Describing the Indescribable

One piece of advice a writer gets early in her career is that you must know where your book will sit in the bookstore. Readers know their tastes and gravitate to the section of the bookstore or library where those books can be found. For a book to be discovered by readers, shelving is of paramount importance.

So what happens when you have a novel that doesn’t fit into a category? Publishers are often leery of these books because they can be hard to market. At the same time, these genre-defying books are often the ones that catch fire and become wildly popular because they are so different. They can surpass expectations and grab hold of the reader’s imagination.

Whether you call them multiple genre, hybrid or cross-genre, books of this nature often seem indescribable. It’s my fortune – good or ill – that The TAKER is one of these books. Any attempt to sum it up neatly for readers has failed, and this creates a bit of a problem. People want to know what to expect – and rightly so – before they pay good money for a book. But to try to force it in any one category could be disappointing for fans of that genre. For instance, you couldn’t call it historical, even though it’s set mostly in the past, because it doesn’t really fit the norms of historical fiction. The same could be said of the supernatural aspect of the book: there’s a character with otherworldly powers in The TAKER but does that make it fantasy? Paranormal? Horror? Or all of these?

As I’ve struggled with the problem of defining The TAKER, I’ve thought of other category-defying writers such as Diana Gabaldon, who has been outspoken about her unconventional OUTLANDER series, which probably has been shelved in every section of the bookstore at one time or another. Sarah Waters is another author who comes to mind, whose TIPPING THE VELVET and FINGERSMITH – books that have been described as lesbian historicals and lesbian picaresque – share shelf space with her last novel, THE LITTLE STRANGER, a gothic historical horror story. Consider also Carlos Ruiz Zafon, whose magical novels have been labeled literary, thriller, suspense and horror.

What springs to my mind about each of these authors is that there is an unmistakable character to their works. You might not be able to categorize Sarah Waters’ work but you know a Sarah Waters’ novel when you read it, and the same can be said for Gabaldon and Zafon. Though their books may incorporate elements of different genres, they each stand whole and complete and satisfying: perfect stories that couldn’t be told any other way.

And I hope you’ll feel this way about The TAKER.