Genres Need a Glow-Up

Bookish pet peeves and unsolicited genre rebrands

---

Between the Wines is free—like a book club, but with more chaos. Paid subscriptions keep it going and support my writing. If you’re enjoying these essays, please consider upgrading. Cheers! 🍷

---

One of my biggest literary pet peeves? The rise—and absolute marketing takeover—of tropes.

Don’t get me wrong, I get the appeal. Tropes are shorthand. A quick, recognizable way to package stories we’ve heard a thousand different ways. Is anything truly original anymore? Honestly, I’d love to have that debate—so if you’ve got thoughts, email me.

But you know the ones I mean: Enemies to lovers. One bed. Locked room mystery. Money is the motive for murder. Pick-me girl. Sunshine meets grumpy. Jock falls for the nerd. Secret agent with tragic backstory. One last job. The killer is inside the house. Et cetera, et cetera.

It’s all starting to feel like Mad Libs.

Writers are shoving as many tropes into a book as possible because it makes it easier to market. Easier to tag. Easier to sell. But as a reader—and a writer—it starts to feel repetitive. Formulaic. A little soulless.

Here’s my real issue: it’s not just tropes. It’s genres, too.

Publishing relies on genre to sell books. Fair. But genre can be limiting, especially for those of us writing across them. There’s been a small loosening—romantasy, for example, now gets its own category (hi, dragons and desire!)—but even that feels like another box. Just… a cuter one.

Take mystery. You’ve got hard-boiled detectives and light-hearted cozies. I write something close to cozy, but not quite. Every agent I talk to sees it differently—cozy, contemporary, comedic, sometimes “just fiction.”

Comparative titles are helpful, but that doesn’t necessarily place a book on the right shelf. Especially when you have something that’s a mashup, take for example Knives Out meets Modern Family.

Who gets to decide what goes where? And why do we act like genre lines are fixed when they’re clearly a mirage?

So, in the spirit of rebellion (and reader clarity), I propose a genre rebrand.

We should rename them and name what they feel like. What they taste like. What kind of weather they belong in. What kind of emotional spiral they’ll trigger.

Let’s begin the rebranding:

Mystery, but a wee bit off-center - Not noir. Not cozy. These books know something’s rotting underneath the nice wallpaper.

• Murder Light – Nobody’s dismembered, but someone is gaslit and there are plenty of darker themes. Listen for the Lie by Amy Tintera

• Domestic Dread – Suburbia, secrets, and a body in the crawl space. Broken Country by Claire Leslie Hall (no bodies in cellars!)

• Melancholy Sleuthing – The detective is emotionally repressed. The solution doesn’t fix anything. The Thursday Murder Club and We Solve Murders by Richard Osman - they’re funny, sweet, but there is real grief (I cried in the last TMC!)

• Offbeat Whodunnit – You’re here for character studies with a side of suspicious circumstances. Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson

Romance & Fantasy (dare I say some romantasy????) suggestions for those that love the unstable - The heart wants what it wants. Unfortunately, it also wants chaos.

• Soft Disaster Love – Two people healing, or hurting, or both. Either way, they keep kissing. Love and Other Words by Christina Lauren

• Feral Longing – The tension is high, the communication is low, and everyone’s one bad decision away from a confession or a breakdown. A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas or The Serpent and the Wings of Night by Carissa Broadbent

• Grief Horny – Trauma-bonded. You shouldn’t root for them—but you do. Deep End by Ali Hazelwood

• Romantasy with Consequences – Magic, desire, trauma. No one gets out clean. Um… Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros

LitFic suggestions that are no just “Self-Important” (looking at you certain Irish author…)- Still devastating, still brilliant—just less allergic to plot.

• Feelings-First Fiction – Existential crises in beautiful sentences. Art, love, and decades of emotional entanglement. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

• Melancholia & Microaggressions – Your book club will love this. Your soul might not. Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid

• Spiral Lit – For when the vibe is “life unraveling, but make it metaphors.” We Could Be Rats by Emily Austin

• Smart Girl Meltdown – peak emotional shutdown, but make it literary. My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

Speculative, But With Restraint - Not high fantasy. Not sci-fi. Just weird enough to keep you up at night.

• Reality, Slightly Off – Something’s wrong, but no one’s saying it out loud. Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder

• Quiet Magic – Subtle, unsettling, and creeping in through the walls. - The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

• Emotionally Devastating Speculative Fiction – See also: your favorite book that ended with a whisper, not a bang. The Unmaking of June Farrow by Adrienne Young

• Sad Girl Sorcery – She’s maybe a little cursed. She cries in the bathtub. Sometimes at the same time. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab

• Subtle Fantastika – The kind of weird that makes you go, “huh,” and then never sleep again. Example: Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

• Lyrical Spec Fic — You’re here for the beauty of the prose as much as the bending of reality. There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak

Dystopia, But Personal - The world is ending. But your real problem is still your mother.

• Soft Apocalypse – The collapse is quiet. The grief is loud. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

• Collapse-Core – Preppers, cults, and emotional ruin. Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

• Existential Dreadpunk – No one’s winning. Everyone’s spiraling beautifully. Bleak exploration of what it means to be human. Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

• Grief-Soaked Future Fiction – It’s bleak. And uncomfortably close. Capitalism survives the pandemic. Your soul does not. Severance by Ling Ma

• Whimsy Gone Wrong – It starts out magical. Then the teeth come out. The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert

Your move, publishing.

Maybe this is a joke. Maybe it’s a manifesto. Either way, I’m tired of pretending “romance” is a big enough word for that book where the witch falls for the monster who lives in the woods and quotes poets. Or that “mystery” can contain the multitudes of gore and tea-drinking detectives with cats. We need better shelves. Softer categories. More permission to let books be weird and unboxable.

Please tell me you have a favorite fake genre? Better yet—please tell me you; ‘re writing the book.

What I’ve been enjoying recently

Oathbound by Tracey Deonn - Read and LOVED the first two. It was just too long in length and too long since the last book. Will have thoughts about this for a future substack.

Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry - by Emily Henry. Enough Said.

Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley - I’ve been seeing this everywhere AND have seen it compared to Daisy Jones and the Six. Color me intrigued.

On the Calculations of Volume (Book 1) by Solvej Balle - who am I?!? Working my way through the International Booker Prize long & short lists. I’m so fancy.

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital by Lorrie Moore - I started and then keep picking up others that I feel like I have to read. This is for the plane. I hope.

---

Please consider clicking the little heart on this essay—your engagement helps more than you think! I’d love to hear from you if this essay made you ~feel~ something, have read a book I recommended, or think I’m wildly off about my wine pairings. 🍷

xx,
bb