When I finished the first draft of my first book, I added this lie to the bottom of my primordial draft of a query letter:
“It is a paranormal romance complete at 90,000 words.”
It was 90,000(ish) words. It was also complete. But was it a paranormal romance? Not so much.
The year was 2009, however, and until I finished my first draft of The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer, I didn’t even know what paranormal romance was. At the time, I’d spent most of my life reading literary fiction and narrative non-fiction, with a brief sojourn into the wizarding world of Harry Potter so that I could have conversations with my then pre-teen brother who would talk about nothing else. But there I was, in the later stages of revision of my novel featuring ill-behaved teenagers who may or may not have supernatural abilities, and having read no YA novels at all—not even Twilight—that’s where I decided to start.
Reader, I loved it.
Twilight has been dissected and analyzed in thousands of reviews and think pieces in the thirteen years since it was first published, so to read my hot take on it now would probably not be…hot. But it was undeniably my gateway into the world of Young Adult fiction, and at the same time, introduced me to the beautifully elastic concept of genre within it.
I’d had limited experience with speculative fiction before then, but I had read a few sci-fi and fantasy classics, enough to be able to distinguish between those genres. But when I read Tithe by Holly Black next, and City of Bones by Cassandra Clare after that, and then Uglies by Scott Westerfeld and A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray and on and on and on, I realized that the more YA I read, the less I understood what categories like ‘urban fantasy’ and ‘paranormal’ really meant. I didn’t even know that ‘romance,’ as a genre, meant that the couple was destined to have a happy ending. In other words, Like Jon Snow, I knew nothing.
Now? I’m still not quite sure about the subtle distinguishing characteristics of ‘urban fantasy’ and ‘paranormal’—all I know, really, is that both are grounded in our contemporary reality (as opposed to another planet, or Panem, or Westeros), but are nevertheless sprinkled with supernatural flavors (witches/ghosts/zombies/faeries/vampires, and/or superhuman powers). But while I still don’t have all the lit crit answers, I do have nine years of specific reading experience under my belt, so if you’re looking to dip a metaphorical, literary toe into the world of the supernatural, here’s where I would start: