The stories I like the best are the ones that surprise you. What you think is a high fantasy takes a hard turn into sci-fi or—more exciting—contemporary. Or a book that starts as contemporary but turns very willingly into demonic possession. They jump genres, you could say. And they’re honestly my favorite. They help remind me that not every story fits so neatly in a box, and nothing ever should (except for maybe pet spiders). Stories are held by the walls you make for them.
So why stick to the rules?
A lot of my recs are portal fantasies, you’ll find. I have a theory that when you add a portal, you give yourself free reign to do absolutely anything. Want to write a YA rom-com where the heroine is the descendant of a priestess who lived in her family’s shrine? And you want to add a magical well and time-traveling—but you want to also add demons? Well, friends, I’ve got good and bad news. The good news is that you can read that right now! The bad news is that someone already beat you to it.
Here are a few of my favorite genre-jumping masterpieces.
First up is The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune. When you first meet this story, you think it’s about a 40-year-old caseworker charged with investigating an orphanage, but this case turns out to be a little different than all of the others. While the story is soft and warm, like a hug from your favorite friend in a post-COVID19 world, it also tackles the weighty subjects of home and acceptance and, above all, the fear of strangers, and the labels we put on them before we ever meet them. It’s both a contemporary look at a quiet and small corporate life and an unexpected high fantasy full of firebirds, slime monsters, and the Antichrist. The strangest thing yet? By the end, it leaves you satisfied and happy and whole.
Much like The House in the Cerulean Sea, Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones is a masterclass in balancing contemporary struggles in a fantastical world. It’s both a portal fantasy within the country Ingary, but also a portal fantasy into our world as well. When the Witch of the Waste curses Sophie Hatter as an 80-year-old woman, she must go undercover as the cleaning lady in a mysterious wizard’s moving castle to break it. But what you think is a simple high fantasy jumps—quite unexpectedly—into a contemporary family drama that plays out both in the magical moving castle and also Howl’s home country of Wales. Real-world Wales. Howl is Welsh, you see. And a good-for-nothing graduate student at that. Howl’s Moving Castle is a portal fantasy, a domestic family drama, and a regency rom-com rolled into one—and who doesn’t want to read that?
But if domestic family struggles aren’t your style, may I recommend Good Omens? Though I love the book, written by Neil Gaiman and the late Terry Pratchett, I think Amazon’s adaptation somehow improves upon the original narration. While Crowley and Aziraphale dance around each other in the book, in the series they downright make googly eyes toward each other. What begins as a supernatural adventure full of demons and angels morphs almost seamlessly into a contemporary opposites-attract workplace rom-com with high fantasy stakes, where two business rivals end up realizing that the corporations they’re working for are corrupt, and turn in their two-weeks notices as dramatically as possible. (Can you tell I have a thing for workplace AUs?)
Remember when I mentioned a YA heroine who falls down a well? Well. Do I have the rec for you. Rumiko Takahashi’s manga Inuyasha and its anime adaption are everything I could ever want from a quasi-historical, folkloric masterpiece. Inuyasha is about a young woman from present-day Tokyo who falls down a well in her family’s shrine, and ends up in feudal Japan where she frees a half-demon her ancestor cursed to sleep for eternity. And thus begins the story of Inuyasha. It has everything: a curse! Magic! A half-dog demon! A love triangle! The heroine doing trig homework while traveling across feudal Japan! It’s zany and heartfelt. Honestly I’ve been chasing the high that I got from episode 13 of the anime for over ten years.
I’ll let you know when I catch it.
My last rec is a weird one, but since I’m screaming about cross-species lovers and moving houses and the Antichrist, I’m not going to waste my shot. If you’re a gamer like me, and you like fun gameplay, cool storylines, diverse and interesting characters, and beautiful illustrations—oh, and food! Lots of food!—then you have to play Trinket Studio’s Battle Chef Brigade. I stumbled upon it a few years ago and I didn’t really get what it was about—but the second I started playing it, I fell in love. You play as Mina, a young woman raised in her family’s Chinese-inspired restaurant, who wants to become one of the greatest Battle Chefs in the kingdom. If you’re looking for a Dungeons & Dragons campaign with a side-scrolling puzzle element and a lot of cool food, then you cannot miss this game. Both the solo campaign and the multiplayer element are fun—but be warned, if you kill the dragon and take the dragon heart when I’m clearly trying to make dragon heart chorizo… our friendship will be over.
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Now I kinda feel like revisiting all these stories again. How soon is too soon to reread The House in the Cerulean Sea? …Asking for a friend.
What are some of your favorite genre-jumping masterpieces?
Originally published in July 2020.
Ashley Poston is the author of the Once Upon a Con series (Quirk Books), Heart of Iron, and Soul of Stars (HarperCollins). Her fangirl heart has taken her everywhere from the houses of Hollywood screenwriters to the stages of music festivals to geeked-out conventions (in cosplay, of course). When she’s not inventing new recipes with peanut butter, having passionate dance-offs with her cat, or geeking out all over the internet, she writes books. She lives in small-town South Carolina, where you can see the stars impossibly well.
Rosemary Kirstein’s Steerswoman series. Seems like an intriguing storyline in a world that could be described as fantasy and then develops into something else entirely.
Highly recommended (with the proviso that it’s unfinished).
The Man from Primrose Lane by James Renner was one where I thought I was reading one type of story and it turned into something completely different and was great.
Declare by Tim Powers might seem like a spy novel on the surface, but some of the entities involved aren’t exactly human…
Stephen KIng’s Dark Tower series starts in weird-western country before riding out across a metafictional multiverse.
Jonathan Sim’s Magnus Archives podcast drama opens as a horror anthology series, but (to the misfortune of the poor framing characters) the weird little archived statements start joining up jigsaw-wise…
Ted Chiang’s short stories. Science fiction? Kind-of-maybe-sometimes. Masterpieces? Yeah. Yeah. Stories of Your Life and Others just about knocked me down.
I haven’t reread it since about the beginning of 2003, but as I recall, I also liked Robert J. Sawyer’s Illegal Alien, which is a murder mystery with an extraterrestrial as the defendant.
N. K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season reads very much like a secondary world fantasy, but the sequels go in a different direction.
Most of China Melville’s novels.
Mary Gentle’s Ash: A Secret History. Ash was raised among mercenary camp followers in 15th century Europe, now a commander she hears a Voice that helps her fight. Hired by the Duke of Burgundy to fight Carthiginian soldiers in Italy, Ash learns she is not the only one hears the Voice and that it comes from among pyramids in Carthage where the sun no longer shines. There’s also a framing story of an academic reading Ash’s story in our time.
Ash is an alternate history and a secret history, and it’s fantasy elements are also technological. It’s a huge and complicated book (it was published as 4 books in the US) and it is absolutely worth the read.
I vote for The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell. It’s several genres jumping back and forth, and it’s terrific.
I had never thought about portal fantasy in the way you described above:
I really like that.
An outlier here would be Charles Stross’s Merchant Princes books. They start off reading more like fantasy, but gradually shift more towards scifi.
Really, nothing about the writing really changes, except that explanations for things are given, but somehow the style changes. Basically, if you’re trying to define what the difference is between fantasy and scifi, these books muddy the waters by being both.
Apparently it was all down to a contract issue where Charlie couldn’t publish scifi in the US (or something), so wrote fantasy instead. That all got sorted, and the follow up trilogy, Empire Games, definitely leans more scifi.
As far as straightforward genre hopping goes, David Hutchinson’s Fractured Europe series starts out as a sort of near-future secret-agent style romp, and swiftly goes in completely different directions you won’t expect.
There’s also Steven Brust’s Dragaeran books, where he deliberate writes some books in the series as different genres, purely for the fun of it I think. Most notably The Khaavren Romances are a pastiche of Alexandre Dumas’s d’Artagnan Romances.
Regardless of the Rukbat prologue, the Pern series (isn’t it really more of a franchise now? ) starts out very much as a Conan with psychic dragons entry in Dragonriders and slowly morphs into straight sci fi. Same with Darkover.
I happily see the next Merchant Princes book written is due out late September.
Even Brust’s Draegaerans are the result of a science project. Sorcery is just psychic power. Witchcraft might be but seems more like magic.
Jon Courtney Grimwood, pashazade (2005)
salman Rushdie, midnight’s children
I’ll always remember the book in the Pern series (spoilers for Pern):
where the protagonists discover the centuries-old wreckage of a colony ship, and you realize that while you thought you had been reading a straight-up Fantasy series, you discover that the history of the world is full of spaceships, genetic engineering, and lots of other sci-fi standbys.
Somewhere in Tepper’s three True Game trilogies, we find out that (as in Dragaera) there is a sciency/colonist explanation for the ~fantastic powers; it comes more as a plausible outcome than a revelation, since the books start with a very mechanical approach to the ~magic.
Similarly, one of Modesitt’s few short stories gives us a space-colonist background to Recluce; I haven’t read enough of the books to know whether this was tossed off or actually used later.
Bradley’s early Darkover books posit what looks like magic in a world where Terran spaceships are on the fringes. This is on the border of the borderline, since they came out back when psi powers generally were considered part of SF rather than fantasy, but the powers are handled by the users as more like magic than science.
The early Melissa Scott novel Five Twelfths of Heaven is one of the better attempts at dealing with magic in a massively technical way. Not great, but not as tangled in nuts-and-bolts as Rick Cook or Lyndon Hardy, and a true genre-bender as the magic is used to power spaceships: the title is a property of a good one — IIRC the closer to heaven they get, the faster they can go.
I’ll throw in a vote for Charlie Stross’s Laundry books, particularly the early ones, which are basically Lovecraft meets LeCarre with a large scoop of Dilbert mixed in.
Sharon Shinn’s Samaria trilogy is this (although sadly the blurb back of the first book actually spoils it!) – it starts out as a world with angels and tribes and fantasy trappings and lots of focus on singing/music as the angels intercede to their god, but ends up being something else.
Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb series. Necromancers in space.
J.D. Jordan’s Calamity: Being an Account of Calamity Jane and Her Gunslinging Green Man. A young Calamity Jane travels the Old West with an alien.
Brin’s Practice Effect feels like magic until you hit the explanation midway through.
Tombstone (Emma Bull) is a detailed, dust-on-everything telling of the events leading to the “shootout at the OK Corral” in which a number of the characters having varying degrees of magical ability.