate in the United States really started to climb in the 1970’s, which led to bisected families merging with other families, thrusting horny teens into sharing bathrooms with another horny teens. Stepsiblings are also, in the grand sweep of history, a relatively new phenomenon. And if sexual attraction accompanies that love, it’s only natural for a little romance to blossom.” They’re put in a situation where they’re expected to grow to love each other. The hookup fills Abby with ambivalence which then evolves into agony after Emerson becomes a part of the family.Īlice Ward, author of My Stepbrother, My Lover, believes the genre has become popular “because stepsiblings have such a unique and fascinating dynamic. In Masters’ book, the heroine, Abby, hooks up with Emerson, the snobby lacrosse-playing son of Abby’s dad’s girlfriend. The stepbrother genre is the new juggernaut of e-book sales, making it the next “big thing” in erotic online publishing (a position once held by vampires, then BDSM duos, and most recently, motorcycle gang romances).Ĭolleen Masters’ Stepbrother Billionaire, a bestseller on Amazon and a much-discussed addition to the genre on Goodreads threads, is a fine introduction into the typical angsty play you’ll find in this blossoming new world.
To wit, Penelope Ward’s Stepbrother Dearest hit #3 on the New York Times Bestseller list in the spring of this year. But these familial romances have always lurked in the margins now marks the first time these tracts have appeared next to a Dan Brown book.
Incest narratives have long been a staple of self-published erotica, be they volumes of fan fiction where the Weasley twins do it to each other or tortured narratives of forbidden love between father and daughter that float around free smut websites.