paranormal fiction | Musings of the Monster Librarian

Watch out.

I’m gonna say it again. Horror. Horror fiction. It’s out there. And it not only crosses over, but exists outside the bounds of other genres. Don’t be afraid to say it. Some people just don’t seem to be able to get it down on paper.

In her new readers advisory guide, Fang-tastic Fiction: Twenty-First Century Paranormal Reads, Patricia O’Brien Mathews really tries hard to define the boundaries of what constitutes paranormal fiction, for the purposes of her guide. Her introduction makes it pretty specific, as a matter of fact. She excludes most science fiction, dystopian fiction, straight fantasy fiction, and horror fiction (which she defines as fiction with the primary intent to scare or horrify the audience). Alas, the world of literature is not so easily categorized these days, as she found when she searched for “paranormal” titles in bookstores and libraries. Does Kelley Armstrong write science fiction, horror, mystery or fantasy? Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books counts Armstrong’s novel Bitten as a favorite paranormal romance. Which is it? Are Rachel Vincent’s Werecats books(which we’ve reviewed here- check out this review for Stray science fiction, romance, or horror? And do they have anything in common with F. Paul Wilson’s Repairman Jack series (and here’s a review of Infernal from that series) at all, except for both being classified as science fiction and horror?

Do all of these really belong to the same family of books? Because horror keeps popping up, even in a book that specifically excludes books in that genre in favor of “paranormal reads”. Maybe someone should go shake the catalogers until they develop some consistency. No offense. I love catalogers.

I’ll mention here that Patricia contacted us and offered to help us out while I was in the middle of writing this. I really do think it’s great that she put this guide together. And it’s even better that she is willing to share her expertise. She has a blog where she updates her annotations, which is worth checking out.

So on to the next book that drove me bonkers. That would be Writing the Paranormal Novel: Techniques and Exercises For Weaving Supernatural Elements Into Your Story, by Steven Harper. I’m not really trying to write paranormal fiction, but for what it’s worth I think it’s an interesting and informative guide, and right at the beginning, Harper writes about “supernatural people”. You know, vampires, demons, zombies, shape-shifters, malevolent monsters… There’s lots about world building and developing character histories, plot, pacing, point of view… there are exercises you can try and checklists to use, but the closest Harper gets to the H-word is a mention of The Talisman, co-authored by Peter Straub and Stephen King. Now, obviously there are many types of books that use the classic monsters of the horror genre for their own ends (and the term “paranormal” covers a broad swath of literature), which is fine, but COME ON! Is the horror genre so invisible that you don’t notice it even when you are writing about writing about its tropes, creatures, and cliches?

Apparently it is.

Vampires: The New All American Hero?

I was excited to see that the American Library Association had published a new readers advisory guide, Fang-tastic Fiction, with the subtitle “Twenty-First Century Paranormal Fiction”. It’s not often that a professional readers advisory guide appears that supports the librarians and readers who use our site (kind of- the author, Patricia O’Brien-Matthews, attempts immediately to remove the horror genre from her definition of paranormal fiction- but that’s not as easy as it sounds).

I’ll try to do a complete review of the book soon, but something she said in her introduction really jarred me. She wrote that vampires have “all the traits of the all-American hero”. What?

To put it in context, she’s writing about the transition of vampires from monsters to sympathetic leading characters. She attributes the change to the Twilight books and Anita Blake series, but I think that’s a stretch. Would you really pair Edward or Jean-Claude with Mom and apple pie? Deborah Wilson Overstreet was writing about this evolution before Twilight was even published, in her book Not Your Mother’s Vampire (Twilight came out in the fall of 2005, and Overstreet’s book was published shortly afterwards, in 2006, so it doesn’t mention Twilight), and she described the new, more sympathetic vampire as the “postmodern vampire”, which I think is a more accurate description. The postmodern vampire owes a lot to the media and literary franchise created by Joss Whedon, called Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He (usually he) is more angsty, more likely to land a human soulmate, and may be a little more public- heck, he may be working towards redemption- but he isn’t any less a monster. A sympathetic character, perhaps, but what makes them sexy is the danger. Not the sparkles.

Of course, there are differences between the scholarly book Overstreet produced in the pre-Twilight days and O’Brien-Matthews’ guide to readers’ advisory for practicing librarians looking for immediate references. O’Brien-Matthews isn’t doing critical literary analysis- that would be WAY outside the scope of her book, which still has to cover an extremely broad field of literature for some very busy people. But all-American hero? Isn’t it enough to be a sympathetic protagonist in the world of the book?