Let me tell you about the vampire in the room or the paranormal alpha hero.

I have been reading him for 30 years.

It started when I was in high school in the nineties.

I watched the genre explode I watched the decline in the mid 2010s, and now I'm watching it come back stronger than ever before.

And here's what I find fascinating, the paranormal Alpha.

Exploded in the nineties during economic uncertainty.

He exploded again in 2008 after the financial crisis, and now's dominating during pandemic recovery and that cannot be a coincidence.

So today I'm gonna be breaking down my Paranormal Alpha journey, why we love these heroes in the nineties, why they came back in the 2000s, and why they disappeared, but also why they're back now, and what all of this says.

About us as romance readers and the world we're living in, because I was there for all of it.

So first, let me take you back to the nineties.

I was in high school when I discovered Anne Rise and it changed everything for me.

But here's the thing, I wasn't one of those kids who grabbed romances novels off of their parents' shelves.

That was not my house.

My parents were both readers, but I was buddy reading journalists, non-fiction stories with my dad.

The first book that I ever go on release Day when I was a kid was a Brian Weiss book, and I read it in less than a Day.

And at the time it was because Shakira had recommended a previous book by him as one of her favorite books in a magazine interview.

That's the kind of reader I was as a kid.

So when I first picked up Anne Rice and I met Lestat, this brooding, dangerous, immortal, unapologetically selfish vampire, it was like a door open that I didn't even know existed.

Just like with reading Pride and Prejudice and falling from Mr.

Darcy, it showed me all the possibilities of romance.

Anne Rice showed me my love for anything paranormal.

Now, these were not safe sanitized vampires.

They were gothic literary, genuinely dangerous creatures, and I couldn't get enough.

But here's what really hooked me.

It wasn't just the vampires, it was New Orleans.

It was the vibe.

Anne Rice made New Orleans feel like a character itself.

So we had the gothic architecture, the cemeteries, the atmosphere, the history.

I became fascinated with New Orleans as a setting because of these books and a lot of paranormal books after.

The city felt dark and romantic and mysterious and I dreamed about going there someday.

And then of course, fast forward to 2015, I finally got to visit New Orleans and it was everything that I had imagined from reading Anne Rice in high school.

I mean, walking through the French Quarter and seeing the locations from the books, feeling that gothic atmosphere in real life and walking through the cemeteries, it was unforgettable.

And that is the power that these books had.

They didn't just gimme a hero to obsess over.

They gave me an entire world that I wanted to live in.

But Anne Rice wasn't the only thing shaping my paranormal obsession in the nineties because it then came Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Buffy changed everything from my generation.

Suddenly we had Paranormal Alpha, who wasn't just a gothic vampire in New Orleans.

He was Angel the Vampire with his soul in high school in California, and then spike the bad Boy Vampire who was.

Dangerous, but also kind of boyfriend material.

Buffy made paranormal romance accessible in the nineties.

It made it cool.

It made it something that you could watch with your friends and not just read alone in your room.

Buffy, I think, gave us the template for so much of what came later.

We got the tortured vampire hero, the Forbidden Romance and that dynamic where he's dangerous, but he loves her, so it's okay.

But Angel and Spike were the blueprint for Edward Cullen and Damon Salvatore for.

Every brooding vampire boyfriend that came after, and it really wasn't just vampires, right?

Buffy opened the door to witches and demons and werewolves and just the entire paranormal world, which by the way, I have a whole video about 90s witches and how they shaped our reading with some book recommendations as well.

So I will link to that in the description, because that's a whole different rabbit hole that we can go down.

But the 90s Paranormal Alpha for me was this mix of Anne Rice's gothic literary danger with Buffy's accessible romance.

These heroes were actually dangerous, not just misunderstood.

They were immortal and powerful, and it felt intoxicating as a teenager, especially.

Dark and atmospheric like these books and shows were for people who could handle darkness and everything, and I love that these stories did not sanitize the danger.

Lestat was selfish and cruel.

Angel lost his soul and became Angelus.

These were not safe heroes, and that's what made them compelling.

Now, of course, I was too young to really understand economic uncertainty or link what I was reading, to what was happening in the world.

But looking back at it, the 90s and the early 2000s were really unstable times in a completely different way.

As an elder millennial, we had Y2K, which was the literal end of the world, right?

We genuinely thought that computers were going to crash, and society was going to collapse on January 1st, 2000, there was this constant low level anxiety about technology, about the future, about what came next.

And for my generation, we were the first generation living in both an analog and a digital world.

We had landlines and then we had cell phones, we had encyclopedias, but then we had the internet, physical photo albums, and then digital cameras and everything was changing so fast in ways that we could not fully process at the time as teenagers.

So maybe.

Maybe the paranormal Alpha appealed to every one of us because he represented something that was constant in a world that was constantly changing.

Vampires are immortal.

They've been around for centuries.

They're powerful and unchanging while everything around us is transforming overnight, and I really didn't think about it that way then.

But now looking back at it with 30 years of perspective, I think we were drawn to these heroes because they felt stable.

Dangerous, yes, but stable, permanent, in a world where nothing felt permanent anymore.

And then the 2000s hit and Paranormal Romance went from a niche gothic novel and cult TV show all the way to mainstream.

And that's when everything changed for me as a reader.

Now I have to talk about Twilight, because we can't talk about the 2000s paranormal without it.

Twilight exploded in 2005.

The movie came out in 2008 and it changed everything for the industry.

But here's the thing.

Edward Cullen isn't a paranormal alpha in the true sense of the word for me at least.

He is brooding, he is protective, but he's also sparkly and restrained, and that is not the dangerous paranormal alpha that I was drawn to in the nineties or later on.

But, Twilight's impact was massive.

We cannot deny that.

It opened the floodgates for paranormal romance in publishing because suddenly publishers wanted vampires and werewolves and anything supernatural.

And a lot of the true paranormal alphas that I love came from that publishing boom.

And listen, I get it.

I was in my twenties when twilight hit, and it probably hit different for the teenagers at the time.

I think Twilight was their Anne Rice moment, the way Anne Rice was mine in the nineties.

It was their gateway into paranormal and supernatural creatures.

So I respect what it did for the genre and for the industry and for readers, even if Edward was not my type of alpha.

For me.

It was Sookie Stackhouse, Charlaine Harris brought back my love for reading.

I had always been reading, of course, I went through a period of a couple of years where I didn't read and Sookie Stackhouse reminded me why I fell in love with books in the first place.

I was lucky enough to meet Charlaine Harris many times over the years after that, and I always thanked her for that because those books opened the door to everything that came after for me.

Now because of my love of Urban fantasy I naturally gravitated to where all the paranormal alphas were living in the 2000s and that was urban fantasy.

So we're talking Laurell k Hamilton.

Yes.

Anita Blake, but also the Merry Gentry series with the fae princes.

I mean, Laurell K.

Hamilton was doing, why choose Romance before why choose Romance was a thing.

Then we had LA Banks' Vampire Huntress Series with Damali and her team of Alpha Warriors.

Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson.

Of course, Adam the Werewolf Alpha, who leads his pack.

Ilona Andrews classic, Kate Daniels Curran, the werelion Beast Lord, who literally rules Atlanta's shapeshifters.

And I think even in ya, right?

We found the paranormal alpha there too.

At the time, Richelle Meads Vampire Academy gave us Dmitri, the dhampir mentor, who was dangerous and protective and completely devoted.

This was the era where urban fantasy and paranormal romance were everywhere and the alphas in these books, they were powerful.

They were dangerous.

They were protective.

They had supernatural communities to lead.

And then the TV shows hit.

Of course, true Blood premiered in 2008 based on the Sookie Stackhouse series and the Vampire Diaries in 2009.

Both were way different from the books.

I mean.

Very different, but I love the shows.

Anyway.

They brought Paranormal Romance to mainstream tv.

We can't deny that.

Suddenly, everyone was watching vampires.

Talking about vampires, choosing teams and I mean, leave me a comment and let me know if you were Team Bill or Team Eric, team Stefan, or Team Damon, and I guess I should probably ask you two Team Jacob or Team Edward.

However, I feel like was there even a choice?

Because really the only right choice is Team Eric, team Damon, and Team Edward.

Right.

Anyway, let me know in the comments.

But I think that this was a huge revival for paranormal and Alpha Heroes.

And it wasn't just the books anymore, it was tv, it was movies, it was pop culture.

The Paranormal Alpha was everywhere.

And of course, I have to make a side mention here that this was also the era of Fifty Shades of Grey and the erotic romance boom.

And we can talk about that in another video because it does mirror a lot of what's happening with Dark Romance right now.

But 50 Shades proved that readers wanted the dominant, powerful and controlling hero.

And Christian Gray was not supernatural, but he had a lot of the same alpha energy, that vibe that he's going to protect you from everything, and he's also going to control everything, which is not so good.

Now here's where I think it gets interesting.

The 2008 financial crisis hit and suddenly paranormal romance and historical romance as well exploded.

I actually have an interview with Eloisa James on the channel here that I'm gonna leave linked and you can watch it.

She talked about how the 2008 recession was a great boom time for historical romance.

She said that contemporary romance was something that people were avoiding because they were avoiding real life.

They didn't want to read about modern day struggles.

They wanted the rake in Regency England.

And for all intents and purposes, they also wanted that alpha vampire in an alternate world.

And that made total sense to me, seeing the demand for those kinds of books at the time.

Whether it was, yes, the rakes in historical or the Alpha vamps in Paranormal Romance, I feel that readers wanted the escape.

They wanted a powerful hero.

Who could promise security when the real world couldn't.

And that's when I started diving deep into paranormal romances as well, not just urban fantasy.

So I dove into Lora Leigh's Breeds series, which was genetically engineered shifters with serious Alpha Energy.

with J.R.

Ward's black Dagger Brotherhood series with six foot eight vampire warriors with leather and weapons.

Nalini Singh's Psy-Changeling series.

We had changelings, which are Shapeshifters, and psy, which have mental powers and they have fated mate Bonds.

Kresley Cole's Immortals after dark series with immortal warriors across different supernatural species.

Jeaniene Frost Night Huntress Series with Bones and the Vampire Bounty Hunter.

And of course, Vlad.

The it factor for me was the strong hero who would burn the world down to protect his mate, his people, would fight every battle.

It was about the power that they could unleash, but the softness that they show only for one person or in private moments.

These were warriors and kings and alphas of their species, but they had centuries of experience and supernatural strength.

Plus they had entire communities that were depending on them, and they would drop everything for their person.

I think that that contrast, the public power and then the private devotion, that's what hooked me.

And then I started under the covers book blog with Suzanne and two of our friends in 2011.

I remember we started our book blog and we probably got on book tube in 2012, 2013.

I can't remember at the time, paranormal everything was somewhat of our identity, and I can't tell you how happy it makes me still to this day when I hear someone that says that they started reading the Black Dagger Brotherhood series or the Kate Daniels series back then because of one of our posts or because we pushed it on everyone because.

We did push it on everyone.

That was our thing.

Those early years were peak paranormal romance and urban fantasy.

Everyone I knew was reading these iconic series.

We were taking days off to read every single new release, chatting about them online in some way.

Even the ones that were not on a blog or on YouTube, it was on Good Reads.

I remember my entire feed on Good Reads would be someone reading the latest paranormal romance release all at the same time.

Of course, we were also filming videos and doing buddy reads, going to signings.

And in a way, it felt like paranormal would be huge forever, but then it started to disappear.

I started seeing the paranormal alpha disappear with the lack of interest from publishing in paranormal romance and urban fantasy.

So traditional publishers stop buying paranormal, bookstores stopped featuring it, and only the true OG authors survived that.

For example, JR Ward, Nalini Singh, Patricia Briggs, Ilona Andrews.

The authors who had an established series kept that going, but any new paranormals, it just dried up.

It was definitely a sad time for a true paranormal romance or paranormal anything fan like myself, because there was a drought for a big part of the 2010s.

There were some indie authors that were writing paranormal and publishing, but not really that much.

The big thing was that everyone said nobody's buying it.

And then when we did see some of those paranormal start to creep back in at the end of the decade, it wasn't the paranormal alpha, it was soft.

It was very rom-com.

It was basically the romcom trend of the late 2010s that took over contemporary romance, but with fangs or fur.

So they were cute vampires, funny werewolves, adorable witches and paranormal romance came back, but cozy.

That was not the same.

It was not even close to the same.

That dangerous, powerful.

I will burn the world down for you Alpha, I think was just gone.

It was replaced by the supernatural boyfriend who was more concerned with being quirky than being dangerous.

And I actually think about this a lot.

The 2010s was also a time of changes in the world.

Was the world going a little softer at the time?

Maybe.

We were coming out of the 2008 recession.

The economy was recovering, things felt Stable.

Relatively speaking.

There wasn't that same anxiety, that same need for an ultra powerful protector hero.

And culturally, we were starting to question some of the alpha hero tropes.

That possessiveness, the dominance, the dynamic that he decides everything for her.

Readers were starting to push back on that.

We wanted more agency for heroines.

We wanted healthier relationship dynamics.

We definitely wanted consent conversations.

Which obviously don't get me wrong, all of those are good things that happened, important things, but it also meant that the paranormal Alpha, as we knew him in many ways, felt outdated.

Problematic, even.

So publishers pivoted.

They gave us a softer paranormal where the biggest conflict really was whether the vampire would embarrass himself at the heroine's family dinner.

Basically.

And look, I'm not saying that those books are bad.

I read them, I enjoy them.

They are just not the paranormal alpha that made me obsessed with the genre in the first place.

So for me, I'm not gonna lie, it was hard.

We had built our blog and our channel and our whole identity around everything paranormal and everything alpha.

And suddenly the genre we loved was disappearing or transforming.

And we were reading more contemporary, which is fine, but it's not my main go-to.

We kept reading the OG authors.

We kept hoping for a comeback.

But you know, for years 2014, 15, 16, 17, 18, it felt like paranormal romance as we knew it was just dead.

And urban fantasy as well.

The paranormal alpha was just gone, but then something started to shift.

I think it started around 2019, 2020, A little bit of a rumble, but definitely 2024 and 2025 it's where I have really started to see something new.

Or, I mean, not new, but something old that is coming back in a new package.

So Dark Romance started exploding, but it wasn't just Dark Romance, right?

The Paranormal Alpha was making a comeback in romantasy, in Dark Fantasy romance, and yes, even paranormal romance again.

So here's the thing, he wasn't always labeled as Paranormal Romance anymore.

I think we see it a lot labeled now as Dark Paranormal Romance and Dark Fantasy Romance and Dark romantasy with fae warriors and dragon shifters and immortal protectors and morally gray heroes.

And usually it's just that 2000s and early 2010s paranormal alpha that I love.

Nothing darker about him, nothing morally great about him.

It's just that alpha, but he's back.

That powerful protective that I will burn down the world for you Alpha hero energy, the one that leads his people, fights every battle and unleashes devastating power, but show softness only in private moments, which can be pretty intense because he's an intense guy.

That same hero is back.

It's just a different label.

Now he's just seen as dark and morally gray.

I think we definitely have, no questions asked, Booktok to thank for this.

I think Booktok gave us permission to love these heroes again, to want the possessive fae Warrior and the dominant dragon shifter and the Alpha Vampire who claims his mate.

Suddenly I think that readers were openly talking about wanting that morally gray hero, the anti-hero, the dangerous love interest, and the algorithm was pushing dark romance and romantasy with alpha heroes and that paranormal with bite.

So authors started writing it again because readers were demanding it.

And as we know, publishing is always late.

Publishers have started to pick up on those indies and publishing them as well.

We have a whole live show video where we discuss the the trend and change in the publishing industry and kind of that in indie to trad pipeline.

So if you want to hear more about that, I will leave that link down below as well.

But that's what gave us books like From Blood and Ash, which introduced us to Castile and a Court of Thorns and Roses, which brought Rhysand and Zodiac Academy with multiple Alpha Warriors.

Fourth wing with Xaden.

These weren't soft paranormal romcoms.

These were all alpha heroes, powerful, dangerous, protective, the kind of heroes that I fell in love with in the 2000s, just in fantasy worlds to start.

And since then, they've actually started showing up again in urban settings as well.

But I think there's something deeper happening here, and it connects back to everything we've just talked about.

So let me show you my pattern thesis here and let me know what you think.

So.

We have the 1990s and the early 2000s.

There was the Y2K anxiety, all the horrible things that were happening around the world.

First generation living through analog and digital world.

So everything was changing really fast.

Nothing felt permanent.

We got 9/11 and the aftermath.

We got the 2008 financial crisis economic collapse.

Job losses, housing crisis.

So what were we reading?

Immortal Vampires, Anne Rice, Buffy, Powerful Protectors, the Black Dagger Brotherhood, Christine Feehan, Kresley Cole.

We were reading Alpha Heroes who were constant and powerful when the world felt unstable.

Then came the 2010s, and this was a period of economic recovery.

There was relative political stability.

So things felt calmer.

They felt safer, the world seemed more predictable.

So what were we reading then?

The softer paranormals, the romcoms.

Contemporary romance, lighter fair.

We wanted to be in the real world and we didn't need the ultra powerful protector hero anymore.

Then now in the 2020s, of course, we have global pandemic, literal world stopping event, economic uncertainty again, inflation, job instability, housing crisis, political division, climate anxiety.

We have war and global instability.

The threat of AI and everything changing again.

I mean, let's face it, the world is a dumpster fire.

So what are we reading now?

Dark Romance.

Romantasy with alpha heroes, dark paranormal romance, dark fantasy romance.

We want those powerful protective heroes again.

I'm even seeing a billionaire resurgence, which I thought that people had pretty much stopped publishing those.

So do you see my thesis here?

When times are uncertain, when the world feels unstable and scary...

We always seek out that out of this world alpha.

Now here I'm making the case for the paranormal Alpha, but yes, that applies for other things as well, even to a certain point, Christian Gray and that erotic romance billionaire type hero.

We want the hero who is powerful enough to protect us.

As it pertains to paranormal, that is a hero who is immortal enough to be constant when everything else is changing.

Dominant enough to take control when we feel like we have none.

And it's not about wanting to be controlled in real life.

It's about the fantasy of safety, the fantasy of someone powerful enough to handle that chaos so we don't have to.

And I think that that's what I've been chasing for 30 years without fully realizing it.

When I discovered Lestat in the nineties, I wanted his immortality and his power, his certainty in an uncertain world, which by the way, what is your favorite Lestat iteration so far?

I am still watching the interview with the Vampire series, but I have to say that nothing tops Queen of the Damned the movie Let me know in the comments, but back to it.

So when I devoured the Sookie Stackhouse series and the Black Dagger Brotherhood, I wanted Eric's centuries of experience and the Brotherhood's Warrior strength.

Their ability to protect their own no matter what.

And when I think now of 2025, after a pandemic and economic chaos and the constant uncertainty, yes, it makes sense that we want Rhysand and Castile and Xaden with power, strength, and protection.

It's the same need, it's the same comfort.

It's just different packaging across different decades.

I think that the Paranormal Alpha actually represents that stability in unstable times.

He is immortal when everything feels temporary.

He's powerful when we feel powerless.

He's certain when everything else is a mess.

And I think this is why the paranormal alpha will always come back.

Maybe he goes away for a while when things are a little stable.

Maybe we don't need him as much when the world feels safe.

Although, I mean, I will always read the paranormal alpha.

We can enjoy the cute vampire romcom when we are not anxious about the state of the world.

But when things get uncertain, when we need the escape, when we need the fantasy of safety and power and protection, he will be there.

He's always been there.

And for 30 years he's been there for me.

From Lestat, to Eric Northman, to Curran to Vlad the Paranormal Alpha has been my constant in an uncertain world.

And I think based on what's happening right now in publishing, in Booktok in Reader Demand, I think he's not going anywhere anytime soon.

So I think it's safe to say that the Paranormal Alpha is back, and I think he's here to stay because the world is.

Still pretty uncertain.

So that is my 30 year love affair with the paranormal alpha from Anne Rice in the nineties to romantasy in the 2020s.

So I think the labels may change.

We have paranormal romance, urban fantasy, dark romance, romantasy, dark fantasy romance, dark paranormal romance.

But the hero at the core, he's the same.

He's powerful, protective, dangerous, devoted.

He's that alpha who will burn the world down for his mate.

And after 30 years, I am still not over him.

So what about you?

Are you team paranormal Alpha?

Do you see this pattern in your own reading?

What do you think about my thesis on why these types of characters are making a comeback or have gone up and down in popularity over the decades.

And of course, let me know when did you discover your first paranormal alpha and has he come back for you in what you're reading in the 2020s?

So drop a comment and let me know.

I want to hear all of your paranormal alpha origin stories.

And if you want more deep dives like this, like this video, and of course hit the subscribe button 'cause I talk about all things paranormal, romance, fantasy, dark, mystery, and more here on the channel.

Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next video.

Bye.