I have a brief confession to make. In fact, I’m fairly certain I’ve made it here before. Still, here we go again – genre makes me flinch. There, I said it. I don’t know why it exactly has that effect on me. It’s not like it even happens all the time, with every single genre story. I’m not one of those people who wouldn’t entertain the thought of a sword or a dragons unless they came bundled up with some HBO nudity or Chris Pine doing his best Guardians of the Galaxy impression.
Sometimes, the allergy can come through the style of the prose. If you can feel someone following a painting by numbers approach to building a bigger story, then I normally recoil from it. If a first book features people saying things like ‘a war is coming’ or ‘something is coming’, I have roughly the same reaction. Other times, however, genre can feel like an incredibly comfy and welcoming chair. If the planets are in alignment, if I’m in the right frame of mind, and if the story doesn’t feel in any way like a photocopy of something grander and older and perhaps a little dustier, then I’m in.
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