Guest Post: Stephanie Draven

I'm thrilled to welocme Stephanie Draven to Musings by WINK. I love dark paranormal romance and her newest release DARK SINS & DESERT SANDS sounds like my kind of read. But why is dark paranormal romance so popular?

Paranormal Romance: The New Face of the Bodice Ripper

In the 1970’s and 1980’s, a common trope in romantic fiction was the forced seduction. These books were filled with heroes who either seemingly or actually ravished the heroine against her will...and they were extremely popular. These types of stories were eventually condemned for glorifying bad, or even criminal, behavior. A new awareness of damaging stereotypes about women took hold of the industry and the romance genre transformed.

But the fantasy behind the success of these books didn’t disappear quite so easily. There remains a perpetual allure to a hero who is so dark and dangerous that he might not be able to control his animal instincts. The thought that a woman might be able to tame such a man is something deeply rooted in our most primal understanding of our gender. It’s a very old, if unenlightened, courtship dance between men and women.

In the modern world, of course, there is no place for this kind of interplay between men and women. Behavior that might have been seen as sexy and seductive even fifty years ago, is now a mark of a man who doesn’t respect women as equals or perhaps a man who needs to spend some time in jail. We all get that.

But instead of exploring gender dynamics as they existed in their historical contexts, bodice rippers went underground. These days, every Duke in every Regency Romance is a gentleman who never violates the consent of his lady love (nevermind that she lives in a world in which her consent is entirely suspect if not irrelevant). All the lords and ladies and Viking marauders and pirate captains and knight errants that populate the historical romances of today conform quite nicely to contemporary standards of love between men and women. (You certainly won’t see anything like Beatrice Small’s Kadin, where a sultan quite naturally takes on several wives and lovingly keeps them in his harem.)

So, where did the monstrous men go? They transformed into vampires whose supernatural urges might lead them to pierce the tender flesh of the heroine without her consent because of hunger. They transformed into werewolves and shapeshifters and magic-wielding immortals for whom the normal rules of civilized behavior toward the heroine no longer apply. The heroes in paranormal romances seldom force the heroine into sexual intimacy, but they often do horrible, nearly unforgivable things to her before she finally redeems them with her love.

This isn’t a bad thing. Paranormal romance carries with it an overt message that this is not real. This is all play-pretend. The rules of this world are not the rules of our world, so it’s safe to read about heroes behaving badly. (But it should leave readers to wonder why historical settings aren’t fanciful enough to give this same message. History is a foreign setting; it’s as much a strange world as the ones paranormal romance authors invent, so why can’t we acknowledge it as every bit as much a fantasy?)

Just as interesting about the paranormal romance genre is that while it has become a bastion for the baddest boys of romance, it has also embraced some of the romance genre’s most liberated women. Reflections of contemporary women’s equality abound in these books right alongside the most sexist attitudes. A vampire hero who rips the bodice of his heroine to drink her blood might just as well find that she’s a succubus who has enticed him to his own demise.

In my latest novel, DARK SINS & DESERT SANDS, there’s a good deal of this kind of behavior from my hero. He’s an Arab-American soldier, wrongly accused of treason and tortured. He blames our heroine, Layla Bahset, and he has good reason to. She was his interrogator. So when he goes looking for her, love isn’t the first thing on his mind. And he’s certainly not gentle with her. If seducing her is the only way to bring back her lost memories, he’s happy to use his mind-control powers to do it.

While I certainly don’t glorify his behavior, both my hero and heroine are deeply flawed characters who are able to find redemption in one another, and paranormal romance gave me the ability to explore their story in a way that I otherwise couldn’t.

That paranormal romance gives authors this kind of freedom from the baggage of the real world seems to work in all directions to create new romantic fantasies right alongside the old. If this accounts for the popularity of the genre, it might well foretell its longevity, too.