I try to stay on top of the trends in American culture, not because I am interested in following these trends, but because it helps me understand the spiritual needs of people immersed in it. Particularly, I try to address these needs when they arise, but sometimes, I’m completely oblivious to certain trends.

I’m not into fiction reading—at all. So following trends in this genre just doesn’t happen very often. But this one fell right into my lap as I am seeing it more and more on social media.

So I decided to research this, and what I found was actually surprising, even to me. I’m looking around at what’s selling on Amazon and I see covers draped with serpents, demons, beasts, and horned shadows clutching women in their arms—and they call it romance.

They call it intimacy. They call it “fantasy.”

But let’s strip away the glossy veneer. This garbage is nothing more than pornography wrapped in gothic fan-fiction, luring women into desiring monsters while scorning men. This is more than harmless escapism. It is a symptom of a much larger cultural problem, and it screams louder than the bookshelves it decorates.

Naturally—and biblically—women need men. They need what God designed them to need, leadership, confidence, masculine authority that reflects Christ’s headship over His bride. That is Genesis 2, Ephesians 5, the created order. But in a world that has rebranded masculinity as “toxic,” we’ve gelded men into betas, stripped of strength, ashamed of authority, trained to apologize for every masculine instinct God hardwired into them, and treated biblical masculinity as cultural nostalgia.

And this is what happens when you suppress the truth in unrighteousness. Romans 1, the truth doesn’t die—it mutates. Suppressing God’s design for relationshipos leaks out in such monstrous perversions.

Often referred to as “monster smut,” women are devouring novels where the lover is not a man at all but a beast…a wolf prince, a basilisk, a demon with horns and claws. Why? Because when men are neutered by culture, women still crave masculine dominance, still crave the strong hand and confident lead—but in rebellion, they run to the grotesque.

If they cannot have men who act like men, they will have monsters who mimic authority in exaggerated, obscene form. The demand for perverse literature is not evidence of liberation—it is the shriek of famine. It is hunger seeking twisted bread.

Essentially, feminism declared war on “patriarchy” and vilified male strength and headship. Even the professing church has baptized the language of empowerment and erased gender boundaries.

And yet, here we are, with millions of women buying fantasies of being ravished by demons.

They will not submit to a husband, but they will fantasize about being taken by a beast. They will not honor biblical marriage, but they will plaster bookshelves with serpents and skulls. They will not confess their need for masculine leadership, but they will indulge it in the most perverse ways imaginable. This is not liberation—it is slavery wearing the mask of desire.

Ultimately, this is a rebellion against God and His created order. These fantasies do not just feature monsters—they are written in mockery and caricature of the created order. They say with their pages, “We do not want Christ as head, we do not want husbands as leaders, we will invent beasts to fill the role.”

As in the days of Noah? Whoever the Nephilim were, they were certainly beastly figures who dominated the daughters of men—and God did not approve. This is the very spirit of idolatry. When you refuse to worship God, you make gods of demons. When you refuse the man, you invent the monster.

The prophets saw it long before Amazon did. Hosea describes Israel as a whore chasing after lovers who could never satisfy. Jeremiah wept over Judah, who “exchanged their glory for that which does not profit” (Jeremiah 2:11). Paul preached to Rome that because they refused to honor God, He gave them over to dishonorable passions.

And here we sit, pretending that “monster romance” is just a niche trend. It is not niche. It is judgment. It is the sound of women with itching ears turning aside from truth, heaping up bestial fantasies to soothe what only Christ and His order can satisfy.

And God will not be mocked. He will not let this generation pervert His design and escape unscathed either. The bookshelves tell a story of spiritual starvation and cultural collapse. Women do not need demons on covers. They need godly men unashamed of their calling to lead, to love, to protect.

And men must repent of their effeminacy, their abdication, their willingness to be tamed by a culture that hates them. If we do not, we will keep reaping this freakish harvest, where perversion replaces God’s design, and beasts stand where men should be.

The rise of monster smut is not just harmless entertainment or escapism. It is a sermon preached by hell. And unless we recover the truth—that masculinity is not toxic, that headship is not oppression, that God’s order is good—we will drown in its liturgy.

The covers may change. The titles may rotate. But the message will remain: when men cease to be men, women will seek out monsters.