In Defense of *gasp* Genre

In the scale of guilty pleasures, genre literature ranks somewhere in the second quintile. It's more embarrassing than, say, gourmet coffee, but less embarrassing than boy band fandom. And that's a shame, because unlike boy bands, there's nothing wrong with liking genre literature.

Good genre literature, that is. It would be disingenuous of me to say that all sci-fi, horror, romance, action, or fantasy stories are good. In fact, I would say that there is probably more bad writing in genre that there is in literary fiction. That bad writing wouldn't exist (at least not for sale) if people weren't willing to buy it. So why does bad genre writing sell?

You see, although the writing is bad, there must be something that those authors are doing well. For each genre that's different. In fantasy and sci-fi, it's creating a world. Booksellers are used to the fact that these worlds are pretty similar in a lot of ways--that's why they're shelved together. The biggest difference tends to be the values that are perpetuated by these worlds--whether the things that are worthwhile in society come from what we build or what we are.

In romance writing, the relationships between characters are brought to the fore, often at the expense of plot. In action thrillers, the opposite happens--intricate plots are woven, but the characters can be nothing more than shadow puppets.

I think of these kind of novels as single-flavor stories. Let's say you have a taste for chocolate. Bad genre stories are kind of like the Hershey bar of literature--inexpensive, mass produced, readily available, pretty much forgettable.

There's nothing wrong with that. Nothing at all.

But after you've had your fifth or sixth Hershey bar, maybe you're looking for something more. Something with some subtlety, something that hits more than one note. You can get more expensive chocolate, or chocolate blended with other flavors. There are cakes and cookies and all sorts of exotic and complex combinations. Here, chocolate is the theme of the dessert, but there's a lot more to it than that.

That's how I would describe good genre literature. Yet the denigrators of genre seem to think that anything that uses chocolate is nothing more than mass produced garbage. They neglect to notice the wide variety and quality that is available, even if it's harder to come by.

What is Pride and Prejudice if not a romance novel? What is 1984 if not sci fi? Hell, Shakespeare's The Tempest is fantasy, complete with a wizard and its very own Gollum. Somehow, somewhere along the line, certain works get a free pass. They're promoted from genre into the ranks of Literature--note the capital. But to try to divorce them from their genre underpinnings is to excise an element that made them popular from the beginning.

The genre of a story is only one flavor. It's probably the dominant flavor, but it's still only one among many, at least if the story is done well. And it's a shame that stigma would be attached to a novel just because it's genre. That sort of literary racism has no place in our culture.