Deborah Cooke: Author

This post evolved out of a discussion started on Coffeetime Romance, where the bloggers from Shape Shifter Romance are hosting a readers’ retreat forum this month. (Coffeetime Romance’s forums, btw, are free – you just have to create an account to access them.)

Marcia Colette started a discussion about labels and distinctions – the differences between urban fantasy and paranormal romance, and urban fantasy romance, etc. – so I posted some of this. I thought you might find it interesting, too, so added and edited a bit.

I think these labels are attempts to distinguish work, so that readers know what they’re getting. Sometimes, as you say, there are too many words and the meanings are too loose, so the descriptions don’t help.

For example, fantasy used to always be about encountering the alternate world in a rural setting – even if the world didn’t co-exist with our own, the protagonists’ adventures happened mostly in the country. Think of Sam and Frodo trekking endlessly across Middle Earth. The faux-medieval setting was a popular one.

Then along came some writers like Neil Gaiman and Charles de Lint (and even to some extent, Patricia McKillip) who placed the alternate world in cities – again, it could co-exist with ours, as an unseen facet of our world, or be an entirely different world that was urban. And this was called urban fantasy to distinguish it from the previous fantasy.

THEN along came the idea of protagonists who defended humans from the nasty creatures in this alternate world. Think Buffy the vampire slayer, or Laurel K Hamilton’s work. These protagonists were threshold guardians, allowing the rest of humanity to carry on in blissful ignorance of what was happening almost under their noses. These books featured a lot more fight scenes and action – although they were still fantasy because the focussed on the alternate world. These were also called urban fantasy, launching furious debate within the fantasy genre as to which was the “real” urban fantasy. (Which I suspect is really about swords vs. guns, but that’s a whole ‘nuther discussion.)

Then, all these ideas slid into the romance section. When the spine of the story is a romance (i.e. the book focusses on the relationship not the exploration of the world or quest) and you also have those threshold guardian urban fantasy elements, then it’s urban fantasy romance. These are invariably of the second/newer variety of urban fantasy, less Gaiman and more Laurel K Hamilton.

This is distinct from what came to be called paranormal romance – which was the winning term for all fantasy romance and paranormal romance – because it’s darker, urban-set, and includes more world-building than was characteristic in paranormal romance.

(Paranormal romance, technically, should include elements that are “beyond normal” for humans, like a protagonist who is clairvoyant or one who has precognitive dreams or one who has ESP. Fantasy romance, technically, should include fantasy elements, like angels and demons and vampires and wizards. Time travel can be argued either way. Probably because of the confusion with the fantasy genre, publishers have tended to use the term paranormal romance for all of this work.)

And this is distinct, as well, from romantic fantasy, which is fantasy with romantic elements. In romantic fantasy, the spine of the story is the fantasy (the quest or adventure) and the romantic elements are in the subplot. Sharon Shinn’s work – like ARCHANGEL – would fall into this category.
There are other qualifiers that can be added to the mix:

We talked about science fiction romance last Friday.

Dark, of course, just means darker and more violent elements – because “dark” in the romance section never meant anything very dark. These are elements more typically found in the horror section, like the graphic depiction of violence, which are becoming acceptable in romance.

Horror romance will be darker and more violent still, as well as more graphic in its descriptions of the violence. I suspect that in that subgenre, the protagonists battle real evil.

And you know what erotic means!

The funny thing is that both of my current series are labelled “paranormal romance” on the spine by the respective publisher, even though the balance of elements is really different in each series. I would call Dragonfire fantasy romance and my fallen angel series either science fiction romance or urban fantasy romance. I suspect, really, that publishers are going to use broader terms of description than authors might, in order to not dissuade a reader from giving a book a try.

Does that make sense?