If you’ve looked at my bio, you’ll have spotted the list. Science fiction, space opera, urban fantasy, horror, fairy tales, noir, detective fiction, dark humour, to name but a few. Often more than one in a single tale, I always add, because that’s the genuinely confessable part.
I don’t sit down and decide to mash genres together. It just happens, the way everything does when you’re a Pantser. You find out what the story is by writing it, and apparently my stories are often several different things at once, wearing each other’s coats and trading hats.
How a Fairy Tale Ends Up in Noir Territory
I’ll start a piece thinking it’s a fairy story. Light, a bit whimsical, the sort of thing with a moral buried somewhere in it. And then, three paragraphs in, someone says something with a harder edge than I expected, and suddenly I’ve got a detective figure lurking at the margins (‘Red’ is a homicide detective), and the whole thing has the shadows and moral murk of noir creeping in at the edges.
I used to fight this. Early on, I’d catch myself thinking, “Hang on, this was supposed to be one thing, not three.” I don’t fight it any more. I’ve learned the Muse knows what she’s doing, even when I very much don’t.
Why I Think It Works (When It Does)
Genres are categories for shelves and search engines, not really for stories. A monster doesn’t know it’s meant to stay inside horror. A spaceship doesn’t know that space opera and detective fiction aren’t supposed to mix. Science Fiction can have romance blossom within it. Once you stop worrying about which box a story is meant to live in, you can let it be the size and shape it actually wants to be.
Paranormal City is probably the clearest example. It’s a dark urban fantasy with horror running right through it, a few scraps of science fiction, and enough dry humour scattered throughout that readers aren’t quite sure whether to be unsettled or amused. Mostly, I’m told, they’re both. I take that as a compliment.
The Confession Part
Here’s the actual confession: I don’t always know what I’ve written until someone else tells me. I’ll think I’ve written a straightforward science fiction story, and a reader will point out it’s really a fairy tale wearing a spacesuit. Or the fact that the private detective talks to ghosts isn’t normal. Or that fairies don’t generally use hair dryers. They’re usually right. My Muse doesn’t file paperwork, and neither, it turns out, do I.
I don’t worry about genres anymore because research shows that readers demand ever more multi-genre tales. And not just in literature, either. Think of how many modern action films have science fiction, fantasy and/or horror elements. In fact, some speculative fiction genres, like interstitial and slipstream, exist precisely because stories no longer stick to their assigned lanes.
So if you ever read something of mine and find yourself unable to decide which shelf it belongs on, join the club. I gave up trying years ago.