Want to take a creative writing class with me?
I’m teaching The Great Escape, an online writing workshop at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies, from May 7-June 25! Spread the word! FYI for those who were in my Catapult (RIP) courses, there will be overlap in material, although of course the workshop is always new. Feel free to ask me questions and thanks as always for being here. Ok, now to the newsletter~
THIRD APPARITION Be lion-mettled, proud, and take no care
Who chafes, who frets, or where conspirers are.
Macbeth shall never vanquished be until
Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill
Shall come against him.⌜He⌝ descends.
MACBETH That will never be.
Who can impress the forest, bid the tree
Unfix his earthbound root? Sweet bodements, good!
Rebellious dead, rise never till the Wood
Of Birnam rise, and our high-placed Macbeth
Shall live the lease of nature, pay his breath
To time and mortal custom.
Act 4, Scene 1. The witches, after a bit of “double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble,” summon a set of apparitions, which intone the prophecy to Macbeth; namely, that he will be killed by no man born of woman, and that he will be safe until Birnam wood marches to Dunsinane Hill.
Prophecies are slippery bastards. An Act later, the forest does not literally march itself, but instead is carried as branches by the army, making good on the terms of the prophecy but disappointing a young J.R.R. Tolkien, who desired a grander magic than that. He imagined a different battle: what if the forest walked literally? Thus Macbeth inspired the creation of ents, those tree-shepherds of Middle Earth.
This is not actually a newsletter about The Lord of the Rings or Shakespeare—I apologize to my nerdiest subscribers out there in the void. Yet I did watch the trilogy over Christmas (a tradition of mine is to have the films playing in the background over the holiday) and remembered this fact about the ents and Macbeth from the behind-the-scenes documentaries that came with our family’s box DVD set—
★⌒~ break for deep nostalgia ~⌒☆
—and thought about how reader expectations collide with, and are informed by, genre. When novels dramatize that speculative/realism divide, and not in the way of the normalized strangeness of magical realism (think Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits) nor modernized fairy tales/surrealism (think Helen Oyeyemi’s What is not Yours is not Yours) nor lightly science fictional books (think Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven). When I tried to find examples over on the bad place, I received many well-intentioned suggestions in this vein. I’m not talking about novels that have speculative elements but are literary in style, your “genre in-betweener” books or whatever you might call them. Frankly a lot of “literary fiction” these days is “genre in-betweener,” with their plot and structure influences from the genre side. (Lmk if that phenomenon is of interest…I have many thoughts.)
I am talking about a narrower category: when the genre is a source of suspense.
I tell students that “what kind of world is it?” is a primary form of suspense at the opening of a story. Usually the narrative begins answering that question from the first paragraph, providing the reader with clues and details about the world as they discover it. But there are quite a few books I love that both prompt the reader to wonder “what kind of world is it? is magic real? are we in the future? etc.,” and withhold that information until it is dramatically revealed at some point later in the story, often near the climax.1
New writers sometimes do a version of this by accident, causing confusion and reader frustration. But if executed well, it can be a satisfying trick; the books that accomplish this trick rank among my all-time favorites. A few come to mind…
Swamplandia!, by Karen Russell: A coming-of-age story about a girl from a family of gator wrestlers who own a sort of roadside attraction. After her mother (the main act) dies, their family becomes insolvent and falls apart. The girl, left totally alone, goes on a quest to save their home, encountering a sort of wizard—perhaps. The girl’s strange POV, the heightened landscape of the Florida swamp, the girl’s unusual upbringing, etc.—it could be magical. I cannot tell you.2
The City and the City, by China Miéville: An unusual detective tale set in Beszel and Ul Qoma, two imaginary cities with overlapping territories at the fringes of Europe. These cities have very strange boundaries indeed. A citizen of one cannot hear or see the other, as if the boundary was drawn on the mind, not the map…
Fever Dream, by Samanta Schweblin3: A mother and her child become mysteriously ill while vacationing in a rural town. The mother, feverish, attempts to piece together what has happened—you can read this one in a single night.
The Vegetarian, by Han Kang: This novel in particular makes me consider how the uncanny style increases the sense of genre trouble. Driven by nightmares, a wife goes vegetarian, sowing discord.
Bunny, by Mona Awad: “On Wednesdays we wear pink” + your worst MFA experience. Tbh I didn’t love this book as much as the others but many do. Interesting to me is that satire often flirts with this boundary.
Hurricane Season, by Fernanda Melchor: Cast of characters whose lives intersect with the murder of the village witch. This is a gorgeous, flinty book (if you prefer to look up content warnings I’d say do that for this one especially).
Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro: Ishiguro writes in such a way that on some level, I feel like all of his novels qualify for this list; that said, this book might be a reach here? Two timelines, one describing a coming-of-age at a mysterious boarding school and the other, the adult aftermath.
The Tiger’s Wife, by Téa Obreht: I fear this opens up the category too much into what might be magical realism? Family generational epics that are grounded in realism in the contemporary setting, whereas in the past it feels like magic is more possible, might be an entire subgenre on its own…but hey I thought this novel was great, so I’m including it. A story of a country in the Balkans shaped by war, and the grandfather’s encounters with “the deathless man.”
The Magus, by John Fowles: My current read and the other inspiration for this post! A directionless recent college grad decides to take a job on a remote island in Greece, where he encounters a mysterious old man, who is either a trickster or magician.
Short story examples: “An Account From the Land of Witches” by Sofia Samatar, “The Dirty Kid” by Mariana Enríquez, both available free online, if you want to dip your toes in.
As you can see, it’s almost impossible to discuss how this trick works without gnarly spoilers. Atmosphere and style can certainly heighten the sensation of genre trouble, by hinting without showing its hand. This isn’t much of an explanation, however. I can tell you that all of these examples only function because of (shocker) the author’s chosen point of view. Told differently, these novels would clearly be either speculative or realist from the start, but the writers chose perspectives that are quite limited, and chose plots that put pressure on the POV.
Put another way: the characters’ theories or understandings of the world are directly challenged. The POV dilates over the course of the story, as information is gathered. The nature of world is revealed not only to the reader, but also to the characters inhabiting it. That’s why it is dramatic. There is a moment, a scene, introducing a fundamental shift in the world physics.
Now that I’ve explained what I mean better, I really am interested in more examples—please leave a comment below if you think of some! ☆
Actually I think this might help refine the category. Many books withhold the nature of the world for the first quarter of the story, but then on it is quite clear what we are dealing with. More rare is for this information to be revealed at the climax (generally around the 75% mark).
Karen Russell has an excellent essay on writing this book that I absolutely recommend.
I suspect many novels in the horror genre use this form of suspense, especially as it relates to unreliable narrators. However I’m admittedly not a huge horror reader, so it’s underrepresented here.