Because no one warned us that Wonderland was a gateway drug.
Alice in Wonderland Day isn’t just for kids or pastel aesthetic posts (except ours). Neither are these Alice in Wonderland Books. It’s for grown-ups who crave chaos, courtly intrigue, dark magic, and unhinged love interests. These retellings go full morally-gray because in this Wonderland, sanity is optional and spice is mandatory.
What Is It About Wonderland That Makes It So Perfectly Unstable?
Let’s be real, Wonderland has never been a well-adjusted place. Talking flowers. Disappearing cats. Authority figures with decapitation fetishes. It’s always teetered on the edge of fantasy and psychological thriller, which makes it prime real estate for romantasy authors to burn it all down and build something sexy on the ashes.
Whether it’s a dystopian remake, a gothic love story, or a blood-soaked villain origin tale, the world Lewis Carroll created is flexible enough to hold all our favorite tropes. Wonderland is chaotic neutral, and romantasy thrives in the chaos.
Why Alice in Wonderland Books Go Dark (and Why We Keep Reading)
At this point, poor Alice has been through it. Locked in asylums. Forced into rebellions. Thrown into twisted love triangles with men who wear too many belts. But that’s exactly why these stories work.
The romantasy version of Alice isn’t just falling down the rabbit hole, she’s diving headfirst into identity crises, toxic flirtations, magical conspiracies, and hard choices. And she’s doing it in a corset. Or armor. Or sometimes just vibes.
These retellings give us heroines who are clever, stubborn, and emotionally wrecked in ways that feel painfully familiar. And the men? Well. Let’s just say if the Mad Hatter isn’t a love interest, we’re already less interested.
