Werewolf Bar Mitzvah! Spooky! Scary!
(Boys becoming men, men becoming wolves)
At the weekend I ended up revealing to people that I know way too much about some genres to really comfortably call myself a man any longer, more specifically romance novels, and more specifically than that: paranormal romance novels.
Not that I read them. My girlfriend reads them, and my mother used to read them. I believe that back home in Scotland there are roughly three hundred Mill & Boon (or related) titles in the loft, slowly changing over the years from literary mulch into actual mulch.
So we were discussing at Alt.Fiction the fact that romance is popular. Extremely popular. Even a series like Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter, which quite famously and ostentatiously jumped the shark after ten books is not only still going, but it obviously sells massively, stocking everywhere in multiple covers (the bane of Lisa’s existence – she goes berserk in bookshops that stock different editions of a series that she was halfway through buying because now they will never match).
I promised myself that I’d go trawling to see if I could find some answers, but as it turns out the genre fans themselves have no idea either. Over on Smart Bitches, Trashy Books there’s a post up about the crack-like quality that exists in all those things that we really should feel guilty about liking, be it Con Air (best. movie. ever. – I still love the white trash wife scolding her daughter at the end; “Now you take your Daddy’s present“) or professional wrestling, or incredibly bad, formulaic trash novels. There are some great comments on there – favourite so far is “I am positive that if I watch THE PERFECT STORM just one more time, the boat won’t flip over.”
On a slightly different note, my girlfriend just made me watch some porn. And you know what, it wasn’t nearly as awesome as I imagined that situation would be – mostly because the conversational tone of the actors juxtaposed against the actually quite disturbing footage kind of freaked me out. Also, she found the link on a knitting forum.
Knitters. Dark horses of the crafting world.
Oh, and the title of the post is from 30 Rock, because I love it.
