I’m asked a lot of questions about genre, mainly about how I would classify my own writing, and whether I actively decided to straddle several genres or I’m intentionally genre-nonspecific.
My stories are a sort of mish-mash of true crime and horror, written in the style of a podcast. My apologies go out to the booksellers and libraries who have to place them somewhere…
To be honest, as a writer, I never really give genre much thought. Genre for me is simply a sign in a bookshop or library, pointing me usually into a basement or obscure corner where I can find my favourite types of books. (That’s not me parading as some kind of literary hipster – it’s the fact that horror, my favourite genre, is always shoved onto the end of a shelf, or else inexplicably made part of sci-fi/fantasy, as if those books might taint all the lovely hardback fiction written by wholesome celebrities, sitting in bright piles at the front of the shop.)
I think I’ve always liked reading books that defy genre. Not as a rule though – I never actively search out such books. It’s just that I’ve always felt that books that so ardently adhere to a single genre are therefore constrained by it, and as a reader, I want to be surprised.
This is by no means a slight on anyone writing genre fiction, but I suspect that if I go into the crime section of a bookshop or a library, I’m unlikely to find a cryptid. Perhaps that says more about me than about genre.
I’m going to give a few of examples of genre-defiant books that have helped shape me into the writer I am today. In other words, the blame lies at the feet of the following authors.
Patrick McCabe – The Butcher Boy (1992)
Patrick McCabe is one of the authors whose work galvanised me to write. His books are usually found in general fiction as there’s no clear place for them anywhere else. He writes like a deranged Roddy Doyle: rich, Irish stream-of-consciousness prose that sucks you into the dark corners of damaged minds in small towns.
The Butcher Boyis set in small-town Ireland in the sixties and details the inner workings of Francie Brady, a young boy whose sanity is crumbling as quickly as his home life. I don’t want to say too much more about the plot as you should read it, then try and classify it yourself.
What on earth is this book? Is it crime? Not really, but also sort of. The atmosphere is thick, the setting bleak. McCabe is often (and horribly lazily) classed as ‘Irish fiction’, which I suppose he is, but there’s a hell of a lot more to his books than that.
Antti Tuomainen – The Man Who Died (2016)
Who said that crime couldn’t be funny? I don’t think anyone actually did, but even so, the effortless blend of humour, crime and oddness makes this one a square peg in the grizzled-detective-with-an-alcohol-problem-shaped hole. Swap the bottle of whisky and the one that got away for a dying, Finnish mushroom entrepreneur, and you already have a stand-out protagonist. That’s before this story’s even started. Reading this book is a little like watching a Cohen brothers’ film. You’re not quite sure exactly how to classify what you’ve just experienced, but you love it and you want more.
Lauren Beukes – Broken Monsters (2014)
First, a caveat: Lauren Beukes is one of my all-time literary heroes. Everything she writes is amazing. This book was the first of hers I picked up and is a cornerstone for me in terms of influence. A serial killer, possession, Reddit threads; written from the points of view of two characters: a detective and her teenage daughter – maybe this should be crime, but is it really? A purist looking for a cosy whodunit wouldn’t have much fun here.
Broken Monstershas a large enough fantasy element, and I guess enough horror, to be classed as such. The defiant spirit that Lauren Beukes’ work invokes felt almost like permission for me to begin exploring new ways to construct a narrative.
Janice Hallett – The Appeal (2021)
This book, while perhaps not as genre-defiant as the others, is nonetheless a significant step towards a new way of telling crime stories. If we think of what a crime novel is at its base level – a story that we, as readers, are drawn into as we try and deduce who committed a crime and why – this book seems to be exactly that. But it takes a beautifully original form.
Rather than a novel in the traditional sense, this book is a dossier about a murder. What we read is correspondence – emails, texts and letters – and from that we have to deduce whether the imprisoned person is guilty or innocent.
But this is no gimmick. The way Hallett constructs voice and character is nothing short of phenomenal. The real kicker, though, is the occasional break when two law students, given this same dossier by their boss, discuss their own theories.
I was utterly consumed and could think of little else while reading The Appeal.
Mark Z Danielewski – House of Leaves (2000)
This a suburban, Lovecraftian, non-Euclidean narrative that envelopes you completely. On the surface it’s about a troubled tattooist who discovers academic-style notes in the apartment of a dead man. These notes concern a family who move to a new house and find a room that leads seemingly to nowhere.
This book does not simply exist; it lives. This book is a journey into madness and you’re going with it. But what is it?
Pages upon pages of fake academic references; single words to a page, or else constructed graphologically in a loop, or at an oblique angle; endless footnotes. It’s like a PHD thesis written by Azathoth.
There are thousands of active book groups still discussing and trying to dissect this story. I read it every year or so and it still troubles me. When I finish it, I need to start again, I need to be lost in the labyrinth of this book.
If ‘fake-academic, non-Euclidean, graphological insanity’ is the only way we can classify this one and a new sub-section of the scifi/fantasy shelf must therefore be constructed, I’m in.
Andrew Michael Hurley – The Loney (2015)
Just like the best kind of folk-horror films, such as The Wicker Manor The VVitch, the scares in this novel are not overt; they creep in like a draught and are all too real, like a distant memory we thought we had. Quiet rituals, such as burning marzipan, stand toe to toe with entrenched faith, and the slow-burn poetry holds the story in a strange otherland that is neither completely real nor really a dream.
Does this make it horror? It’s been described as ‘gothic’, and that might be as far as anyone can go when trying to fit it into a genre. We start with a dead body in the lonely bay of Coldbarrow in the North-West. This is a haunted place. This is a truly haunted story; the narrator being haunted by the past, by the memories of what happened to his mute brother, Hanny. We swing between the present and the past, Hurley’s eldritch poetry drawing us along as it describes the narrator’s ritualistic devotion to his memories, his pious mother and her cult-like companions, and the journey to the shrine above the ‘wild and useless length’ of coast known as ‘The Loney’ to cure Hanny of his affliction.
This is more of a mood than a story. But when the mood is so expertly crafted, it’s a pleasure to wallow.
