I am constantly asked about genre, as though it’s a mark of quality, and I find myself wondering about how important such a thing is. Is genre just a title, a category to help us group stories into classes of pre-determined judgment, or is it something more?
Stephen King’s books are widely regarded as horror, but this is also the man who penned such greats as The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. Neither of those stories would ever be thought of as horror, unless you’re an idiot. He also wrote The Running Man and the somewhat cult-classic Dark Tower series, both possibly classed as science fiction, and yet somewhat not. I mean, if you really delve into any of his novels, there’s a hell of a lot more there than mere horror, and yet everyone seems to think of him as a horror writer.
My first publisher classed The Dark Path as a horror novel, a genre I would have never imagined when I wrote it, and yet it’s gone on to great success from both people who profess to love and those who detest horror. Since taking things into my own hands, I’ve decided to change its categories to action/adventure and thriller, both of which it slots perfectly into, and yet these do not define it. The same goes for my Prometheus Wars series; both books could be classed as anything from mythology to paranormal, but the heart of the books is adventure, and as such that’s how they’re categorized, much to my chagrin. Tiny boxes make for even smaller windows, and when trying to get readers to notice you, you want the biggest damn Plexiglas window in the world.
Genre is a useful tool, but it’s also a double-edged sword. For instance, I know there are hundreds (possibly thousands) of phenomenal books out there I will probably never read simply because they’re classed as romance novels. No matter how gripping a synopsis reads I doubt I’ll dip my toe into a romance on the off chance it slides into a stereotypical estrogen-fuelled sappy-saga.
No offense to romance fans, but I’d rather put my face in a blender than read about heaving bosoms and engorged loins. And yet I know chances are many of those stories classed as romances are brilliant, and in no way limited to what I perceive a stereotypical romance to be. This is my loss, and all because of my prejudging of the genre, much like another reader might see a book classed as horror and expect to be terrified by ghosts and scary clowns.
So is genre good?
Much like pigeonholing people, typecasting books so blindly is ignorant. And yet we need it. There’s no swifter way to identify subject matter other than genre categorization. It draws the reader in to read more about a book they will hopefully like, and until each author reaches the same heights of popularity as the King, we will continue to class our writing in such a way.
