Mills & Boon is passé, paranormal erotic romance is the new hit. Renuka Deshpande explores the genre.
You have smuggled it into your room when you were a teenager. As an adult, you couldn’t help but marvel at the graphic details it provided that at times helped add zing to your life. The literary genre of erotic romance has, over the ages, titillated, enlightened, mortified and angered people over the centuries.
With the Internet giving way to free e-book downloads, the parched erotica readers found solace in the world of paranormal erotic romance, which was popularised through hush-hush e-book downloads. For a long time now, the genre has been enjoying immense popularity among net-savvy readers.
This genus is a heady mix of Twilight series (without the sickly adolescent mush) and sizzling sex. Only, the mythical beings in these novels aren’t restricted to vampires and werewolves. You also have faeries, angels, demons, hellhounds, ghosts, witches, wizards, satyrs and even Roman gods and goddesses as protagonists, coming with a bagful of sexual tricks, because hey, they are immortal, so they have accumulated some valuable little pleasure-secrets over the centuries. Black Dagger Brotherhood by JR Ward, Psy-Changeling by Nalini Singh, Lords of the Underworld by Gena Showalter and Dark Hunter by Sherrilyn Kenyon are some popular series in the genre.
The thrill in reading paranormal erotic novels lies in the lure of the mysterious—beings that are shroud in legend and anatomically dissimilar, yet similar. Their basic anatomy remains quite like the humans, but the vampires have their fangs, shapeshifters turn into animals, angels have wings, demons have horns and wait for this—satyrs sprout an additional organ on mating night every month! The mating frenzy features prominently in almost every paranormal erotic novel and is the time when the activity gets particularly intense. And intense is the word you would otherwise use for the sexual landscape of these novels anyway—bondage, domination, sadism, masochism, exhibitionism, threesomes, group sex, unnatural sex—they comprise anything and everything that could and couldn’t be done.
While you may argue that erotica by itself caters to every sexual proclivity, the catch here is that it involves beings that are ‘different’ and sexually skilled and adventurous. Sample this—in Brenda Williamson’s Tornan’s Curse, a werewolf pack leader takes a gypsy bride and has to mate with her in front of the entire pack—in wolf form. Or that the satyrs in Lords of Satyr can conjure up beings called shimmerskins who will fulfil every desire of theirs, no matter how sick or twisted. The nature of the genre allows authors to let their imagination loose and go wild, lending shock-and-awe value to the content. And you find everything, including bestiality, exhibitionism, whipping, hot wax and homosexual, bisexual and heterosexual activities often all at the same time in the same novel.
But it isn’t just sex that is so sizzling. It is also the romance. Most of them feature hunky heroes of the tortured kind who need to be ‘saved’ by the belles, and they are. They are most women’s dream—strong, protective and possessive and often mate for life, forever loyal. The women on the other hand are pampered princesses, innocent virgins or experienced vixens, but nonetheless courageous and witty. Not surprisingly, the most popular novels in the genre are those that are high on romance and white-hot sex scenes—because after all, who wouldn’t want a man who with herculean powers—in bed and otherwise?
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