Paranormal Fantasy

For most of literary history the vampire was a monster seen from outside. Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire (1976) made the vampire's inner life the whole point of the book, and gave it a history, a grief and a social world. That shift from monster to member is the root of paranormal fantasy.

In the 1990s, Laurell K. Hamilton's Guilty Pleasures (1993) put a vampire executioner into a St. Louis where the undead had legal rights, and the idea of a supernatural population living openly, or nearly so, became a genre engine. Charlaine Harris's Dead Until Dark (2001) brought it to small-town Louisiana, and Kim Harrison's Dead Witch Walking (2004) imagined a world where witches and vampires had come out after a plague.

Stephenie Meyer's Twilight (2005) took the form to a vast teenage readership, and the years after it brought Cassandra Clare's City of Bones (2007), Richelle Mead's Vampire Academy (2007) and Deborah Harkness's A Discovery of Witches (2011). Each built its own hierarchy of houses, covens and packs, which is where much of the pleasure lies.

Expect worldbuilding by hierarchy: vampire courts, werewolf packs, witch councils, and the treaties and grudges between them. A human or newly turned protagonist often serves as the reader's guide into that world. Romance is common, and frequently a triangle across species lines.

Series run long, and many are told in first person with a quick, wry voice. The supernatural is usually treated as dangerous but not inherently evil, and much of the tension comes from creatures who must hide what they are, or have only recently stopped hiding it.