Kerry Allen

I’ve always been a romance reader (except when I wasn’t). 

I spent my formative years in a small town (4 streets, 4 avenues, bisected by railroad tracks) in Illinois. The town consisted of homes, a bar, a volunteer fire department, a teeny post office, a church, a playground, and a three-story brick school house containing kindergarten through 8th grade, most of its students bused in from outlying rural areas. With the exception of the break provided by the lone exit road, the town was surrounded by corn fields (and let me tell you, Children of the Corn really freaked me out). Television reception extended to four channels if the weather was favorable. There wasn’t a lot to do other than ride your bike around the block in summer or build snow forts in winter.

This dull environment made a reader of me at a very early age. The act of reading was a boredom buster, the stories themselves an escape from the suffocating sameness of every day. (Granted, I probably wasn’t thinking in those terms when I was five, but I definitely would now.) I quickly read everything I could get my hands on. By second grade, I had gone through the entire minuscule library of the school. (They didn’t know what to do with me. It was silly to have me sitting around reading Sweet Pickles books with new readers, so they sent me to the library for an hour every day. I remember having to write a report and present it to the 1st graders, which I believe is when my loathing for public speaking began.) We barely had money for luxuries like school clothes (fortunately my grandmother sewed me some pretty decent ensembles between those trips to Sears—my brother needed a larger portion of the clothing budget to save him from the humiliation of wearing homemade jeans), so feeding my voracious appetite for books by buying them was out of the question, and the nearest public library several specks on the map away was distance prohibitive.

So I read whatever I found lying around the house, and what was lying around the house (other than Playboy, which yes, I also read) were my mom’s category romances. I still remember some of those from years ago.

One featured a Siamese cat named Yaffa. The heroine was a jewelry maker who also worked at a runaway hotline. She hooked up with a dad using her to find his runaway son. The hero helped her rescue a teenage hooker from her pimp. The son, of course, had a nontraumatic runaway experience (boy genius made big bucks selling papers to college students and had a place to crash, so no dramatic pimp rescue for him).

Given my nonexistent memory for names, the fact that I remember the name of a cat is extraordinary. Naturally, I couldn’t tell you the name of the book or any of its human characters, but what do you need with those when you have Yaffa?

There are others I remember fondly, if in less detail. Then, of course, there are the memorably awful. (Spotlight on Betty Neels. Words cannot express my loathing for that woman’s writing. She’s responsible for the first book I could not bring myself to finish reading.)

I graduated to single-title historicals by the likes of Johanna Lindsey and Kathleen Woodiwiss. (One of my favorite books is still Tender Torment [gah, these titles] by Joyce Myrus, who apparently never wrote anything else.) Eventually, contemporaries by Jennifer Crusie, Nora Roberts, and Rachel Gibson, to name a few, made it into the rotation.

Did reading Romance, particularly from such an early age, give me a distorted view of real-life love? No more so than my parents’ less-than-happy marriage. I never expected one, never wanted the other. In fact, early exposure to the opposite end of the spectrum probably spared me a lot of emotional hangups in the long run. At least I knew there was a spectrum, not just what I saw around the house, which is much more likely to have scarred me for life.

We relocated several times, gaining better proximity to libraries. My older brother started bringing home Dean Koontz, and I continued my habit of reading everything in the house and branched out into Horror. My horizons expanded, but Romance still comprised most of my reading diet.

Then sometime in my early twenties, I got bored. Every romance I picked up, I could read the back and the first few pages and predict with eerie accuracy every major development in the book. I couldn’t read a romance for 10 minutes without putting the book down, frustrated by the predictability.

I turned my attention to the Mystery section, then Fantasy, then discovered there were a lot of amazing books in the Children’s section. With plenty to keep me occupied elsewhere, I completely abandoned Romance. I didn’t touch a romance novel for a good 10 years.

About three years ago, I received a much-appreciated box of hand-me-down mysteries. Hidden amongst them was Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Fantasy Lover. Much eye rolling ensued. Let me guess, the hero’s an underwear model? Dumpy, frumpy heroine with his picture thumbtacked over her bed saves him from a burning building or something, and he confuses gratitude with being in love with her? With some public declaration to his sexpot ex that he thinks the heroine is sexy despite her love handles and mousy hair?

Sneering, I read the back. Say what? Demigod cursed into a book, only to be brought out for use as a sex slave. Hmm… well, that’s different. “Different” excited me. It was the first thing I read out of that box of books. It was dark and sexy and amusing and brutal in ways Romance wasn’t allowed to be, in my experience. I had to have more, and I did some undignified squealing when I discovered there was more.

That box of mysteries is still sitting around somewhere, forgotten, overshadowed by my new reading love.

Thus, I discovered the joys of paranormal romance. It tends to be dark, which appeals to my semi-Goth, staunchly anti-perky nature. It relies heavily on worldbuilding rather than relying on the reader’s stock knowledge of Regency England or contemporary American living sans things that go bump in the night. When your boyfriend is cursed, has dietary restrictions, goes furry at that time of the month, or serves Satan, the conflicts tend to vary a bit from “we can never be together because Daddy doesn’t approve” or “I must keep my distance so he doesn’t find out about his secret baby.” (Which I know is a gross oversimplification, but there are themes we’ve all seen a million times, not just in romance novels but in real life, and there’s not much an author can do to make the million-and-first new and interesting.)

I recently picked up a historical off my mom’s TBR and couldn’t sustain attention through the first paragraph on the back cover. I’m clearly not ready to go back there yet. There have been a couple of paranormal historicals I was fine with (Shana Abe’s The Smoke Thief, notably). Maybe I need a really historical historical to make it interesting to me if there’s not going to be any bloodsucking or shapeshifting or spellcasting going on, maybe with some kind of political intrigue. It’s going to have to grab me and not let go, though, because I’m not forcing myself to read anything for the sake of genre loyalty, as the stack of unfinished books on my table can attest.

How did you get started? Have you ever fallen out of love with romance? If so, what convinced you to give it another chance?