I find it amusing that whenever someone (usually a woman) wants to be taken seriously but is caught reading a romance novel, the first thing out of her mouth are the words "guilty pleasure." Or she becomes defensive if the other person disapproves. She doesn't want to be blamed for condoning trashy books or labeled as anti-feminist. But you know, even if they're in a genre with more than its fair share of terrible covers, they're just books.
Anyways, this does not mean that I give the romance genre a free pass. The main problem I have is that romance is particularly susceptible to commercial pressures. Romance writers are always looking for the next hot fad to exploit. And once they've found it, the market is saturated with similarly plotted novels that aren't very good.
One such fad that has jumped the shark is the subgenre of vampire romances*. There really hasn't been any innovation with this monster since Anne Rice. (I feel like I can make this statement with some authority since I've read or partially read many of the authors writing in this field.) Making a character a vampire is more like a plot crutch. Please, no more angsty vampires. I don't even bother looking at those books anymore.
On the other hand, humor--particularly of the parodying kind--can excuse a lot of things if done right. Or maybe I was just feeling nice when I read A Bite To Remember by Lynsay Sands. PI Jackie Morrisey has been hired to protect Vincent Argeneau, theater guru and vampire, from a crazy (possibly another vampire) stalker. However, Jackie has some serious control issues when it comes to vampires (the rest of the characters and the reader--me--got beat over the head with it one too many times), and she's the type of gal who'd run after the bad guy herself, preferably without the hero tagging along. And to top it off, she has a sidekick named Tiny.
While Jackie has all the machismo, Vincent is decidedly not your average vampire--or even alpha hero. He likes shopping. He likes color coordinating toasters with his kitchen. He won't even bite the pizza delivery guy if it means the psycho lurking nearby will kill the human after he's had his snack. And he (as are the other vampires in the book) is not particularly angsty. Actually, the vampires aren't really undead either--this is explained with nanobots which could have potentially hilarious and/or profound consequences if the author had bothered to expand on this aspect of her universe.
A note: A Bite To Remember is stand-alone although it is part of a series. If you like this one, you'd probably also like A Quick Bite. The books before that one aren't quite as good (I did not manage to finish them). I think Sands is actually one of the few romance writers who actually improves with her newer works rather than rehashing old themes.
*Another gripe I have is with paranormal romances in general. Although I like the idea a lot (after all, I'm totally into speculative fiction of all types), almost no romance author has done anything original or plausible with it. It's as if the only research they've done was watching re-runs of Buffy.
