I recently read Cheryl Anne Gardner's The Kissing Room, a novella of only 16K words. The Kissing Room is hardly a light, cheery romance for a Sunday afternoon; rather, it is a dark, disturbing story which threatens to repel the reader with its brutal honesty, while compelling him to read on for the resolution. Consider yourself warned-if you dare to sample the first page, make sure you're in a comfortable chair.
This fast-paced story alternates between what happens next and what happened before, and fluctuates between gentle, romantic, or bittersweet moments and truly ugly, stomach-churning scenes of violence and despair. Even the nastiest situations are not described graphically or in lengthy detail, however, but neither are they for the faint of heart.

