Get yo freak on

Romance novels inhabit a literary ghetto that is very easy for readers to visit (though they usually do so surreptitiously, by cover of night), but extremely hard for books to leave. Every so often one of the novels is smuggled out, into the literary mainstream, and millions of women wind up reading mediocre, but riveting prose about an extremely handsome vampire as fast as they can. But for the most part, romance novels stay in this ghetto—and so the only people lucky enough to know about the existence of mind-boggling sub-genres like Amish romance novels are Amish romance novel readers themselves.