Ghosts and Angels in Paranormal Romances…Could be Interesting, No?

I’ve noticed what I think might be the beginning of a new trend in paranormal romances, recently.  Romance novel trends tend to plug right into what is hot in current culture, and Supernatural has a cute angel, along with a big handful of ghosts, X-Men has Angel, who really isn’t, plus there’s all this underground rumbling that vampires, love-’em-to-death, just ain’t enough any more.  Readers want something more, something new.  Something interesting.

Fae and fairies have been done.  Gargoyles are plain ugly.  Hard to imagine one of those beasties sweeping you off your feet.

Ghosts have have a chance of being romantic.  But there’s an inherent unsolvable romantic conflict there.  One of the two in the romance is already dead, and theoretically, you can’t arrange a happy-ever-after ending.  Heather Graham managed to pull it off in The Dead Room by

~spoiler alert~

killing off the heroine so she could join her dead husband in the afterlife.

But I find that leaves an empty kind of satisfaction for me, as I’d rather have them get to live in the here-and-now and enjoy a more earthy love.   One that involved sex and intimacy.

~ end of spoiler ~

Still, there might be other ways of arranging it that were credible enough to satisfy the reader, and make for a great paranormal romance involving a ghost as a hero or heroine, and thus launch a whole new sub-genre in the never-ending category (isn’t it great?).

Then there’s angels.  This is the one that has distinct potential, because there’s good angels.  Then there’s the bad boys, up to and including Lucifer himself, who was an angel before he got himself kicked out of heaven.  Remember the movie Michael?  John Travolta, leaving feathers all over the place as he learned what it was to be human?  Drinking, smoking, and getting laid?  Gluttony and greed in practice.

There’s also archangels, the warrior kind who know how to step into a fight and swing with the best of them.

If you follow the fictional examples of both Michael and City of Angels and presume that it’s possible for angels to fall to Earth and become human, and fall in love, then the field is wide open for exploration by romance writers.

And if there’s bad angels (Lucifer) and warrior angels, then that opens it up to the province of urban fantasy writers, and erotic urban fantasy writers like me…

That makes for some delicious story ideas, don’t you think?

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