The Case for (and Sometimes Against) Genre Hybridization
Welcome to May’s edition of OUT OF CHARACTER! Monthly roundups will still be a part of this newsletter, but they’ll appear at the bottom of the page.
*
I finished two books in the first week of May, both genre fiction pushing the boundaries of the conventions of their genre. Caitlin Starling’s The Luminous Dead was substantially more successful at this than my other read, Beach Read by Emily Henry, but they’re both worth looking at in a conversation about genre drift, blurring, and hybridization.
The Luminous Dead arguably hybridizes a good few genres—science fiction, horror, and thriller—though all of this arguably also falls under a general “speculative” umbrella, an umbrella I’m becoming much more in favour of the more current spec fic I read. Much horror is also thriller; much sci fi is also thriller, though it’s certainly not true that most thrillers are either sci fi or horror. There was recently a debate on twitter that horror cannot exist in space—a ludicrous claim given the existence of Alien (1979)—but one thing the argument did was raise the question of where a genre begins and ends. The Luminous Dead doesn’t take place in space, but it does take place on a planet that is not ours—yet it could just as well have taken place in a terrible cave on Earth with very few details replaced. I feel it’s still sci fi, but nominally. It is horror because there are ghosts and the protagonist is working against her own mind, and it’s thriller for the danger and survivalism of it all—yet the fact that it technically takes place off Earth puts it in the sci fi category often before others.
Beach Read, on the other hand, has an internal discussion about what genre it is; seems to make one decision for most of the book; and then makes a different decision at the end. This didn’t work for me, but it’s certainly true that this book also negotiates with a number of different genres, even textually. This is possible because one of the protagonists is also a romance writer, bringing metatext to text.
Beach Read tries to differentiate—or, arguably, not differentiate—between romance, women’s fiction, and general fiction. January, our romance writer protagonist, argues that women’s fiction is just a pigeonholing name for “fiction.” She also claims to be a romance writer (external characters also make this claim)… romance is quite a specific genre to me, and not necessarily one I personally would conflate with either women’s fiction or general fiction.
The book also negotiates with these genres on a metatextual level. Its writing style is one I definitely associate more with the elusive genre of “upmarket women’s fiction” which, like pornography, I can mostly only name when I see. But the book is functionally a romance novel, especially its final chapters, where the common romance beats of Dark Night, Grand Gesture, and Whole Hearted so obviously dominate the book’s structure as to construct a gigantic neon sign reminding the reader that this book follows romance conventions.
“Genres” are fundamentally a marketing tool—a useful one, but sometimes limiting. January has a point that labeling a book a woman has written as “women’s fiction” tends to cut out half that book’s potential audience. But as we know from the rise of YA to market dominance from nonexistence, genres can also shift over time. I think it’s happening with spec: fantasy, sci fi, and horror are increasingly mingling together and getting more difficult to pull apart. Science fantasy is on the rise. Star Wars is a classic genre hybrid.
This may also be happening with categories like Women’s Fiction—which seems to me like a holdover from a several decades ago—and Romance. This strikes me more as drift than hybridization, though: women’s fiction is (to me) defined by its subject matter, style, and authorship, while romance is defined by its conventions. They’re harder to explicitly combine, and easier to blur the lines between.
Genre hybridization is a bit of a writerly preoccupation for me, possibly to my own detriment. One of my projects reads like a fantasy book, but over time it’s revealed to be science fiction. Another tries to combine elements from historicals, focusing on difference in setting; fantasy, focusing on fantastical worldbuilding; and mystery, navigating this world setting-heavy world through the answer to a question.
Genre conventions can be useful to helping us understand how to shape or read a story—but there’s lots of creativity to unearth in combining, discarding, and subverting those genres by introducing another one. Among other things, genre hybridization is one way to approach a familiar story pattern with a fresh perspective. What about a story that follows all the beats of romance, but the content is horror?
It’s possible to get too ambitious. If your story tries to include too much, your MICE quotient might get out of whack. It’s also possible to fuck it up: the uncertainty of Beach Read in how it understood itself—of whether it was trying to blur genre lines, shirk them, or enact them—was ultimately what made reading that book an unsatisfactory experience for me.
But especially in an era of literature when things like beat sheets are extremely accessible and widely followed, hybridizing genres might inject some needed creativity and craft diversity into the landscape… as long as we can actually find someone who will buy and sell our books.
*
April Totals:
29,074 words
- 25,816 fiction
- 7 projects, one immediately abandoned on account of it being bad; four drabbles finished
- 3,258 content
April’s wordcount was low partly because of Copper Spines’ launch which, between editing and promo, ate up several days’ worth of work time… but it was mostly low due to a profound lack of motivation to put words on the page. I have a block right now based in apprehension: I have whole stories in my head that need to be transcribed, but when I open the document I’m somehow afraid of fucking up, or taking on too much. It’s brain time. I’ve got the brain. Hoping in May I have less of the brain, though my wordcount this week hasn’t exactly been stellar, either.
April was also cool because NetGalley started approving my requests after three months of not doing that, so I have some ARC reviews! I also updated and began using my Storygraph account for the first time this year; I tend to do stream of consciousness reviews on Storygraph and the condensed version on instagram, so choose your own adventure if the reviews are what interest you:
Read this month:
- Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro (4 stars—speculative—insta | storygraph)
- The Echo Wife, Sarah Gailey (4 stars—speculative—insta | storygraph)
- Ultramarathon Man, Dean Karnazes (2 stars—memoir—storygraph)
- Skye Falling, Mia McKenzie (3.75 stars—romance—ARC, out June 22, 2021 — insta | storygraph)
- Library at Mount Char, Scott Hawkins (3.5 stars—speculative—insta | storygraph)
- The Sunset Route, Carrot Quinn (3.25 stars—memoir—ARC, out July 6, 2021—insta | storygraph)