This article compares the discourse of sibling incest evident in a
corpus of fiction with the discourse found in clinical, sociological and
criminal literature. Whereas the former primarily regards the coupling
as a bad romance, the latter presents the idea that it is unequivocally
harmful. This discrepancy between the two discourses surrounding sexual
relationships between brothers and sisters speaks to literary fiction’s
need for thwarted romances for the purposes of the literary market. A
more detailed look into three novels from the corpus, Tabitha Suzuma’s
Forbidden (2010), Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992) and Pauline
Melville’s The Ventriloquist’s Tale (1997) shows how this logic of
sibling incest as a bad romance works in practice.