Read Outside Your Comfort Zone: Paranormal Romance

This is the cover from the original hardcover edition.

Back in 2001, Kelley Armstrong did something revolutionary...she wrote a fantasy novel set in the modern day with a female protagonist, who happened to be a werewolf. Yeah, in less than ten years that manage to become a cliche, but this is where (for me at least) it all started. I found this book (I think it is up to it's third edition these days because I bought it in hardcover and I know there have been two paperback releases too) tucked away on a shelf in my then-local Half Priced Books (I miss them down here in Florida), and was blown away.

I've never been a big fan of fantasy literature, despite the best intentions of fellow gamers over the years, outside of a couple of authors that I enjoy (like Moorcock or Howard or Zelazny), so it is rare for a book with fantasy tropes to engage me. Maybe it was the female lead. Maybe it was the modern day setting. I don't know. It hooked me in and I've read every book that she has read since (which isn't a small number). Then I started casting around for other authors, and I found people like Patricia Briggs and Devon Monk. And I rediscovered old favorites like Nancy Collins (I consider her Sonja Blue stories from the 80s and 90s to be the prototype for a lot of the tropes of paranormal romance fiction).


Give Bitten a read, I think it will appeal. Armstrong is also not a stranger to gaming, being a fan of the Unisystem rules. Honestly, I think that a couple of the books after Drug Store Magic read like they were written from someone's game reports. I don't mean that in a bad way either. The byzantine background reminds me also, in a few ways, of the setting of GURPS Cabal. I like that the supernatural protagonists are not treated like monster, in the cliched way that many horror writers and games treat these sorts of things. In a lot of cases, these characters are treated like they are in a novel of the everyday but that everyday just happens to have werewolves, magic-users and vampires in it. Unfortunately, a lot of "geeks" wrinkle their nose at the thought that a book might have romance in it. I find that silly.


The reason why I wrote this blog post is to issue a bit a challenge to gamers and geeks: read something outside of your comfort zone, outside of what you might normally read. You never know where your next favorite writer, or genre, may come from. My suggestion is to start with Bitten and see if the urban fantasy/paranormal romance genre bites you.