Ask Me Anything | On the Dubious Dignity of Paranormal Romance

To the Speculative schmuck.

I notice you don't seem to particularly dig paranormal romance. What's the dealio, Niallio? Do you need to get laid or something?

From "Team_Jacob97xxx"

Eh, not so much. Scotsmen are known the world over for their healthy sex drives.

We are, aren't we?

But to your other question, Team_Jacob97xxx: what an acute observation! As a rule, no, I'm not a fan of paranormal romance, nor do I have much sympathy with those readers who live for new Stephanie Meyer, say, or the next novel in Charlaine Harris' interminable Sookie Stackhouse series. Perhaps it's because I do get laid, as you say, that I simply can't grasp the appeal of such counter-counter-culture wish fulfilment, wherein a typical narrative tends to involve an innocent outcast girl falling for a sexy bad guy who's really a good guy - or perhaps even three of them - and a bunch of will they/won't they rubbish before inevitably, they do.

It certainly doesn't help matters that so many of the authors making a living writing such tosh really can't write very well. Let's face it: when you've got Stephen King making fun of your grammar, I'm of the mind that there's a rather serious problem.

Of course if there's good paranormal romance out there that I'm missing, I'd love to hear about it. I'm open to anything. So long as there's a good story to be told - and I don't mean as above but substituting in Bigfoot in place of a vampire - and the someone doing the telling can tell a story well enough, technically if not necessarily artistically speaking, then sure, I'll give it a shot and report back. It's not the genre of paranormal romance that I take issue with, so much as the badly-written boilerplate nonsense that makes up the larger part of it, so far as I can see.