Carol Rose
Basic
GENRE READER EXPECTATIONS – PART TWO
In Part One we covered Romance and Sci-Fi/Fantasy. Those are the two largest ones with the most sub-genres.
In this post, we’ll cover the rest of the broad genres. Please see Part One for a brief discussion of hybrid genres, which we will not be covering.
Horror
A horror novel can contain elements of Thriller, Mystery, or Sci-Fi novels. Carefully comb the websites, blogs, and Twitter feeds of your targeted agents and publishers to first see if they list this genre. Remember that unsolicited submissions are often read by interns, and anything labeled with a genre the agent does not represent, or the publisher does not handle, could be an automatic reject.
What worked for M.R. James and Algernon Blackwood in the 1920s, Lovecraft in the 1930s, Richard Matheson and Ray Bradbury in the 1950s, Robert Aickman in the 1960s, Stephen King in the 1970s, Stephen King and Clive Barker in the 1980s, Stephen King, Peter Straub, Rick McCammon, and Dan Simmons in the 1990s won't necessarily frighten or entertain readers today.
This is true of any genre. Reader expectations change over time as societal norms and customs change. That’s why it’s important to stay on top of what’s selling today in any genre.
Horror readers today want to be kept on the edge of their seats. This means you need to carefully craft a story that keeps them squirming in some way on every page. Horror can be physical, spiritual, or psychological. So decide early on what type of torture your protagonist will endure and stick to that. These novels typically contain supernatural elements, but they don't need to. The fear and dread can come from any source, including another human being.
Readers want the ending to be a surprise, and they want it to be horrible, scary, unsettling. The best stories in this genre leave you with a sense that the horrors for the protagonist are not truly over. That he/she might have to endure this again at some point in the future.
Horror novels are usually written in third person and use multiple POVs, but you still want your characters believable and relatable. You aren’t going to capture anyone’s attention, or scare them with your words, if the person going through all this pain or mental torture is a two-dimensional character who is so unreal, your readers can’t put themselves in the story. If they don’t care what happens to your characters, you've missed the mark.
Unlike Fantasy novels, where you can make up a world and thus make your own rules, these settings tend to be ordinary, commonplace, familiar. That’s what makes them so terrifying. You want your readers left with the idea that this could easily happen to anyone, including them.
The pace should be fast, but it’s okay to slow down a bit when you need to really drive home a point, or to write a gory or psychologically disturbing scene. Description here plays a key role, but at the right times. These are not the books to be painting a picture of the trees and flowers for your readers. Unless of course those trees and flowers are the bad guys in the story.
Mystery
This genre also has elements of Horror and Thriller novels, but Mysteries have unique characteristics that set them apart.
All Mysteries must have a secret or puzzle – often layers of either - a sound motive, red herrings, and clues. Most contain a murder, but it’s no longer essential these days that they do.
There are five main sub-genres.
Cozies
Traditional cozies are light, sometimes humorous, slow paced as compared to the other categories. The murder is usually quite civilized, and any sex happens off the page. The solving of the crime is a battle of wits between the reluctant amateur sleuth and the villain. The setting is most often in a small town or community, and the secondary characters are quirky and fun. The sleuth falls into the mystery by accident or circumstance and uses common sense/gray cells to solve the crime. These are usually written in first person.
Hard Boiled
The hardboiled mystery is a detective story with attitude and action. It’s a tough mystery that takes place in a city or urban setting. It’s gritty and violent. The blood, violence, and sex takes place on the pages. Usually the detective is a professional who’s been hired to investigate. It’s usually written in first person with a bare-bones or abrupt narrative style. This is not your emotional mystery. Think Raymond Chandler or Michael Connelly.
Soft Boiled
The soft boiled mystery falls somewhere between the hard boiled and the cozy. It’s not as violent as the hard boiled, but can have more on the pages than the cozy. Many soft boiled mysteries have humorous elements. The detective can be a professional or amateur. Janet Evanovich writes soft boiled mysteries.
Police Procedural
The detective/sleuth in a Police Procedural is almost always a law enforcement agent of some sort. The details of the mystery plot are the focus, as opposed to the heavier character development of the other categories. The term Police Procedural is used because the procedures are detailed and accurate. Rules must be followed and crime details are key. PD James and Tony Hillerman write police procedurals.
Medical, Scientific or Forensic
A refinement of the Police Procedural in which the protagonists are doctors, medical examiners, forensic pathologists, or other technical experts. They use intelligence and expertise, not guns, as their weapons. Similar to the Police Procedural, with extra emphasis on the physical details of analyzing unusual evidence.
No matter the sub-genre, the ending of a mystery novel answers all the who, what, when, where, and why questions. It needs to totally relate to the beginning, and answer any lingering questions about falsely accused or suspected characters or elements of the plot. Don’t leave any plot points hanging, and don’t leave out any alternate explanations for the red herrings you sprinkled along the way.
Readers want a strong hook in a Mystery. You want that hook to grab them from the first line, invite questions they strongly want answered, and contain a dramatic potential that will turn your protagonist’s world upside down.
You want to make your reader your number one detective, dropping clues for them that aren’t too obvious and leaving red herrings along the way. Make the dialogue suspenseful, and create a mysterious mood with the setting and descriptive language.
Thrillers
These are also called Suspense novels, depending on where you search for definitions. They are similar to Horror, in that your readers should be unsettled while reading them. So what’s the difference between a Horror novel and a Thriller?
A Horror novel is intended to scare or disgust a reader by inducing feelings and emotions of terror. A Thriller is meant to excite and entertain a reader through the use of constant tension and suspense.
Unlike Horror novels, Thrillers are usually written in first person or deep (close) third, so the reader is right there with the protagonist. Every scene needs to generate conflict and tension on some level. Great Thrillers provide suspense and constant excitement, but not necessarily horror.
The pacing demands of a Thriller are less forgiving than other novels. Readers who pick up a Thriller expect to be kidnapped by fear and action and dragged along on a wild ride. They’re looking for a breakneck journey that rarely slows down long enough to explore dead ends or enjoy flirtations.
Readers of Thrillers expect to flip through the pages ferociously, while readers of Horror expect more fear and dread on the page, and not necessarily this kind of breakneck speed to the narrative. Thrillers can exist in specific subgenres that Horror wouldn’t necessarily be found in.
There are many sub-genres of Thrillers, and most of them have crossover elements. Here are the elements of a few popular ones.
Action
In this sub-genre, the audience expects the protagonist to physically fight for his survival and find himself in grave physical danger repeatedly throughout the story. Also, there are typically many locations, travel by numerous high-speed vehicles and the presence of lots of guns and explosions. The Action Thriller should be fast, bold and loud, like an adrenaline rush.
Spy
While these often contain plenty of action, the focus is on a large-scale conspiracy involving governments, cover-ups, and sophisticated weaponry. These are often set during a war.
Sci-Fi
These involve space travel, time travel, or are set in future, dystopian worlds. They are often cautionary tales of bad things that can happen if technology goes out of control.
Crime
As the label suggests, these novels involve the planning of and solving of a crime. The focus here is the ticking clock. The protagonist must solve the crime before he/she becomes the next victim.
Psychological
These novels can build up slowly, with ever increasing doubt and tension, until some violence and action takes place, usually at the end.
Crime
Crime is a genre all its own, and obviously involves the solving of crimes. You can see how these might easily cross over into Thrillers or Mysteries, but they do have unique common characteristics as well as their own sub-genres.
There are seven main elements/reader expectations of a crime novel.
Conflict – the suspense arises from this conflict.
Time - unfolding your novel within a tight time frame is one of the best methods for building suspense. Other limits such as physical space can also exist, in addition to the ticking clock of time.
Red herrings - as we discussed in Mystery novels.
Foreshadowing - this is key in these novels.
High stakes – this is crucial in a Crime novel.
Contract with the reader – you can only build suspense if the reader trusts you to play fair.
Strong characters – all of this means nothing if your readers don’t care what happens to the characters.
Crime novels have several sub-genres, but bear in mind that most Crime stories involve the investigation, not the courtroom drama. The greatest Crime stories deal with a moral accounting on the part of the hero for his entire life, or provide some new perspective on the tension between society and the individual.
Other moral themes can include the challenge of decency, honor and integrity in a corrupt world, individual freedom versus law and order, and the tension between ambition and obligations to others.
There is seldom any mystery as to who the criminal is. Typically the story starts with a brilliant or daring crime, and then a cat-and-mouse game of wits and will ensues, with the tension created by the increasing intensity of the battle between the opponents. The underlying question is: Will the cops prevail before the opponent stages his next crime?
The hero is usually a tough and capable cop or vigilante who believes in the society she defends despite its flaws. The Crime fiction hero is often seen as an outcast but is revealed to be the most morally engaged character in the story.
The villain is routinely a tough and brilliant criminal who considers the system rigged and the society inherently flawed. He is often a kind of Luciferian rebel, and is a rogue individual even if he commands a crew or organization.
This genre gravitates toward urban locales, but suburban, rural and even wilderness settings have all been used to great effect.
Just as the Mystery genre, by focusing on the search for truth, obliges numerous reveals, the Crime genre, by focusing on battle, obliges numerous reversals. What are reversals? The hero and the villain trade knockout blows and suffer serious setbacks to their respective plans throughout the story.
General Fiction
General Fiction, as was also briefly discussed in Part One, is a perfectly acceptable label for your book if you can’t neatly fit it into one of the existing broad classifications. It’s that place where everything else goes. There are no reader expectations, because there is no true standard for what goes into General Fiction.
If you follow agents’ blogs or Twitter feeds, you may or may not find them discussing it as a separate genre. Most who represent fiction will list it on their websites under genres they take, but you might have a difficult time searching for authors of those books unless they break it down that way on their site.
Fiction is a broad category on Amazon, but as we also discussed in Part One, placing self-published books into categories on Amazon is an entirely different animal than identifying the genre for a potential agent or editor. I would not recommend this method, since the categories on Amazon are designed based on their ranking algorithm, not from reader expectations.
Literary Fiction
Don’t. Simply don’t. Agent Pete discusses this nearly every week on Pop-Up Submissions, as nearly every week someone will submit a piece they classify as literary.
There are no standards for this one. You will be hard-pressed to find a consistent definition. Some agents list it as a genre they accept, but it’s difficult to find which of their authors have written what they call literary fiction, so you usually have no comparison to help you label your submission.
It’s a troublesome category which often comes across as an author trying to be pretentious, and for which there are such muddled and inconsistent standards, that I recommend not using it. Not unless you’ve had feedback from the agent or editor you’re targeting, and they have called your story literary fiction.
And we’ll end this series on that note. There are, of course, many more genres out there, depending on where you search, but I believe we’ve covered the most popular and broadest ones. Feel free to add to this, discuss others, or ask questions. I’ll do my best to find you answers to them.
