Examples of Genre Mashup in Literature
- Battle Royale is notoriously hard to classify. Some consider it horror due to the terrifying premise, but that classification always causes "traditional" horror fans to baulk because it isn't traditional. Action-adventure? That's perhaps the best when combined with horror, but given the deep, requires-substantial-thought satire and themes "action" seems misleading. When you go to buy a copy you could end up in the Sci-fi section, the horror section...If that's not confusing enough, many people also characterize the film as a VERY dark comedy.
- Gravity's Rainbow includes elements of historical fiction, spy fiction, sci-fi, war, comedy, pornography, conspiracy theories, and a general atmosphere of Mind Screw.
- Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl series combines Urban Fantasy with science fiction and serves it up with a heavy dose of crime drama. A plotline involving fairies using nanotechnology to take down the Russian Mafia is typical for the series.
- Similarly, Colfer's book Airman is a mixture of a Swash Buckler, Romance, Steampunk, Retro Sci-Fi, Adventure, Western, Espionage and Great Escape.
- Gunfighter's Ride is a pony express rider delivering the mail, dealing with demons, ghosts, and a genocidal medicine man.
- Terry Pratchett's Discworld is a fantasy series, mixed with parody, mixed with humor, mixed with deep examinations into the human psyche, mixed with occasional detective story elements, mixed with war drama, mixed with Police Procedural tropes. Might be just shorter to say it is simply awesome.
- Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency was described by author Douglas Adams as a "detective-ghost-horror-who dunnit-time travel-romantic-musical-comedy-epic". Mind you, of these labels, only four are really accurate — detective, ghost, whodunnit and time travel — and two of those are synonyms.
- Dhalgren is written very much like psychological Sci-Fi (one of the characters lampshades this at one point), but it ends up being very hard to classify.
- Earth's Children is a portrayal of life during the Ice Age, but this includes elements of Romance Novel, Historical Fiction, historical fantasy, erotica, travelogue and Shown Their Work mixed with a lot of Artistic License.
- Isaac Asimov wrote Sci-fi robot detective stories.
- Rudyard Kipling's Kim is a spy story, a gigantic Slice of Life, and a Coming of Age story.
- Anyone who calls Great Expectations a romance is greatly oversimplifying matters. It has romance, drama, comedy, suspense, a bit of action, a bit of adventure, it's a rags to riches story and a coming of age story, a possible satire of this and that or even Self-Parody, and it has strong elements of mystery and horror. Figure that out!
- The Destroyer series of books were published as Men's Adventure books. However, there are strong elements of Satire and Black Comedy. The main characters practice Supernatural Martial Arts and the opponents ranged from The Mafia, terrorists, and communist spies (typical of the genre) to androids and vampires.
- According to The Other Wiki: "A Clockwork Orange is most frequently described as political satire, dystopian science-fiction, black comedy, and crime drama, although its crossover appeal to the horror fan community is unmistakable."
- The Princess Bride is a humorous fantasy action adventure — with a Framing Device that makes it into a parody of old satire (yes, a parody of satire) and also incorporates fictional autobiography for some reason. The book's title and those of its chapters are also deliberately misleading to suggest some kind of bland-sounding fairytale romance.
- John DeChancie's Castle Perilous series is essentially fantasy, being based in a magical castle, but what makes the castle special (well, one of the things) is that it contains portals to 144,000 different worlds. This allows for dumping the characters in any genre of story the author feels like writing.
- The Dresden Files can very easily be put on the "Urban Fantasy" shelf of the bookstore, but certain elements of the story and the lead character have enough "cowboy" characteristics that it had a strong element of fantasy western (even though it takes place in Chicago.) The author himself says that, at its heart, it's like a comic book, and the general World of Snark writing style also gives it a strong comedic element as well.
- In The Exile's Violin: We have a detective-intrigue story mixed with an action adventure story and a heroic fantasy story in a Victorian Steampunk setting that spends most of its dialogue on Snark to Snark Romance.
- Will of Heaven is usually classified as a work of Science Fiction, but the cast is almost exclusively composed of historical and/or legendary figures, the occasional Wuxia trope turns up, and the eponymous will of heaven may not have a scientific explanation.
- The Lies of Locke Lamora is a heist novel...in a fantasy setting.
- Nerve Zero is a find-the-girl noir story, set on a far-future, zero gravity space station populated by weird versions of humanity.
- The stories in the League of Magi are predominantly thrillers, with elements of detective, spy, and conspiracy genres thrown in. The world itself is decidedly urban fantasy (with some horror seasoning).
- Mr Blank and its sequel are almost genre Mad Libs. Comic noir, with conspiracies, monsters, aliens, and just a smidge of urban fantasy.
- City of Devils is a classic noir riff: world-weary detective in a world that hates him. He's also the last human detective because almost everyone else in the world is some kind of monster.
- Undead on Arrival is a "zombie noir" story. Taking a title that's a reference to the classic D.O.A., and then putting it in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.
- Dream Park and its first two sequels feature a fantasy-adventure Show Within a Show storyline embedded in a tale of industrial espionage that's straight out of cyberpunk, all taking place in a high-tech future. The fourth book tosses steampunk motifs into the Game component, and swaps espionage for Die Hard-style action movie.
- Obsidian & Blood is a historical urban fantasy locked room mystery.
- The Ahriman Trilogy is a young adult urban fantasy superhero cosmic horror tale.
- The Gammage Cup: A children's story that starts with Slice of Life in a Fantasy world, but moves to a Downplayed Dystopian setting. Then the main characters rebel and create a Robinsonade-esque mini-civilization from scratch. Finally, various Chekhov's Guns fire and the story turns Epic Fantasy.
- It's difficult to place Jane, Unlimited into one specific genre since each section is basically it's own. It's part detective fiction, part espionage, part horror, part sci-fi, and part portal fantasy.
- In the Leigh Bardugo novel Six of Crows, a wealthy merchant hires a team of master criminals to rescue an imprisoned scientist who's invented a highly addictive drug. Sound like just another caper? This one takes place in a Low Fantasy world, and the drug enhances peoples' magical abilities.
- A vast majority if adult fiction with LGB leads is automatically labeled Queer Romance as its genre, no matter what other elements are in play. Whether romance gets a majority focus of the plot or not, if a queer lead has a same-sex love interest, that is now the genre. This leads to a lot of adult M/M and F/F fiction having a mix of genres under the same label and crossing territory multiple times.
- Example: Cut and Run is a Queer Romance /Thriller / Action/Mystery Fiction that frequently delves into being a Drama and sometimes has elements of Magical Realism.
- A Symphony of Eternity is a Space Opera / High Fantasy / Black Comedy meta-fictional delight. The books follow galactic war fought in a universe where magic instead of technology is used, it contains elements of military sf, Discworld like humour, Flashmanesque protagonits with bits of The Sandman-like meta-fiction, Lovecraftian Horror, historical fiction and use of many examples of Fictional Documents for Worldbuilding and Tolstoy quality level of suffering and existentialism and nihilism, with a dash of optimism and hope for the future, all the while being a Deconstruction and Reconstruction of itself all at the same time. And it is GLORIOUS!
- This is arguably the point behind the New Weird, a literary "genre" intended as a reaction to the Sci-Fi Ghetto and a return to the H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith era when fantasy, science fiction, and horror were still more or less all one genre. See the New Weird page for a much more thorough explanation.
- After decades, if not centuries, of Literary Fiction posturing itself as a "superior" or "non-generic" genre and refusing to do much playing around with the conventions of other genres, we finally have a good number of modern and semi-modern LitFic authors and books that consciously blend the archetypical elements of LitFic with other genres, including:
- The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. Epic story centered around two Indian men in London, but with an uncompromisingly comical tone and so many Magical Realism elements that the book verges on outright fantasy.
- Generosity by Richard Powers. Same tone, prose style, and characterizations as LitFic, but it's just as obsessed with science as any Science Fiction novel, specifically in the areas of nature vs. nurture and the ethics of genetic engineering.
- Look at Me by Jennifer Egan. Again, has the same style and many of the same themes as LitFic, but with an unusually surreal tone, a private detective, and an overarching mystery plot.
- The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison. A gritty literary reworking of The Great God Pan, which focuses on the aftermath of three friends summoning a creature from another plane.
- William Gibson's Neuromancer combines elements of film noir, mystery, pulp science fiction and an emphasis on technology to create what is now known as Cyberpunk . It is now seen as the Trope Maker of the genre, and depending on who you ask, the Trope Codifier as well.
- Riddley Walker is an After the End Science Fiction done in the style of a Middle Ages historical novel.
- American Gods won the Nebula and Hugo Awards for Best Sci-fi book of the year, the Locus Award for best fantasy book of the year, and the Bram Stoker Award for best horror book of the year. It's also a meditation on the "meaning" of America, and reflection on the different immigrant stories.
- Stephen King's The Dark Tower book series isn't your typical King material, and it definitely isn't a typical Western story. Hell, in the context of storytelling, it arguably isn't really a typical anything. It's fairly well described by Torg's description of his own "greatest comic book of all time" in Sluggy Freelance — "a cowboy-western-psychological-horror-action-romance-thriller" — except that that's missing its perhaps main genre of fantasy.
- Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! is a comedic conspiracy novel that also includes erotic fiction, horror, epic fantasy, and espionage. Wilson's later novels in the same setting add science fiction, historical fiction and a variety of literary pastiches.
- In The Snows Of Haz is a mystery set in a fantasy world.
- Gun, with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem is a sci-fi police procedural that eschews most of the stereotypical elements of sci-fi, like aliens and computers. In fact, it probably is far closer to a pastiche of thirties noir with the silly elements (talking animals, super-intelligent alcoholic infants, free drugs for everyone, etc) justified after the fact. It could be telling that the author is also the editor for the Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler anthologies.
- Thursday Next lives' off of Metafiction, so the fact that it's a fantasy/sci-fi/mystery/comedy/drama involving everything from Time Travel to cheese smuggling as major plot points eventually just starts to be classified as "I give up."
- The Nursery Crime series as well, given it's a spinoff of Thursday Next, though it has its roots in Detective Fiction Deconstruction.
- Jennifer Fallon's Second Sons is almost brilliant about this. From one perspective, there's little reason why it couldn't just be called Historical Fiction— it has no magic, no aliens, no Applied Phlebotinum, and generally nothing outright impossible, and while it definitely Never Was This Universe, that doesn't necessarily disqualify it from fitting the genre. However, it's marketed as fantasy, because it really Never Was This Universe rather than being just our universe with different names, and because the depicted world has two suns in its sky. (For the record, the author calls it medieval science fiction.)
- Complete World Knowledge combines the almanac with the absurdist comedy.
- House of Leaves is a horror/fantasy/parody/romance story, and while that statement is accurate, it's only scratching the surface of the novel's strangeness and unconventionality. The footnotes alone..."I had one woman come up to me in a bookstore and say, 'You know, everyone told me it was a horror book, but when I finished it, I realized that it was a love story.' And she's absolutely right. In some ways, genre is a marketing tool."
- Out of the Dark is for the most part a typical Alien Invasion novel. But the twist near the end reveals that it's also a vampire novel.
- The Teresa Knight Trilogy: It's basically erotica meets a basic detective story in each novel.
- Worlds of Shadow: As author Lawrence Watt-Evans said, the series is a combination of High Fantasy, Space Opera and Horror. It starts in our world, when some Americans were contacted by people from alternate High Fantasy and Space Opera universes, who are drawn into a battle against an enemy who's threatening them both. Horror tinges this constantly as well, since the protagonist's loved ones are raped/murdered, he's made a slave with many others on a fringe planet (where the women are raped), the enemy has made corpses into many horrifying undead servants and makes terrible monsters too.
- The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle: The novel is a Time Travel Mind Screw thriller set against the backdrop of a country house murder mystery Whodunnit in the tradition of Agatha Christie.
- Tantei Team KZ Jiken Note is a combination of Detective Literature and a Middle Grade-level Romance Novel, with a bit of Reverse Harem mixed into the latter. In the latter case, Aya is obviously having fleeting crushes with one of the several boys in the KZ Detective Team, but she's oblivious about it.
- Beyond Reality is a series of novels and short stories that explore the multiverse and thus touches upon all kinds of genres within. One story could be an Action-Adventure set in a post-apocalyptic world, another could be a lighthearted Science Fantasy romance across time and space, and a third could be a straight up Cosmic Horror Story.
