While I accept the marketing and retail need for categories and subcategories, sometimes I find it frustrating to describe one of my stories as simply a “fantasy” or “sword and sorcery” or “Mythos horror” or “kind-of but not-really steampunk.” Most if not all of my novels, and quite a few of my short stories, don’t fit neatly into one category. I want an enormous German term for fantasy-romance-horror-comedy-mystery.
This weeks questions are: Do you prefer stories that combine many genres? Are there some genres that mix especially well? Others that don’t mix at all? How do you figure out whether, say, a fantasy novel also has the other elements you enjoy?
I’m a big fan of the urban fantasy genre. Done poorly it is painful to read. But done well it can often pack more of a punch for me than just straight fantasy settings. Also, I’m enough of a gaming nerd that I *want* there to be fantasy creatures roaming around our modern world.
Some of my favorite stories are mashups: Sherlock meets Chuthlu… Victorian Dieselpunk… Time Travel and Egyptian Gods… sci-fi and Native American mythology… Two great things that are awesome together… I think the German word you are looking for is “drawn from other sources yet wholly original”
(Bonus points if you can identify the stories cited above…no Googling….)
All fiction is fantasy romance. Beyond that it depends on what you promote and how you phrase it
I do prefer stories that combine genres, but I’m also in agreement with Alan (above) to a great extent. If we go back far enough, there were only two genres, poetry (fiction) and prose (non-fiction). Accepting that the demands of marketing have given us other genres, the best combinations are SF or Fantasy and crime/mystery. Romance (as in love story) makes a nice subplot, but not for cross-genre work — at least, not if you’re actually using the tropes and conventions of the romance novel.