Blending Genres in Fiction

Also includes building a glossary and using horror as an anchor in cross-genre

Sometimes I think: what would a glossary of my life look like? How much of the current Mirriam-Webster Dictionary might be used? Less than one percent? Mostly simple words? Wouldn’t even know where to start. The idea is too ambitious, though fun to consider that I could take everything I’ve ever written and build a glossary of a life, my life. What would you even do with it?

Writer/Professor Gabino Iglesias and Nicholas Belardes in conversation at UC Riverside Palm Desert MFA’s Winter Residency

What I did do recently while visiting UCR Palm Desert Low-Res MFA’s winter residency (where I had a wonderful book talk with professor/writer

Gabino Iglesias

about The Deading), was give a lecture on “Monster Mashups.” In part, the lecture was on building glossaries. It was also about blending genres, in specific using horror as an anchor like I’ve done in The Deading, and in my forthcoming book, Ten Sleep. Both blend more than two genres, such as horror, science fiction, climate fiction (eco-horror in this case), experimental fiction, Chicano fiction, thriller, Western fiction, etc.

Like I said, we did discuss how to build a glossary.

Of course, the first question is Why do I need a glossary? Simple. If you’re blending genres, let’s say Western fiction with horror, and that Western portion is set in Wyoming during a cattle drive like Ten Sleep (June 2025), and if you know little about things like cattle or the landscape, then as part of your research, and part of how you might enhance your work with genre-specific language, you can do build a glossary from words and common-ish phrases (re-worded) pulled from whatever related works you’re studying.

If writing a gothic horror cattle drive as I did, you could take words from Western novels and place them into categories like: plants, animals, attire, insects, geology, astronomical terms, cows . . . Really, whatever categories that could help you thematically enhance your novel, providing stronger anchors into the genres you seek to blend.

Here’s a screenshot from one of my glossary pages. Any particular common phrases I pulled, I may have already re-worked them in my own voice:

While I won’t go through a step by step in how I pulled from novels to build my glossary (that’s just identifying words and phrases and gathering them into categories), instead, I’ll show you how I blended genre by using specific language in a sort of balancing act on the page. I think one of my best bits of advice is how we should be constellate in our thinking. Our entire novel needs to consist of constellations of thematic and specific language that illuminates the genres in which we’re blending.

Let’s use Ten Sleep as an example, that way you get a tiny preview too (Note: not a final version, please forgive typos, etc.). I should first say, this prologue excerpt uses a different narrative voice from the rest of the novel. Still, it required understanding and uses genre-specific language. Here I’m blending the natural world, climate fiction (nature, geology, etc.) with speculative fiction (horror). Give it a read and write two categories, horror and climate fiction or eco-horror, then write down words and phrases that you think could be genre-related. Those specific word choices are really how I’m blending the two. Now ask yourself: How is horror the anchor? Is horror stronger on the page than climate fiction? Is that because it’s where more of the plot might be? Any other reasons?

Now do the same for this page from the first chapter, “206 Bones.” Look for specific Western fiction language and also speculative fiction (horror) language. Once again, write down those word choices and phrases into categories or groups. Now ask, how is horror the anchor? Then, figure out how I’m playing with phrases, maybe unexpected words, so that they also become the language of horror.

That entire lecture began with a talk on what the first blended genre work might have been. I mean, I didn’t do a deep dive or anything into literary history, though I did consider Shakespeare and the works of H.G. Wells. But no, neither of those. I had a different tale in mind, one further into our storied past that I just happened to stumble upon . . .

Perhaps, I said to UCR students, it started in Koobi Fora, Kenya 1.5 million years ago on the eastern shores of Lake Turkana. Did you hear about the two sets of fossilized footprints recently discovered there? The footprints are those of Homo erectus and Paranthropus boilei—two different species of ancient human ancestors crossing paths in lakeshore mud. What we know about these hominin is what little that anthropologists know, which includes the idea that these peoples didn’t even have a language. Language is what, one hundred thousand, two hundred thousand years old? But writers don’t require knowing any language but their own to tell stories of the past. We are the imaginers, the rememberers, the dreamers. So if we wanted, we could tell this story of these two peoples, their clans and communities, in an epic family tale.

Clearly these families were in competition. We know there are community stories in their history, in those Koobi Fora footprints. Specifically, there are family stories. And family stories in a way, we could argue sometimes anchor literary novels. Messy families and whatnot, messy relationships, brokenness, betrayal . . . Imagine these two epic families, not even of the same species like any great pairing of dueling families in literary history. They just can’t get along no matter how hard they try.

What’s fascinating to me isn’t the revelation that these two human ancestor species co-existed. It was just a matter of time to find evidence that could make the connection that offshoots of humanity literally competed to exist. No, it’s something else. Something unexpected. So let me now throw into this dueling family equation a third set of footprints found at that same lakeside location. Uh oh.

And it’s not what you think. The imprints are not that of a human ancestor. No—something larger, with wings. It’s the Leptoptilos. A distant relative of one anyway. The footprints of the giant marabou stork. They stood six-and-a-half-feet on average, which meant they could be shorter, or taller than the four-and-a-half-foot-tall marabou storks of today, which are themselves humongous.

Now before I go further, I would like to put before the court of writerly opinion that this story suddenly becomes better because of the stork. It becomes anchored in something dark and scary, definitely horror, and perhaps we have some blended genres going on. Family epic, plus horror, equals what?

I mean this could have been a mystery-horror, these early ancestors sleuthing around in the mud for someone’s missing head that was perhaps plucked off by a giant stork and stolen by that other human ancestor species. Joking aside, what we do know is that you would crap your pants if an eight-foot-tall bird with a bald head was staring at you while your feet were deep in sticky mud, also while your competition, the lady down the street or whatever, not even your species, but a lady nonetheless, might be mad at you for any number of reasons. Could be you were stealing from her fishery.

And let’s look at our footprint again: what does this image from the past tell us about this hominin? That they are deep in mud. And what else? They walk on their toes—not gonna be caught flat footed with a giant bird and goodness knows what else might be staring.

You see, it’s easy to start thinking about scary things. And when we think about scary things, sometimes that can take over our entire mindscape. Including a story. That family epic is now a family horror. But once again, why blend with horror? Why should we care if our tale gets scarier or not?

In Bristol, England at a writers’ conference a few years ago was the genre panel,“Murder Most Magical.” The panel linked supernatural, horror, and fantasy to crime fiction. I mean, if you like crime fiction and you also like speculative fiction, should be a no brainer. Seems like a popular trend to me. I’ve dabbled in the crime genre and noir—I totally see the appeal—and religiously watch all things true crime. Anyone else feel like they’ve seen all of Forensic Files? Anyway, writer Paul Cornell was on that panel, and in the UK Guardian article where I found the info, “When Crime Meets Fantasy and Fiction,” he said: “I think in crime fiction, death is an absolute ending, the trapdoor out of the story. The supernatural thus serves as a sort of basement to crime, where all the dead go to, and there's a stairway leading back up.”

I don’t know if I agree with all of what he’s saying, but I do see something really special in his words about how horror writing provides new opportunities for storytelling, new ways in or out. And it is all limitless.

And Cornell tells us something else important, that some of our characters, regardless of genre, deep down may kind of be one and the same, and that’s interesting to note. He says, “They’re all incursions of the chaotic and frightening into the normal pattern of peoples’ lives. Detectives and exorcists do the same job: solve the trauma, return reality to normal.”

And maybe that’s what horror does especially well—because horror AKA the literature of fear takes characters outside of normality, daily life, job, marriage, parenting, routines—and like other novels, turns a person’s life inside out, upside down—but in addition, scares them, scares us, or at least unsettles us, maybe mocks us, and at the same time, explains us to us, before setting us back into our lives (if possible).

And as we might learn from our friends, homo erectus, paranthropus boilei, and our new bestie the giant leptoptilos, if you’re blending horror and the detective novel in a story set 1.5 million years ago, you don’t even have to carry a badge. You just need your imagination, your reason, and ability to solve a mystery, and all the right kinds of language. And if writers are all thieves, well there you go. Just don’t plagiarize.

While I also talked a lot about worldviews in that lecture, I’m just going to end here and thank you for my biggest year yet as a writer. I’ve got a horror panel coming up February 1, 2025 in La Quinta with Monika Kim and Kathryn E. McGee, and a book talk with Gabino Iglesias at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s Ethnic Studies Program in late April or early May. So stay tuned.

Here’s a link to The Deading on Bookshop.org where there’s a seasonal discount going on. Please do keep supporting if you can. Sales mean everything in publishing. Until next time, or perhaps next year! Cheers.

Me with copies of The Deading at UC Riverside Palm Desert MFA Program’s Winter Residency