Genre-Shift

By Russel D McLean

This week I was lucky enough to read an ARC of Lauren Buekes' THE SHINING GIRLS. Its a genre-bending novel that is at once a serial killer thriller, a time travel masterpiece and something altogether a little weirder.

It grabbed my attention straight away.

Why?

Because it was taking risks. Because it was doing something very different. And because it was doing it well (although that was a bonus)

I do think that writers can often be pigeonholed into a genre, that they can be associated with one type of fiction and one type only. I think that they can sometimes be afraid to experiment. I think that sometimes their readers can be afraid, too.

Best example of someone always genre shifting is Iain Banks. He has two distinct fan bases, that do occasionally cross over. But it was interesting when tried to blur the two in TRANSITION, because suddenly people seemed not to know what to do, as though he had committed some grievous sin akin to crossing the DNA of a shark with that of a human being*. Really, folks? Because it dared to have elements of various genres, you threw up your hands in despair?

But its an old problem. I remember Banks talking with despair about readers who give up on perfectly good novels because they come across the word "space" and suddenly their brain shuts down.

And I remember some of the reactions to one of Chris Brookmyre's best novels, PANDAEMONIUM: "but there's deeeeemoooons! That's not realistic!" as though abseiling down a cliff-face using your enemy's intestine as a rope was any more so.** I can only wonder what their reaction to the more pure-SF BEDLAM is going to be like...

Sometimes, playing strictly within a genre becomes limiting. I read a lot of good crime novels, but many of them while competent and entertaining (and sometimes even quite brilliant) can suffer from adhering too strictly to a jaded formula or genre boundaries because that's what's expected***. I find it very interesting that John Rickards (aka Sean Cregan) has started rewriting his earlier novels which were published by Penguin, talking on twitter about how they made him pull back from some of the genre hopping elements he tried to put into them.

Variety is key to life.

Now, not every book should be a genre-hopper. I mostly write straight up crime fiction and I'm happy with that, but I hope if I ever should decide to hop about the genre playground, you, my dear readers, will trust me enough to know that this is what the story needs to be and that even if it plays a little outside of your comfort there is a method in my storytelling madness.

Because fiction should be about experimenting, about trying new things, about attempting to cross-pollinate ideas, themes and characters. Fiction is about possibilities. It should never be limiting.

Not even within a genre.


*apologies, I wound up watching DEEP BLUE SEA the other night primarily because as cheesily insane as it is, I can never resist that brilliant Samuel L Jackson chomped by a shark scene

**one of the best and funniest (in a dark way) moments in BE MY ENEMY

***note I said some, not all. Pure genre storytelling can still be very very very powerful and so well done you don't give a toss what genre it is at all

Not The Same... and Decidedly Different

By Russel D McLean

Christopher Brookmyre’s latest novel is not a crime novel.

The Scots author has become known not just for his acerbic (and occasionally offensive, to those of a delicate nature) humour but for crafting the kind of crime novels “Agatha Christie might have written if she’d been off her tits on manky crack” – this according to Time Out.

However, Dame Agatha would not have touched this latest novel with a barge pole (mind you, given Brookmyre’s potty mouth, she may have had some difficulty with the rest of his output, too) and some people will be surprised to discover that Pandaemonium features a bunch of Glasgow School kids facing off against Demons from what is possibly the depths of hell. In amongst all this carnage of course, Brookmyre inserts an argument about organised religion and how it can all go so horribly, horribly wrong.

It’s a brilliant book. It moves like, well, a bat out of hell, and it’s screamingly funny and no one else could have written it bar Brookmyre.

But it’s also a risky book.

Because what he’s done is switch genre completely. I mean, there is no crime here. At the day job, we have to put it in the crime section, but I’d be much happier putting it in horror. Its not a predictable Brookmyre book. Oh, sure, its his book. It has his obsessions and his voice and his idiosyncracies, but its not the kind of book we’ve come to expect from him. He’s turned the tables on his readers, and he’s having a ball doing it.

A lot of writers these days are pigeonholed by genre considerations. People believe that they want “the same but different” and get nervous when a writer does something unexpected. Like we don’t trust our writers to be unpredictable, even though so many of them are at their best when they are.

In a recent interview with the Rap Sheet’s Ali Karim, John Connolly says the following:

my publishers have adopted a very hands-off approach to what I do, and I’ve been permitted to experiment through books like Nocturnes, The Book of Lost Things and, later this year, The Gates. That’s come at a cost, though, in that the sales of the Parker books would probably be higher if I was producing one of them every year instead of exploring other avenues with every second book. “The same, but slightly different” is the way to top the bestseller lists. So exploring different genres doesn’t help, but I’m comfortable with the balance that I’ve achieved.

The thing that his “experiments” are often among his best books (Although his most recent Charlie Parker, The Lovers, is an incredible and wonderful novel) and allow him to surprise his readers. Which is what all writers should aspire to, I think. And all readers should desire, as well.

A lot of people complain about how their once favourite writers are churning out the same stuff over and over. I think we, the readers, have to take the blame for this as much as anyone for not standing up and saying that although we love what we read before, we loved it because it was unexpected, because it was fresh and what we really want is the same experience – the feeling of not knowing how a novel is going to go, of being carried away by its vision – rather than the same damn book.

As audiences, we have started to believe that somehow if we are surprised or taken out of our comfort zone, this is a bad thing. But I would say that if we can just allow ourselves to open up to the possibility of being surprised, of accepting new and different things even from authors we think know, then perhaps we might just start to remember why we loved reading in the first place.