Flame & Fable, Northeast Ohio's First 'Romantasy' Bookstore, Opens in Lakewood

Flame & Fable, a new bookstore in Lakewood, opened up last weekend at the height of a national romantasy craze. “It’s a movement,” owner Nickie Lui said. Credit: Mark Oprea

Everything in the universe seemed to be aligned for Flame & Fable at its grand opening on Detroit Avenue in Lakewood on Saturday, February 8.

As Northeast Ohio’s first bookstore focused solely on romance and fantasy, a stage was properly set. Red roses and chocolates festooned the front windows. Shelves of scented candles neighbored those displaying books by the likes of Brandon Sanderson. Patrons ate branded sugar cookies while holding novels centered on sex-craved dragon flyers.

Or as the millions of those that call the newest genre to storm the literary world: romantasy.

“We had 600 people show up throughout the weekend,” Nickie Lui, the founder of Flame & Fable, recalled to Scene this week. “I’m talking a two-hour-long line out front.”

“It’s a movement,” Lui added.

“Movement” may be curt or exact depending on whom you ask.

For starters, the romantasy genre—“fairy smut,” as its known on TikTok—is arguably the greatest trend in genre fiction since Harry Potter was released in 1997. Romantasy, which amounted to 30 million print book sales (or $610 million) in 2024, is essentially the all-grown-up version of a Hogwarts narrative, thick books crammed with horny elves and the mortals that pursue them. (“Spicy,” as fans like to call it.)

And the trend is no joke. Sarah J. Maas, whose fairy-filled romance Court of Thorns and Roses sold eight million copies so far, was just dubbed the best-selling author in the U.S. in 2024. And recently, in St. Paul, Minn., 1,700 fans showed up to a reading by Rebecca Yarros, whose sexy supernatural Onyx Storm reached the top three spots on Amazon’s “most sold” fiction list in January.

As to why, literary critics and fangirls love to speculate: millennials are growing up into sex-verbose individuals. Women, done with dating apps like Hinge and dead-end relationships, are into reading about masochistic billionaires, stalkers, or dashing elf-men in some faraway military academy.

“Where can she go to read about a man who’s not going to exhaust her?” one critic mused. “At least in the way that every real, human man seemingly is?”

Nickie Lui, the owner of Flame & Fable, at her shop in Lakewood on Thursday. Credit: Mark Oprea

For Lui, who became an aficionado of the genre in the past five years, opening up Flame & Fable in the thick of an American romantasy craze isn’t just some capitalistic grab. It’s also, she said, a method of growing community around an ethos that’s undeniably political.

“There’s a movement among women in the millennial age group in particular, where we’re kind of like reclaiming romance for ourselves,” Lui said from behind her register. “Because romance has historically been a very attacked genre. It’s predominantly women [that] publish romance.”

“And especially in today’s political climate?” she added. “There are some issues with, well, certain books being sold.”

She’s not wrong.

Of the 1,477 books banned in schools and libraries last year, 211 of them were barred for sexual explicitness, and 299 for their spotlight on queerness. At least none were in Ohio—most bans are in Florida, Texas, Missouri, South Carolina and Utah.

And romantasy is at least part of their targets. Maas’ books, which often feature chapters of otherworldly lovemaking, notwithstanding: a dozen of hers have been banned 61 times in school districts across the U.S. Flame & Fable, as Lui gleefully pointed out to Scene on Thursday, carry half of them.

“That’s why it’s really important for readers in this particular space that the romance and the fantasy romance space to have community like this,” she said. “It’s really hard to be excited about books that are under attack all the time.”

Growing up in North Royalton, Lui worked for e-book behemoth Overdrive for eight years until quitting to pursue Flame & Fable last May. The store matches the cozy, ingroup feel of other themed bookstores that’ve popped up locally in recent years, like Clevo Books downtown or Hexagon Books in Cleveland Heights.

The goal, Lui noted, is to leverage the romantasy craze into that communal push: hosting book signings of local and touring authors; starting book clubs; maybe hosting readings one day.

And, above all, ensure that Lakewood gets its fix.

“Ah, this one is good, very dark, but good,” Lui said, ringing up a copy of Navessa Allen’s serial-killer romance Lights Out, grabbed from Flame & Fable’s “Dark & Erotica” section. Lui read the book’s tagline aloud: “The couple that slays together, stays together.”

“I’ve read, like, the entire series,” a woman in her thirties told Lui from the other side of the register. Her husband waited quietly close by. “They’re very good. But they’re kinda messed up. Like, if I give them to my friends to read, a lot of them gave them back.”

Lui laughed as she bagged the book, tossing in a Flame & Fable bookmark.

“Oh, those books are fantastic,” she added. “And those books are terrible. They’re so terrible and so dark.”

She smiled. “But they’re just so fun to read.”