By Kate Kenzie

With Valentine’s Day yesterday, I was pondering when my love affair with paranormal romance began. I could say it was Beauty and the Beast but it was never a fairytale I loved as a kid. Nor was it the relationship between King Arthur and Guinevere with the fantasy backdrop of Camelot. It was an amalgamation of my love of romances and horror.

Being an 80s kid, teenage romances were just becoming available in the form of Sweet Valley High and Sweet Dreams series. They were addictive and more relatable than the Mills and Boons books I borrowed from my mum. I loved the compulsory HEA, but I also had an obsession with the ghost stories and the paranormal. To fulfil this side of my reading preferences, I relied on horror books. Thank goodness my local librarians didn’t worry about age restrictions then. My teenage library book stash was regularly an eclectic mix of Jessica and Elizabeth’s sweet adventures and Stephen King or Dean Koontz. Both genres distinctly separate until The Changeover by Margaret Mahy published in 1986.

I remember buying it through the scheme. I ticked the box on the order leaflet and then had to wait forever for the book to arrive at school. The storyline was a blend of horror, demonic procession and the attraction between Laura Chant and Sorensen Carlisle, a brooding teenage witch.

I reread it umpteen times and it still holds chills, thrills, and charm, even now. With paranormal romance, the dangers and conflicts are heightened by magic, paranormal threat and positives enhanced. Why have just a kiss when witchcraft can produce stars in jars with unmeasurable power or a ghost’s love can extend beyond a lifetime?

While Point Horror books in the 90s touched on relationships, the next novel to cement my love of the genre was Barbara’s Erskine’s Lady of Hay where reincarnation and time travel was entwined into an epic historical novel. Kelley Armstrong’s The Otherworld series were the first commercial urban fantasy books I read. Full of danger and sizzling romances between witches, werewolves, vampires and demons, I knew this was the genre I wanted to write in. It allows the author’s imagination to thrive because anything is possible. From magical tea in A Blend of Magic to sexy Gargoyles who can fly in Jessica Haines, Heart of Stone romance isn’t constrained to reality. Mythic Alley books hope to capture the genre’s diversity and
share it with you.

What was the first paranormal/fantasy romance you read?