Babel Clash

Yes, you can hear agents cringe and editors spit out their coffees at the mere mention of genre hopping or mixing; their jobs made, somehow, infinitely more difficult because there is no pre-fab marketing niche for your novel that mixes SF, western, and cozy mystery!

I say that with tongue only partly in cheek.  I’m of two minds on the commercial potential of genre hopping throughout your career, or writing a single novel that mixes genres (and I’m not talking paranormal romance as genre mixing either).  The pessimistic mind of the two knows that the industry wants to package you-the-author in a category so that they think they know who will buy your book.  Risk, particularly in this economy, is the four letter word in publishing, while trend is the publishing gold rush (see the idiotic proliferation of …and zombies books as an example of trend).

The optimistic mind sees that many of his favorite authors and recent books are in fact genre hopping.  2009 might be the year of the weirdboiled (coined, at least in public, by Geoffrey H. Goodwin in a Bookslut interview with me) novel:  novels mixing noir and fanatsy, or surrealism, or experimental fiction.  (See my blog post from earlier in the summer: Weirdboiled or Noird for more ramblings and a list of books)

So, the brief defense: I applaud and crave genre hopping books, the ones that don’t conform to singular genre expectations.  While I certainly understand the appeal of comfort fiction (recognizable stories, settings, characters, all as fluffy as your pillow), I don’t want to be comforted.  I want to be challenged.  I don’t want to feel safe when I read.  I want a new experience.  I want something that I’ll remember long after shutting the book’s covers.  To me, that’s what genre hopping fiction does and does quite well.

By no means an exhaustive list, but recent favorite examples of genre hoppers:

Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, China Mieville’s The City & The City, Jeff Vandermeer’s Finch (of course!), Jessica Anthony’s The Convalescent, Jedediah Berry’s The Manual of Detection, Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners, Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching, Stephen Graham Jones’s Ledfeather (or any of his work, really), Stewart O’Nan’s A Prayer for the Dying.

Related posts:

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