Week Six: Building Base Knowledge (Genres)

Assignment 1

The genre site I chose to follow is Stop, You're Killing Me. Like Early Word, they have managed to streamline an enormous amount of information (over 47,000 titles) into an easy-to-navigate, organized site. They must be librarians. :-)

What I like about this site is that I can look at the award lists for "best of" for sub-genres of my favorite style of mystery books. I lean toward the Edgar Awards types, but I also enjoy the old-fashioned Agatha style books. I can see this being helpful as a readers advisory tool. There are also a slew of indexes featured on the left. The Historical Index could be very useful in hunting down old volumes for customers. "Do you remember a mystery series from..." As it goes back to the Classical era, it is very extensive!

Assignment 2

This chart is fun to explore. I think it needs a few more branches, but then I'd need a much larger screen!

Assignment 3

With some Googling, I found ScienceThrillers.com, "where thriller fans put their Geek on," which is a Science Thriller fan site. Reading some of the comments and reviews, I can see that the fans enjoy nonfiction and the subject of science, but when you combine that with a complex plot and authentic details in a fiction book, they get pretty stoked. 

On the site, I also found a pretty good formal definition of Science Thrillers, not to be confused with Science Fiction. First of all Science Thrillers can be fiction or nonfiction, and Science Fiction, by default is fiction. But here is the site's more complete definition: 

Story must be plot-driven, page-turning, with some (or a lot of) action The science should be largely grounded in scientific reality. If a scientific plot element is technically impossible, it must be plausible to an average reader.

One very popular Science Thriller author is Michael Crichton. They have a listing of all the 5-star books from the site, and Jurassic Park is one of them, and actually a book I have read. I'm not even familiar with the genre, but way back when, I was on vacation, and picked it up in a used book store and read it while on my trip. I really liked it, so I agree with their rating. Extinction by Mark Alpert and The Hot Zone by Richard Preston are two other well received Science Thrillers.

For my second subgenre, I chose Horror Zombies. I found a fan site for books on Zombie Hub.com. They are pretty straightforward on this site. It is basically a listing of "every zombie book every written" catalogued alphabetically and divided by fiction and nonfiction, and people are free to post their reviews. What makes a Zombie Horror book good is, if it scares you. How that is accomplished is open. Joyce Carol Oates has a book called Zombie, and it is very effective in scaring the reader, as her character was

so convincingly written through the voice of a killer, you will feel nervous while reading at how familiar, how human, he is. Part of how she achieves the effect is through sparing use of bizarre capitalization (e.g., "MOON" and "FRAGMENT") and crude drawings done with a felt-tip pen.

Sounds chilling, and they liked it! Popular Horror Zombie writers are Robert Kirkman and Brian Keene. 

And my third subgenre is Urban Fantasy. I found a fan site called Urban Fantasy Fans. It is displayed in my least favorite website graphics combo: dark background with light text. Hey, I guess they want to be dramatic! Skimming over this site, I am getting the impression these fans are voracious readers. These stories encompass much: exciting supernatural circumstances, complex plots, well-developed characters, and then some humor and romance for good measure. Kim Harrison, Linda Grimes, and Sherrilyn Kenyon are popular Urban Fantasy writers.

One mash-up of Historical Fiction and Horror Vampires is Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, a humorous account of Lincoln, a secret vampire hunter, who figured out that in order to eradicate slavery he had to kill every vampire in the country. Another is Deck Z: The Titanic, a story collaborating historical fiction, the fateful sinking of the Titanic, with a tale of horrific zombie anarchy.