When a certain notorious biology professor from Minnesota notices the massive wall o’ befanged man-titty adorning his local Wal-Mart, and finds it notable enough to blog about. Poor PZ. I can only pity his eyeballs. I don’t know if this is a sign that paranormal romances have finally hit the big time, or whether they’ve jumped the shark.
It’s always interesting to pop outside the romance community and see how people outside of it perceive the genre. Do I have thoughts on that? Boy howdy do I ever.
Some of the people sniping at Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series as being equivalent to Harry Potter for angsty teenyboppers except not particularly well-written made me stop and go: “Wait, Harry Potter was well-written?” (This is clearly because I am such a superior reader with superior tastes in all my literature, and anyone who thinks Harry Potter is awesome is wrong. And stupid. And racist. And a killer of puppies. Just so we’re clear about where I come from when I make statements of aesthetic judgment.) My pointless and incredibly silly snobbery when it comes to children’s and YA fiction aside, what struck me about some of the comments in Pharyngula that dealt with Twilight was the offhand dismissal of the series, not merely because they weren’t especially well-written (I myself couldn’t finish Twilight, and in that regard I’m totally in agreement that it’s the Harry Potter of vampire teenyboppers), but because they were obviously written for a teenage female audience in mind. There’s much casual contempt for literature that deals with the emotional and the female, and I see it as a logical extension from a culture that devalues female experiences in general; that teenage female romantic experiences in particular are singled out as being especially frivolous and assumed to be Not Worthy of Serious Thought isn’t anything new, but it still chafes at me when I see it pop up.
I am also fascinated—FASCINATED—that Harlequin has become shorthand for romance, all romance, the way it has, since books published under the Harlequin/Silhouette imprint cover only a very specific niche of romance. It’d be as if, in attempting to define ice-cream, somebody didn’t address the ingredients, or the characteristics that make ice-cream, well, icy and creamy, but instead chose to refer to it solely by a rather slapdash association of flavor and brand name, sometimes resulting in rather jarring juxtapositions if you know ice-cream well. “My mom’s a huge fan of Breyer’s Phish Food, but I just don’t get it—the thought of eating bits of unbaked chocolate chip cookie dough in ice-cream makes me want to hurl,” sez somebody, and it’s all I can do to not leap up like an obnoxious bastard and say “DUDE, Phish Food is Ben and Jerry’s, and for the love of God, it doesn’t have chocolate chip cookie dough anywhere in it, and really, YOU OBVIOUSLY DON’T EAT ICE-CREAM AND THEREFORE ARE UNQUALIFIED TO COMMENT ON WHAT WE’RE EATING, AND I’M GOING TO JUMP ON YOUR HEAD BECAUSE YOUR NEXT COMMENT IS OBVIOUSLY GOING TO BE HOW EVERYONE WHO EATS ICE-CREAM IS A FAT WHORE. SEE HOW I’M JUMPING ON YOUR HEAD? JUMP. JUMMMMMP.”
Right. Now that I’m thoroughly craving Phish Food (AND have successfully squelched my desire to act like an obnoxious bastard on somebody else’s comment board—at least this time): PZ’s question at the end intrigues me. Where DID this surge come from?Because people attributing the surge to Twilight are wrong. Twilight hit just as vampires and paranormal romance were huge and getting even bigger. JR Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood had hit the scene like a hundred-khilitohn bhomb the September previous to Twilight‘s publication. I’m not necessarily interested in tracing the whole trajectory to its source, because I think the current paranormal romance scene is not a direct reaction to, say, the disturbing eroticism of Dracula—I think Anne Rice’s novels are a better candidate for that.
Personally, I think the current paranormal romance boom is the direct descendant of Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series, which is more urban fantasy than a creature driven by older, more Victorian mythologies and sensibilities.
Regardless of what the Anita Blake series has become, and regardless what people may think, the popularity of the books and its unholy progeny is due to more than the thrill of reading taboo-busting inter-species nookie; somebody in the comments quoted a Powell’s Books employee defining the genre as “women committing every imaginable act of lust and perversion with vampires, werewolves, demons, Lovecraftian tentacled rape gods, basically anything you can imagine as long as it’s not a normal human man”—which made me go HAAAA, but also made me go “Oh, come ON, judging all of paranormal romance just because you were forced to page through the Merry Gentry series is hardly fair. I mean, taboo-busting inter-species nookie is pretty hot and definitely a factor in the popularity—and really, God bless our prurient motivations, because so much brilliant art would have gone (and continue to go) unexpressed if it weren’t for horny artists sublimating their unspeakable urges in beautiful ways, and I really don’t see any inherent wrongness in reading something to get your rocks off (but oh God that’s another topic for another time). But slapping the “It’s the Sex, Stupid” label on the phenomenon is too simple, and falls into the old “Psh, it’s porn, that’s why they like it” dismissal that covers everything and explains very little.
My theory is: it’s also about women, and putting women in control, and how we’re still not comfortable enough to put it in real-life/realistic fiction terms yet.
The surge of demand for women in a dominant role—as pursuers and protectors and warriors—has been a long time coming, and I think it says something interesting about us and our level of comfort with and/or inability to suspend disbelief about women owning a certain sort of cultural power that most of the asskicking happens in Not Quite Earth, and that many of the heroines are Not Quite Human. The current crop of paranormal romances owe a lot to Anita Blake, but they owe much to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, too.
And now I’ve pretty much reached the extent of my over-thinking about this particular bit of romance, it’s your turn: feel free to overthink paranormal romances in the comments. Or, you know, don’t. Do you read it mostly—even solely—for the hot sex and because you have a hard-on for angsty immortals? Sing it loud, and sing it proud.
Oh, but I think you have to. They’re all part of her work.
I am not a big fan of vampire books, but I love, Love, LOVE paranormal/urban fantasy/science fiction/epic fantasy—all that stuff, especially when mixed with romance. I fell in love with fantasy and science fiction first. When I was young enough I still thought kissing was icky. I was married with kids before I discovered romance and glommed onto all its sub-genres. And the fantasy/ paranormal ones were always my favorites. Except for vampires. I just really never could get into vampires.
Unless you write a really good vampire. And there are some really, really good vampire writers out there. I like LKH. Even her latest books. I’m a little worried about the new one due out in June, but I’m still going to give it a whirl. (The serial killer crime with the dead girl in the pit was worked through to the end—but the bad guys did get away, so it wasn’t resolved as well as one might like. Don’t like it when she saves bad guys to bring back in later stories.) I also like J.R. Ward. And Lynn Viehl. I like Kim Harrison, have THE OUTLAW DEMON WAILS on my TBR shelf, but I’m a little afraid to read it because she really gets into torturing her characters and I have to be ready for all that anguish.
On the other hand, I’ve never been able to get through a Feehan, and I can take or leave Adrian. The one I read was okay, but it didn’t inspire me to snabble up the rest of them. MJDavidson is like cotton candy. It’s big and fluffy and sweet when you put it in your mouth, but then it instantly melts away to not much.
So. I prefer my paranormal/SF/Fantasy romance without vampires, thank you, but I’ll read them if they’re really, really good. On the other hand, I read the stories for the story, not the hot sex. Although if the hot nooky is really good, and it fits the flow and the pace and needs of the story, all the better. Some stories, I find myself skipping the sex. (This is not limited to paranormal romance. I skip most of the love scenes in the few Stephanie Laurens books I read too…)
Hey, Quercus, thanks for mentioning Sunshine. That’s one vampire love story that really got to me. Like you, I’ve never met a Robin McKinley book that I didn’t like, and she managed to make it work for me.
Shit, man, we’d lose 80% of ALL romance novel heroes.
Many romance novel heroes are all sorts of creepy. Sexy, but creepy. This isn’t unusual; it’s human nature. If that sort of obsessed attention comes from somebody we desire, it’s hotttt, because we WANT to be the focus, we WANT to be that desired, we WANT to drive that hot guy crazy with lust. (If it comes from the pudgy guy in Accounts Payable, it’s stalker-like.) Most women long to be Helen of Troy. I know I do. My fevered teenage fantasies often involved the object of my affection just about killing himself from how much and how hopelessly he loved me. Desire is power, and it’s one of the weapons we women have owned and wielded, even as it’s been turned against us.
I’ve often thought that the only thing separating some romance novel heroes from the villains, especially in many of the old-school romances, in which there’s lots of rapin’ and pillagin’, was the fact that the hero had nicer abs and a prettier face.
Good points re: superpowered heroines being paired up with superpowered heroes, while superpowered heroes end up being paired with human heroines. I think part of it’s the strength thing—but that’s just a symptom. It all comes down to not wanting the hero to appear effeminate or emasculated, as being somehow less than the heroine. This also underpins how women are frequently allowed moral victories in romance novels (and genre fiction in general), but they’re rarely allowed competitive victories. Hero winning = proof of excellent wang. Hero losing = proof of lack of balls and bonerdeath.
Addendum to the “we want to be Helen of Troy” comment: I want to note that this desire isn’t necessarily healthy, and that most of us are perfectly capable of pinpointing something we want in our fantasy lives while acknowledging that actually getting it in real life would be a disaster.
OH MY GOD, ME TOO! That really deserves allcaps. So many of these heroines are just complete jerks. They’re rude to everyone, always have to be right, don’t listen, don’t compromise, and in fact are often bullies. At the end of such a book, if I can make it that far, I desperately want the villains to win and the heroine to die a fiery death. Never happens, of course. So I avoid those books now like the plague.
That’s actually my problem with Anita Blake. She’s a jerk. Or at least she was back when I was reading the books. Maybe she’s changed now, who knows. But when I read her, she was so unpleasant, so mean, so rude, and so hypocritical and cruel that I just PRAYED for the author to kill her. The sex isn’t why I dropped the series (although the sex is bad, IMO). It was the characterization of the heroine.
Also, this whole “What brought about this booming subgenre?” discussion makes me think of The Tipping Point. Anybody read it? I think the reason paranormal romances are now huge is due to many little factors that slowly merged into a big boom. Like so many things, it can’t be nailed down just to one or two influences. Even if those influences made the NYT bestseller list.
This is similar to a class I’m taking called Violent Women (it has a longer title but that is so much more cool), where we study violent women in film and TV shows. We’ve been talking about how all the violent women- in comparison to men- have to be justified in their violence, morally. Even when it’s revenge, it’s revenge we are rooting for.
Can’t think enough to expand on a topic I’ve been talking about for 7 weeks…brain hurts…tired…zzzz….
Just to throw my two cents in here (or bob since I’m not actually in the U.S. lol):
I remember being introduced to the Fantasy Genre through tons of Hippo Fantasy and Point Horror books (well kind of after Grimms). I always think it’s a whole generation of girls who have grown up with semi understanding the suppressed eroticism in these books and channeling it into something more fulfilling. And something where we say ‘hey Vampire dude the biology of blood transfusion can totally be made up so come on over. I want me some illicit Vampire loving.’ Here, women are in control of themselves, especially with Vampire novels where they seem to be more comedy than dark or dangerous (but please excuse me if I’m wrong! My knowledge of the genre is more gleaned than extensive!).
Also I remember reading tons of Buffy novels from the T.V. series which my mum wouldn’t let me watch and I definitely, definitely noticed a trend around 2000 when all these paranormal novels popped up with awful, awful ‘sassy’ buffyesque heroines that after about the age of 13 you want to throttle. So i think it’s directly related to that too (the T.V series that is.) Anne Rice, although has been around a lot longer didn’t do what Buffy did for the modern Vampire novel. Or at least the Vampire Romance novel. I really can’t see the true Darkness found in Rice evident anywhere else in the romance world. Although I think it would be great!
In literature the Magic Realism of Rushdie and specifically of Angela Carter who reconstructed a lot of fairy tales to give feminist out comes really made an impression on the literati. Which I think influenced the publishers (also literati perhaps!) in to picking up more books related to this. The Bloody Chamber and I think Company of Wolves the movie is all about Carter’s work regarding this.
Perhaps also we, as the novel reading world, were ready for a non-sixties family set-up. Where the dark, not talked of ‘other’ that has been cast as at the very least ‘loners’ are bought out for reassessment and understanding. Perhaps the paranormal novel is a bit of an extreme version but still related I think. Somewhere that draws parallels with our darker desires something that isn’t the comedic dysfunction of a Caucasian, middle class, honey-i’m-home-generic. Sadly I can’t watch the Flintstones anymore which is such a shame because I LOVED them.
Personally I love paranormal romance but I can’t seem to find what I’m looking for in the Romance genre. I loved the Tamora Pierce books and OMG how could I forget! Charmed was also a landmark. Such a big influence on a lot of novels. It allowed a real resurgence of Wicca along with Buffy.
Sorry! rather a rambly two bob!
cOcO
Needs57 – lol- Yes Please, I needs me some great paranormals!
Yes, agree that LKH kicked off the trend not by being the first, especially since I first read the same type of story when it was written by Mercedes Lackey and the heroine was named Diana Tregarde.
But the success of the LKH series opened the market door to books in that genre—NYC publishers saw a market and started grabbing stuff the audience might buy. Trivia: Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden books were inspired by LKH. He was a big fun up to…oh, book 10, I think. He used to frequent the old LKH yahoo list back in the day.
On Twilight: my teenage daughters reads them and loves them. And she gets the fact that Edward is ill-behaved and stalkery and that’s not a good thing, and that’s why Bella should be wary of him. I think there’s some nuance there that can actually teach girls that ‘no, this is not the way a proper boyfriend should behave.’ But Edward is safe, because he’s fictional. Note: I have also learned the best way to drive her crazy is to call Edward ‘emo.’
Eileen Dreyer had a theory about the rise of paranormal romance in the last few years. Not only that the women were allowed to be in charge and powerful.
She thought it was more primal than that. It went something like this:
The world is an incredibly horrifying, scary place right now. And the way women are coping is taking their deepest, darkest fears, all the things that go bump in the night, out of the closet, wrestling with them, defeating them, and sometimes turning them into creatures of the light. It’s part of the deep desire right now to take this horrible chaos and put it in order.
(I think that’s how it went. She explained at the bar at RWA Nat’l in Dallas. And I’d had a few drinks at the time.)
Fascinating. Because this exact sort of behavior from heroes was what caught my attention when I first started reading romance when I was a wee ‘un, and it both infuriated me and made me horribly uncomfortable. I wonder if the flip-flop is due to lazy characterization, or if it’s liberating because it’s a sign that women are finally allowed to be assholes AND protagonists (instead having the asshole females relegated to villainess status, as has been the case in the past). Maybe a bit of both?
orangehands, re: morally justified violence if the violent person is a woman: YES, I was thinking just the other day, while reading The Spymaster’s Lady by Joanna Bourne that, much as I like Annique, I wish the fact that she’s not the sort to kill hadn’t been made so evident. Heroes are literally allowed to get away with murder; I haven’t read too many heroines who are. A killer heroine—especially a sexy, amoral killer with mild PTSD the way Anne Stuart’s killer heroes tend to be—would be very, very interesting.
Jennifer Armintrout made me come out of lurkdom by invoking L.J. Smith. I’m always so excited to meet fellow former fans. I loved her books before I had ever heard of LKH. That’s what got me hooked on paranormal/vampire romance. I think it was the whole fantasy/epic/forever/gothic sense that hooked me as an impressionable teen (actually, more like 12 years old) in the mid-1990’s.
L.J. Smith sadly fell off the face of the earth 10 years ago, but has recently resurfaced—with a website and everything—and is supposedly writing again. I can only hope she doesn’t pull an LKH and the wait is worth it.
Yay! Somebody else who loves Tamora Pierce : )
I ws just thinking I should stick her in here as someone who has been writing great YA fantasy for years. Her heroines are always strong women who excel in male fields/uniquely gifted. I think the reason I love her so much is her women are always strong, but never rude or annoying. I read her as soon as she comes out. The Protector of the Small series is my fav.
Also, a shout-out to Charmed. Those women were strong and able to take care of business without being completely arrogant bitches (with some exceptions, they could be ragey bitches if they wanted to). Although sometime they fell into the whiney trap, mostly it was about them dealing with things using their own power.
Wonderful ; )
Darn, I missed that comment! Yes, the LJ Smith books are a gazillion times better than Twilight, but I’m a total fangrl when it comes to LJS. I wouldn’t say the heroes are any less pyschostalker than in any other vamp rom, tho. Look at The Vampire Diaries—the main character, Elena, had practically every male in that book chasing after her like they were rabid dogs! Fortunately, the intrepid vampire hero turned out to be the dog with the biggest teeth.
Patricia Briggs is currently my favourite ‘paranormal’ author, but I admit to knowing the exact release date of the next Anita Blake. I got suckered (uh, sorry) into the whole vampire thing when I read Interview with a Vampire in year 8. It was the first book I knew I wasn’t supposed to be reading (a la Julie Burchill’s intro to Valley of the Dolls) and I’ve had a thing for vampires ever since. The genre’s popularity definitely owes something to the illicit nature of sexualized blood-letting/violence (especially as it goes against both Judeo-Christian AND feminist mores…)
However, I was dragged into being a LKH fan pretty much against my own will (I was trapped working a second-hand bookstore till 9 every friday night for two years. I did/read a lot of things I wouldn’t have otherwise). But she’s always been a terrible writer, so I’m pretty at peace with the fact that she’s never gonna be the sort of author who gets that their characters are characters and not people they’re in love with. Since she isn’t that sort of author, however, it’d be nice if she’d stop over-populating her books with increasingly ludicrous secondary characters since we’re all painfully aware that they won’t have the decency to get themselves shot.
I don’t mind Stephenie Meyer, as far as blandly written, wildly unsatisfying books go. But there is something, if not actively harmful, at least icky in the fact that in both the Twilight series and The Host the emotional arc hinges on the intense uncontrollable emotion of male romantic interests who are lent explicit narrative permission to express that emotion violently, in a manner that almost always involves the body of the female lead. I mean—Bella spends three books getting grabbed, carried away against her will, almost eaten etc because Edward and Jacob are overly titillated by how things smell. The Host‘s main character seems to nothing *but* get beat-up for antagonizing men by her mere presence.
Actually, I think that probably qualifies as more than just icky.
Candy:
There’s the asshole villainess and then there’s the martyr heroine. I’d rather read about an asshole heroine than a martyr heroine who spends the entire book on her pedestal patiently waiting for the hero to come to his senses and grovel for forgiveness.
Late to the party, but how disappointing! I usually enjoy PZ, but his ignorance is showing, as is the ignorance of (I’m guessing) a mostly SF reading crowd.
The confluence of paranormal romance, vampire books, and urban fantasy is rampant these days, but I think it’s a “perfect storm” situation. Each has their own inspiration, whether it’s Ann Rice, Dracula, female empowerment from Buffy et al. (I’ll attribute the rise of the kick ass female urban fantasy thing to Buffy, and the rise of the paranormal romance to the fact that regular contemporaries are too PC to get into the caveman-alpha tactics most para romance heroes employ). Most popular para romance authors who have been in the field for a long time can tell you how they labored in obscurity for years, because the romance market was not interested in paranormal topics. Angela Knight pubbed with small presses, Christine Feehan was a pioneer in that respect.
And as for the Harlequin/ice cream thing—I absolutely agree. In fact, I even blogged about the phenomenon several months ago:
http://www.romancingtheblog.com/blog/2007/01/05/a-new-counter-meme/
I ws just thinking I should stick her in here as someone who has been writing great YA fantasy for years. Her heroines are always strong women who excel in male fields/uniquely gifted. I think the reason I love her so much is her women are always strong, but never rude or annoying. I read her as soon as she comes out. The Protector of the Small series is my fav.
Anj, her Tortall books are my fav! I have the most amazing memories of reading them in the summer. I loved the romance and the atmosphere, the training, the relationships and even the cross dressing. She actually went into proper detail about a woman’s obstacles when fighting; periods, muscles in awkward places and of course the cross dressing angst and everything!
Although her latest Tortall books are a little cringe worthy. I remember in one this bird is picking at Ali’s chest for some goodness knows what reason and she says something like ‘oooh stop that I don’t even let boys of my own species do that.’ Eww. Crossed some wierd animal/human boundary thing for me. Even though perhaps the ending explains it a bit better.
Woo Charmed! They are ass kickingly good. Although the Harry Potter Magic school thing they pulled was like NOOO! Crazy. I loved all the potions and lotions making! Soo cool. And they were ridiculously easy in true long running T.V. series style! Which was highly enjoyable to watch.
I really think this was waiting to happen. It’s like for about 40 years we were exploring this occult stuff from i Dream of Genie to Bella’s Dracula and suddenly a cool new interpretation suddenly bust on to the page. A whole generation worth of lots of intertextual paranormal fun! I think a lot of people were writing the same thing at the same time. So I agree totally that if LKH had been a janitor then we would still have this new craze.
coco
Also I do remember growing up that even Sweet Valley High had a Vampire novelette. I swear Jess was kidnapped and forced to live with some dark and dangerous (and probs actually more Campire than Vampire dude with all that green velvet) Vampire and Elizabeth rescued her. Only SVH I ever read. So tortured.
Coco
I commented early in this thread and have been reading all the comments since. And now I’m trying to figure out why, when I was such a big fan before, that I am so over it now when so many others are still very excited about the genre.
I guess it boils down to two things, letting my dissatisfaction with certain authors leave a bad taste in my mouth for the whole genre and the fact that I’ve never liked what’s popular. I got turned off on certain paranormal and paranormal romance authors that had personally jumped the shark (LKH and Sherilyn Kenyon being to main two among others for me ) so that soured me to the whole genre for the most part. Also I am very much the rebel and lover of the underdog, always have been, and even as a middle aged mom I get very leery of anything that’s too popular. The bigger and more mainstream paranormal gets the more reluctant I am to call myself a fan.
Honestly I’m shocked how popular it still seems to be but I guess that’s great since I have many friends writing in that genre.
I personally cannot stand the mean, bullying, rude, insensitive, uncompromising alpha male heroes either. I can’t finish a book if such a hero is in it. It’s just too much. Most recently I tried to read a Judith Ivory novel where the hero gleefully kidnaps the heroine and holds her against her will, and then gets her pregnant, and is just thrilled that she’s pregnant because now he OWNS HER. Ugh. I gave up right in the middle and will prolly never finish it. But, different strokes for different folks.
At first the rude, bitchy heroine was refreshing and delightful, what a nice change! But it got old quick. You’re right though, maybe the abundance of jerky heroines is a result of wanting women to be able to be just as rude and unlikable as men, not always having to be nice and passive and sweet and “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.”
Sweet Valley High! Sigh… I grew up on Christopher Pike and RL Stine and Caroline B. Cooney, et al, and they hugely influenced me. As well as Stephen King and Dean Koontz. But I think a lot of people grew up with those teen horror novels, wonderful pulp fun, and I think maybe so many of us having read that sort of thing and being surrounded by that genre (horror movies, horror novels, TV shows) made the paranormal romance a logical continuation. Vampires and werewolves are not new, kick-ass heroines are not new, and thrills and chills are not new. The only thing that’s new, I guess, is the name and the marketing. Maybe.
It could be a bit of both, I guess. And perhaps I’m culturally conditioned to want the heroine’s bad behavior to be morally justified. Thing is, I don’t like it when the hero acts like an unrelenting jerk, either. Or, to be more exact, if either the hero or the heroine acts this way, I want to know why. Did they have deeply emotionally scarring childhood or were they subjected to some other major trauma? If so, let me know or at least drop some hints, because constant nastiness directed at everyone that the hero/heroine comes across, with no indication why they are acting that way or why anyone would put up with them for any length of time, does nothing but make me dislike them intensely. Even then, I’m of the belief that past trauma only excuses so much because, at some point, a person has to take responsibility of his/her own behavior and how they treat people (as opposed to making their issues everyone else’s problems). Still, I’ll excuse a lot if I know that certain behavior is a mask for insecurity or a way of buffering the character from more hurt. I’ve read many books where the heroine is not particularly likeable, but the characterization was so skillfully done, I found them sympathetic and I cared what happened to them. This is not the case in the book I’m currently reading and in a few others I’ve picked up recently. There’s a certain fairly new (and somewhat popular) urban fantasy/alternative universe series that I don’t read anymore because I wanted to throttle the heroine for her treatment of the hero—treatment that was still just bitchy in the second book even though the end of the first book supposedly wrapped up the emotional conflict between the two of them. It’s the continual “act like a bitch and justify it because hero isn’t worthy because he’s not human/realize hero may not be entirely human but has feelings too and feel remorse/realize and declare own feelings/act like a bitch and justify it because hero isn’t worthy because he’s not human” cycle that ticked me off about Buffy/Spike and Anita Blake/nearly every guy she has contact with for more than a 1/2 day in the last 5-6 books. The Buffy/Spike relationship was finally dealt with somewhat and resolved, but if anything has frustrated me about the Anita Blake books more than anything else is the lack of any real resolution or emotional growth in any of Anita’s relationships. At some point in a series, shouldn’t some of the emotional issues reach some resolution?
That said, the book I’m currently reading is a first in what appears to be a series and I’m only halfway through, so I’ll finish it and see if the characters are fleshed out a bit more by the end. Perhaps she has reasons why she acts snotty and unprofessional to everyone.
Wandering more off topic, but the heroine being unbelieveable awful to the hero was the reason I stopped being able to stomache Stephanie Plum novels.
I adored Morelli and the way Stephanie continued to treat him was just awful to me. I’ll admit I stopped at about book 7, so I’m a few behind now, but I decided that I would stop reading until Stephanie and Joe get hitched (or HEA).
But ultimately I agree with Tina C. I’m okay with the hero/heroine acting awful as long as there are issues to back it up and growth away from awful.
THis about sums up why I read paranormal books..looks good, kicks but and has hottie waiting in the wings.
The first vampire romances I ever read were Obsession, Possession, and Confession by Lori Herter in the early 90’s. This was back when I would read any book in a language I could understand as long as it had vampires in it, including How to Become a Vampire in Six Easy Lessons by Madeline X.
That said, I remember Herter’s books as being fairly decent as far as romance novels go (not one of my favorite genres anyway). The sex was a bit silly. The female vampires were basically the “typical” man’s dream: didn’t require any foreplay and liked sex rough. I don’t recall anyone ripping anyone’s throat out though.
Now that vampire novels of all kinds are so ubiquitous (and now that I’m no longer completely obsessed by vampires) I am a lot more picky. I’m sure there are good vampire romances out there, I just haven’t gotten around to reading them.
Well, that wall of paranormals at Wal-Mart’s includes mine, Happy Hour at Casa Dracula, with the appropriate neck-sucking cover. If the prof had looked a little closer, he might have seen that the books between these covers include quite a range of fiction, from things that are closer to traditional horror to urban fantasy to mystery to sci-fi to romance to comedy. (Mine is a comedy.)
My paranormal influences aren’t Anne Rice or LKH (can’t read either of them) but shows like “The X-Files” and “Buffy” and now “Dr. Who” and “Torchwood.” These are character-driven stories and so is much of the current paranormal fiction out there. I could be wrong, but I think women tend to like character-driven stories.
The covers are all the same regardless of the content though. Kind of like the high-kicking girl who is used to sell a variety of things.
My code: cent83, so I still owe cent81.
I’ve been looking for good fantasy novels for years—ever since Robin McKinley’s “Beauty” first came out. Before that I read the kid’s stuff as well as Tolkien. But most of the fantasy I came across was very male fantasy “boobs & wizards” stuff or the epic young male protagonist quest novels. As a young female I got bored with what was available to me. The female characters were either ciphers or existed solely to provide sex or be rescued by the male characters.
When all the good paranormal stuff started coming out, I loved it! Finally I found some strong women characters who were the stars of the show. Now the genre is clogged with a lot of junk, but there is still good authors and books to find out there. So, I’m happy…
2 reasons why I think vampire novels (and other paranormals) are popular with women:
1) The women are strong! They take action, kick ass, and make choices for them. They’re usually not too neurotic (except for Anita of course.) I can identify with them.
2) Vampires usually “fall in love forever”. They are faithful after they meet their special someone. With over 50% of marriages failing now, I like my fantasies to have happy endings.