Let's Discuss: Why I love Paranormal Books

All righty, since I was taking the unplanned bookstagram break by reading Sunday afternoon, I decided to hop on here and think of a discussion post to help soothe my worries of not being productive on all corners! Lol. So here we go...

Reasons Why I Love Paranormal Books

So a long, long time ago, in a time I can barely remember...I used to read contemporary books. Yes. I know. ME! I was just a reader looking for a book to read and chose whatever sounded interesting in my Borders strolls. Then one day, I read this book, you might know it by now. It was Demon in My View by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes and it involved VAMPIRES! I'm trying to remember if I discovered this at a book fair or Borders and even if I somehow read this book before I read the first book of the series, it's possible. I really can't remember those details as well, but this book has always cemented, for me, the start of a beautiful relationship with the paranormal world!

I loved meeting vampires. I think what made this such a great book to be my first love was that the heroine was also a writer of vampire novels and it suddenly turned out what she wrote was real. If memory recalls, it was all something like chance or fate that what she wrote was true. She really had no psychic inkling that her characters were actual real vampires.

Aubrey was my first vampire crush and he was what you would call the reluctant hero or bad guy turned hero. He wasn't a hero in the official first book and he wasn't super heroic in this one either, but in the end, well, he wasn't so much villainous anymore either.

Thus began my long obsession with what goes bump in the night. I loved meeting these characters who appeared "normal" yet were hiding secret powers or just the secret that they were something other, be it vampire, werewolf, half-demon, or other another type of shapeshifter and thereon. And it's not just about supernatural people having normal problems either, they tend to be far from normal and much more magical in nature...and more or less involve needing to save the world.

Eventually it presents the issue of does the human society know about these magical beings or are they in the dark? That alone always presents a different kind of storyline.

For a time, I did try to go back and forth with paranormal books and contemporary ones, because, well, there wasn't enough paranormal ones to read. Finally, I reached the point where I couldn't handle reading the contemporary ones anymore and dove deep into paranormal lore and I haven't looked back since!

Now you might say, hey, Jessica. You've read fantasy books and thrillers and reviewed them here before. Fantasy, I stipulate branches off of paranormal, or maybe vice versa. Fantasy will usually involve magic, so far from the norm! Then with thrillers...well, yeah, that's more mystery but with seriously sinister characters who are monstrous...but are 100% homo-sapiens! 

But yes, my love of paranormal comes from its lack of 100% normalcy. I like that they sometimes have the added blend of normalcy to it to make it feel more realistic, but that's as close to contemporary I'll get these days.

So what's your favorite genre to read? Why do you love that genre?