Kaylie Smith Books

Kaylie Smith was a BookTok personality before she was a bestselling author, and she used that platform knowledge ruthlessly well. Phantasma, her 2024 gothic romantasy, shot to #1 on the New York Times list and established her as one of the fastest-rising names in the genre. Her publisher Second Sky signed her to a five-book deal on the strength of the series, and she has been building out her spooky, spice-laced corner of romantasy ever since. She built an audience by talking about books the way readers actually talk about them, then delivered a novel engineered to those exact tastes, and the result hit bestseller lists immediately and stayed there.

Smith writes gothic atmosphere with a modern voice. Her heroines deal with anxiety and intrusive thoughts in ways that feel contemporary even inside haunted mansions, and her love interests are charming menaces who flirt like the devil because sometimes they nearly are. She favors games, bargains, and competitions as structures, which keeps her plots ticking forward even when the romance takes center stage. The vibe is velvet, candlelight, and a wink.

Phantasma follows Ophelia Grimm, a necromancer with a cursed inheritance who enters a deadly supernatural competition inside a sentient manor to save her family home, and finds herself allied with Blackwell, a phantom with dimples and a hidden agenda. The nine trials, the bargain, and the forced proximity do exactly what they promise. Enchantra followed in 2025 as the next Wicked Games installment, and Smith has an angel-and-demon trilogy, Such Wicked Things, launching in summer 2026. The New Orleans setting does quiet work throughout, all wrought iron and humidity, and Ophelia's obsessive, intrusive-thought-riddled interior life has been widely praised as rare anxiety representation inside a paranormal romance, the kind readers write thank-you posts about.

On our spice scale, Phantasma sits at a solid 3 to 4. The tension builds through most of the book, then pays off with explicit scenes that made the rounds on BookTok for good reason. Smith writes heat with humor, which keeps even the steamiest chapters feeling playful rather than grim, very much in the grumpy sunshine tradition inverted, since here the heroine broods and the phantom grins. The devil's bargain structure helps the heat too, since every escalating trial raises the stakes of trusting Blackwell, and distrust laced with attraction is the engine the whole book runs on, right up to a twist that reframes the story.

Smith matters to romantasy because she embodies the genre's new generation: internet-native, trope-fluent, and unashamed of giving readers exactly what the algorithm promised, executed well. Her gothic haunted-house romance arrived just as readers were looking for something moodier than court intrigue, and she delivered a series that works as both comfort read and fright night. She is also proof that knowing your audience is a skill, not a shortcut. Her rise also says something about where the genre is heading: authors who grew up inside the fandoms they now write for, with an instinct for the exact scene readers will clip and share. It is easy to be cynical about that until you notice how well constructed the books underneath the marketing are.

Start with Phantasma, which stands alone well enough to test the waters, then continue with Enchantra if the Wicked Games world hooks you. Watch for Such Wicked Things in 2026 if demons are more your speed. If you are not sure whether gothic spice is your subgenre, our romantasy quiz can point you somewhere gentler, but the manor usually wins. Both Wicked Games books stand alone as complete romances in a shared world, so reading order matters less than mood.