I was thinking about the plethora of vampire stories that has sprung up ever since the smash success of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, featuring the Vampire Lestat. Unfortunately, as I sit here and think about it, I can name only a few. Can anyone help me fill out this list?
Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel: Angel, Spike, Darla, Drusilla, etc.
Twilight: Edward Cullen, etc.
Vampire Diaries: Stefan, Damon, etc.
Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter: Jean-Claude, etc.
Southern Vampire Mysteries/True Blood: Bill Compton, etc.
J. R. Ward’s The Black Dagger Brotherhood is 6 of the top 10.
And these aren’t complete lists. They’re really best of, more than 3.5 on a scale of 5.
No outsiders understand or appreciate how enormous paranormal romance has become. I’ve been saying for years that more paranormal romance titles are published than either science fiction or fantasy or both of them combined. Nobody in sf wants to believe me.
I thought that might be the case, but I didn’t check first.
Paranormal romance really isn’t a separate genre, it’s a sub-genre of fantasy. That’s the way I look at it anyway. Actually I can see it as a hybrid of romance and fantasy. Some of the books are more one or the other though.
Blade was a D-list Marvel character until his movies. Movies which might not have had a shot without the resurgence of vampire popularity. Blade is an interesting case as it was also the first post-Schumacher comic book movie to do well playing it straight.
Also add Being Human UK and US, Let the Right One In, and 30 Days of Night.
Hambly has also written about other sorts of vampires, but to tell which books contain them would be spoilers. So I won’t.
Most of the paranormal romance that I’ve read is more romance than SF/fantasy. That is, it’s mostly romance with some fantasy trappings. There would be no story (such as it is) without the romance, but you could use other genres and still have about the same story. Now, there are some good paranormal romances, and some good werewolf/vampire/supernatural critter stories out there, but a lot of what’s being put out under the label of paranormal romance is just potboiler writing, and when the next fad comes along, the writers will happily switch to the new fad if they can.
From a literary point of view, certainly. But from a marketing point of view, it’s an entirely different category. It’s kept in a separate part of the bookstore, and readers of paranormal romance don’t usually read a lot of regular fantasy. And vice versa.
But from the number of books in the genre, it’s far more popular than fantasy or science fiction.
The problem is that the paranormal romance still have the romance part of it. My wife, who doesn’t like romance, reads some of them but has recommended only a few of them to me. (Bitsy the vampire Queen is the only one I can think of.) She just finished a different urban fantasy romance book and while the urban fantasy was okay, the romance formula can, and usually does, ruin it for her.
While I agree with EM, I also agree it’s a sub genre at best but doesn’t cross over, as the other two said. The point being that supernatural is the adjective and the romance part is still the focus of those books. That’s not bad! But it does mean they aren’t for me.