Why Romance Books are Still in Print?
You may think that by now our culture has had enough of the mushy “happily ever after” love story that makes for good chick flicks and fairy tales, but is apparently elusive in the real world. However, head over to your local book store, and you will see that the romance novel aisle is among the largest sections in the entire store. Indeed, romance books aren’t going out of print anytime soon. If anything, it seems like the amount of romance novels in print has increased. But how can this be, you might wonder.
What more do romance books have to offer us? Isn’t the world fed up with silly love songs and cheesy romance?
Nope, not even close. Maybe people are tired of the old love stories and love songs, but they are embracing the age-old ideals of love and romance in a totally new way: the bad way, the “bad romance.” It’s the age of Lady Gaga and her little monsters, of Pink and her party goers, which are wrong in all the right ways, and Rihanna, who’s bad but utterly good at it. It’s the age of vampires and werewolves and their illicit affairs with human beings, love that should not happen but the audience wants it bad, that bad romance. So when we say that the amount of romance books has increased, we really mean more Twilight books are on the shelves. They are the “bad” romance books, and in a way they’re more romantic than the pure hearted “good” romance ideals of that past. Being in love with somebody even though they feed off of blood, faint at the sight of garlic and burn to a crisp when the sun rises? That’s some pretty powerful love right there. Wanting ALL of somebody, their ugly, their disease, their horror and their design and not just their good point is in some ways a more dedicated, all-encompassing love than the traditional happily-ever-after offers. You have to wonder: Missing Verb Snow White and Cinderella really have fallen for their princes if they had not been “charming”? In this day and age, they would have. And Snow White wouldn’t have been so snowy white either, and Cinderella would have embraced her ashes.
So no, romance is not dead, romance books continue to be in print, and love is still oh so real, albeit twisted and reinterpreted. The legends of old do endure, and true love is everlasting. But no one said that they’d remain immortal in their original forms. Love will continue to change and evolve as time goes along, and maybe next century it will be a totally new kind of animal—or monster. And we will be dying to read all about it.
