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Recommended Books

March, 2001

"Paranormal Romantic-Suspense Realism"

By

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

 Send books for review in this column to: Jacqueline Lichtenberg, POB 290, Monsey, N.Y. 10952
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Stealing Shadows by Kay Hooper, Bantam Books pb Aug 2000

Hiding in the Shadows by Kay Hooper, Bantam Books pb Oct 2000

Out of the Shadows by Kay Hooper, November 2000

 See all books by Kay Hooper

I picked up Out of the Shadows at the supermarket, not realizing there were two prequels. I was more than half through it before I realized it was a sequel! Now that is GREAT writing!

I bought Out of the Shadows because as the author of a couple of vampire hardcovers, I found my attention riveted by the bloodless corpses strewn through the book so I knew I had to read it. Psychic detectives was just a perq added on.

I ordinarily do not like or read 'true crime' genre, and though I like Mysteries and Detective Fiction of the more cerebral kinds (Perry Mason, Columbo, Sherlock Holmes, but especially Faye Kellerman's Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus series that I've raved about here many times,) I don't generally read or like stories about chasing deranged serial killers. "Profiler" is not one of my favorite shows though it's a very well produced series.

Kay Hooper has made a fan of me. Why? Because she gets away with mixing genres with wild abandon, and I think she may have invented something new here that might signal a breaking of the Trend of Trendlessness I've been watching.

In the SF/F field, we had the advent of "Magic Realism" -- stories set in ordinary 20th century cities with mundane characters who had to deal with Elves, Fairies, and High Magick, in a very work-a-day mundane setting. I found I really liked those novels. Emma Bulll did some great work in that field.

Kay Hooper may not have invented this mixture she's using n this Shadows trilogy -- but I suspect she's the one the future will cite as having perfected the genre. I think I would call it "Paranormal Romance-Realism."

The most outstanding feature of Out of the Shadows is the style of the characterization. She has treated the paranormal in a way that makes the Psychically Talented characters in her novel seem real to those of us who ordinarily do experience the world psychically.

I'm using the term "Paranormal" here because that is the label that has been adopted by readers of this type of Romance. Out of the Shadows is definitely a romance -- complete with no-holds-barred sex/Vulcan-Bonding scene between two telepaths. Neither Katherine Kurtz nor Marion Zimmer Bradley have done better than this scene.

So Out of the Shadows merits the label "Paranormal Romance" - but how many romances have the most gory, insane, serial killer leaving dismembered, fully exsanguinated bodies all over town?

These characters live in the very realistic real world and do very realistic real-life-jobs while heroically suffering through their Romance phase. That's what makes the romance believable.

Hooper's Trilogy is true Detective-Genre fiction consisting of three separate stories about FBI Agent Noah Bishop, a highly rated telepath in a world that doesn't credit the existence of such talent.

Bishop uses his senses as an edge in Profiling serial killers and solving crimes for the FBI. Having proved the worth of this ability, he fights for and gets a separate crimes unit composed of Talented people. Each novel involves Bishop with a different victim and a different criminal he has to track down. The format is thus much like the Perry Mason novels, or Inspector Poirot.

In the third novel, Bishop's past is revealed as he deals with a multi-Talented woman from a Talented family. Eight years prior to Out of the Shadows, Noah Bishop fell in love with, and bedded, Miranda Knight the first time he saved her from a serial killer.

As in the novel Jean Lorrah and I wrote together, First Channel, the two lovers discover to their shock and dismay that sexual aftermath leaves their senses clouded, diminished or disabled. The first time they have sex, the effect lasts for days -- then later, just for hours.

Knight and Bishop had parted 8 years prior to Out of the Shadows bitterly because in the course of catching that serial killer, Bishop let all but one of her family be killed.

Now she's a town Sheriff and has a serial killer operating in her town and needs FBI resources to catch the maniac. So Noah Bishop comes to town with two of his Talented agents. And the tension between him and the Sheriff is palpable on every page.

His team is a group of people who are empaths, telepaths, and precognitives, even psychometrists. They are everyday normal people who have the same matter of fact attitude toward their senses that every "real life" psychic I've known has.

Hooper has used this element of Psychic Realism to make her rather fantastically talented characters seem real. Yes, their talents are exaggerated from those I run into regularly -- but just by enough to make the plot of the story work well as drama.

The characters have an attitude toward the psychic that is the exact attitude every real-life psychic I've known has -- it's not so much fun, certainly not romantic, definitely dangerous, just another complication to life no different from the irksome complications everyone must cope.

I was especially impressed with Hooper's precisely correct attitude toward the Mediumistic talent of one of her characters. Hooper handled ghosts, ouja boards, and Possession with a realism I've seldom seen in fiction outside of Marion Zimmer Bradley's work.

So this trilogy deserves the label "Paranormal Realism." Or perhaps Paranormal Detective Fiction because ultimately the serial killer is tracked down via some pretty intense psychic work.

So how many genres is that?

Paranormal Detective-Romantic-Suspense -- Realism. I don't think you could FIT a realistic vampire into all that.

This trilogy has all the elements that makes Laurell K. Hamilton's vampire series work, though Miranda Knight is much more mature than Anita Blake. Fans of the TV Series "Profiler" will find everything they love in this novel series. Fans of Marion Zimmer Bradley's novels will find many elements familiar. And though Miranda Knight is an agnostic, and there's no ceremonial magick in Hooper's Universe, Katherine Kurtz fans should find much to admire.

What has a novel like this to contribute to our understanding of the Trend of Trendlessness?

It is precisely this amalgam of disparate genres that is so clearly demonstrative of this underlying, over-arching Trend of Trendlessness.

For many decades now, Publishing has pursued the latest, hottest trend, churning out more and more books on the same identical formula that was just successful last month.

In that commercial atmosphere, it was impossible for an author -- even a Best Selling Author like Kay Hooper (Out of the Shadows was amazon.com Rank #506 on Dec. 31, 2000 and I've seen ranks well over 100,000)-- to sell a novel that crossed the genre division lines.

The Editorial Wisdom learned through painful experience (editors get fired if the books they've chosen don't sell well enough) was that readers will not buy off the shelves any novel that has elements in it that they don't like even if they love all the other elements in the novel.

So for each genre you add to your mix, you sell FEWER books not more. In other words, if you write a Romance you might sell 50,000 copies -- but if you write a Paranormal Romance, you'll only sell to that subset of Romance readers who can tolerate the Paranormal. So you'll only sell 35,000 copies. Add a Serial Killer and you only sell 10,000 copies. The editor can't afford to buy that book.

Today, with amazon.com -- and all the reader-review and recommendation-tracking tools, with e-books and the internet -- that old Editorial Wisdom is no longer applicable. So publishers can't follow trends, or even make trends. And readers haven't yet learned how to make trends -- they haven't yet learned they've gained power over Manhattan's publishing choices.

So the publishing world is in that backwater eddy of swirling trendlessness identified in the January Column.

The trend that is emerging is one I've long wanted to see -- Cross Genre storytelling. It is possible that the best selling author, Kay Hooper may just be a strong enough voice to establish this new trend if the readers will speak up on amazon.com.

 

See all books by Kay Hooper

Send books for review in this column to: Jacqueline Lichtenberg, POB 290, Monsey, N.Y. 10952

 

 

Send books for review in this column to: Jacqueline Lichtenberg,

 

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