THERE WILL BE NO MORE LITERARY GHETTO: I was going to save this for when TPE gets around to doing the ALOTT5MA book club thing with World War Z (hint, hint), but since I just finished Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell a couple of weeks ago, I'll get to it right now: what is it that consigns a book to the genre-fiction ghetto?
I bought Jonathan Strange and Darkmans out of the General Fiction/Literature section (at B&N or Borders; I can't tell them apart other than that Borders still has better a better music section), but I picked up The Prestige and The Baroque Cycle in Sci-Fi/Fantasy. I got World War Z in Horror, but A Brief History of the Dead in General Fiction/Literature. Yiddish Policemen's Union and Casual Rex/Anonymous Rex: GenFic/Lit; L.A. Confidential/Black Dahlia: Mystery. A Good and Happy Child: GenFic/Lit; The Terror: Horror.
I can't see anything that justifies this weird classification. There's far more of the fantastic in Jonathan Strange than in Baroque Cycle. The Terror is more mythic than horror, and Good and Happy Child is the opposite. There are undercover dinosaurs in Casual Rex, for crying out loud. There isn't any legitimate stylistic basis for the distinction, I think (though one could argue the point with certain books). And yet one group gets to call itself highbrow; the other is stuck with the lowbrow tag (and often, but not always, the genre packaging, with the geeky graphics and the garish colors and the embarassing title font). Who makes these decisions, and why?
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