For the first post on the blog, I thought I'd cover one of my favorite things - what I consider to be cross genre fiction. Fantasy crossed with science fiction, mystery crossed with horror, and so on.
I like it best when this is intentionally done. I don't mean like what some people consider to be fantasy elements in the Star Wars movies, though there is a bit of genre tweaking with light sabers and knights flying around on star ships. What I mean, like most examples of what is or isn't a genre, is best defined by examples of what it is, and isn't.
One of my favorite examples cross genre fiction is Larry Niven's Gil The ARM stories. They're classic 'hard' SF crossed with a bit of supernatural (the lead character has a telekinetic ghost arm) and a classic mystery tropes - the locked room, the murder of the heir, and so on. Niven knows his mystery classics, and is one of the great shapers of modern science fiction.
Another good example is Richard Morgan's first Takeshi Kovaks mystery, Altered Carbon, which is a great example of how current trends from cyberpunk and noir mystery thrillers. Altered Carbon captures the feel of the noir thriller on the movie screen, and the grit and class commentary of Gibson's early cyberpunk work.
Outside of the realm of F&SF/Mystery, which admittedly is one of my favorites, there's the cast new field of "paranormal romance" which admittedly contains a lot of serious schlock, and some bad writing. That said, it does sell, and some of the storytelling is compelling. The best known name in this is Laurel Hamilton, whom I'll admit to reading and enjoying as a guilty pleasure, despite the fact that some of her recent composition and styling has made me want to throw the book across the room.
Hamilton crosses mystery, fantasy, horror and romance. When she hits on all of them well, it's quite impressive. Relationship angst in the midst of a zombie raising to see who murdered a vampire? That's pretty cool. A lot of where I think she's started falling down is where she's forgotten to tap the roots of the genre she's in, and gotten into too much mary-sue-ism with crap like "power levels" and some pretty blatant fanservice sex scenes.
A lot of horror involves solving some sort of mystery, so it's necessary to me to pin down who's really intentionally pulling from the roots of different genres in such a way that the reader will get that it's really, truly blending two or more genre s.
John Connolly's Charlie Parker novels are another example of supernatural/horror and mystery being crossed. As I mentioned with Hamilton, the later novels go deeper into story arc of the characters, and become less about the genre crossing. Again, for me, they are less compelling in that respect. I don't think Connolly's quality of writing took the downhill slide that Hamilton's did though.
Those examples seem to occupy the core of the realm of what I call cross genre. Further out, there's a little grey area where things like Steve Brust's Khavren books occupy. They're crossing a genre that's essentially over, that of the Dumas age romantic heroic adventures, and contemporary fantasy, which is still pretty much alive, but pulls from it's own realm of genres-gone-by and myths and fairy tales. I like this sort of writing a lot too, especially the recent work by S.M. Stirling in Sky People, and the upcoming In The Courts Of The Crimson Kings. Those two books comprise are even further out on the edges, because they're contemporary SF referencing and paying homage to and referencing an older type of SF. Not really cross genre, but more internal genre historical commentary. Mystery novels are published with noir sensibilities that are set in current day.
In a way, much of fiction references and is influenced by previous elements of fiction in the genre it's in, so that's why intentional crossing of what are usually separated genres interests me so much. It's a minor transgression of boundaries in bookstore classification.
The question is, what holds the taint? Mystery taints horror, for the most part, and science fiction/fantasy taint mystery. Romance taints pretty much everything, but despite being supernatural horror, Laurel Hamilton stays in F/SF, and does not get put into those specialty racks that paranormal romance imprints send out to B&N.
And that's my first post. I hope future ones live up to, or exceed this one.
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