Crack fiction, or How La Gringa stopped being a literary snob and learned to love paranormal smut.

I have a confession to make: I am utterly addicted to paranormal romance. Every once in a while, I get sucked into a yet another new paranormal romance / urban fantasy / hot-chicks-in-leather-on-cover book series and get seriously addicted. My female friends and I have a term for these kinds of books: “crack fiction“.

A quick definition of crack fiction:

• Generally involves vampires, werewolves, demons, ghosts, djins, spirits, and/or characters with super-human powers; sometimes (as with Faith Hunter’s extraordinary novels Bloodring and Seraphs) they involve angels, seraphs and other interesting guest stars from the Old Testament.
• Characters are always – and absurdly – smokin’-hot (this is very important: there can be no unattractive people in these novels).
• Covers almost always have some variation of a hot chick wearing leather, carrying a gun or a crossbow or a sword or all of the above (hopefully centered around a gratuitous ass-shot); tattoos are also involved in a major way (see cover of Patricia Briggs’ Blood Bound and Jenna Black’s forthcoming The Devil Inside – both entirely crackalicious novels, by the way – for examples)
• Those hot chicks in leather are usually (but not always) the protagonist, and – make no mistake – they will kick your ass to hell and back, and they’ll do it cheerfully, while spouting snarky witticisms; afterward, they won’t have so much as even smudged their fuck-me-red Mac lipstick (although they sometimes do break the heels on their four-inch Manolo stilettos).
• Rare exceptions: covers that feature hot dudes, usually bare-chested, wearing leather or wings or both, with flowing hair (usually red or black), sometimes carrying a sword or a crossbow or a gun; not so much with the tattoos for some reason
• Sex. Lots and lots and lots of sex. Girl/boy sex, boy/boy sex, girl/girl sex, girl/werewolf sex, werewolf/vampire sex, vampire/private detective sex, private detective/lawyer sex, lawyer/plumber sex, etc…

As someone who has always been a genre reader but rarely a romance reader (I don’t count the five Danielle Steele novels I read when I was fifteen and in the hospital for three weeks with blood poisoning, because that’s all they had in the gift shop and my father didn’t know any better and I was on serious painkillers and just thought the covers were pretty and, really, who are YOU to judge!?) this new addiction of mine is somewhat surprising to me. I blame many people for this:

• Book Stud, who turned me onto Rachel Caine’s Weather Warden series long ago and started me on this long road to literary depravity (waves fists at the sky ::: damn you all to hell, you drug-dealing fiend! ::: ) (and really, if you haven’t read these books yet, what the HELL are you waiting for???)
• Big A (mother of Baby Crumpet), who also writes crack fiction (and I just finished reading one of her unpublished manuscripts called Animal Attraction which is totally AWESOME and worthy of the title “crack fiction”, if you are an agent looking for a new author, I suggest you email me now so I can tell you all about how much you need to publish this book and then we can go drink heavily and gossip, and afterward we’ll get a pedicure)
• Village Chick, whose entire apartment is an endless source of crack fiction goodness, in teetering stacks and piles on every available surface (which is going to be a problem soon, since she is expecting, and will eventually need to somehow squeeze a crib in between all these books, unless she can figure out a safe way to balance a bassinet on a pile of mass-market paperbacks) and . . .
• Nightgarden / Melicitlu (yes, you may be under the impression that these are two separate human beings but you would be wrong; I have evidence that they are in fact part of advance force of brain-sharing, super-intelligent and snarky aliens who have begun a surreptitious invasion of the Bronx), who continuously feed me a steady stream of books that are each more depraved than the last. (Um, hello, J.R. Ward? Ya big pervs.)

But mostly?

I blame Joss Whedon.

So, if y’all will excuse me, I have some rockin’ good crack fic to read.