Mythic, magical, realism, horror, urban, fantasy, scifi…?

Today I'm delighted to welcome author Michael Williams to my blog. He's touring the internet with a fascinating quartet of books, but which shelf will you find them on? Michael has generously agreed to help me figure out the shelf, and understand how all those "genres" of my favorite books fit together. Is it Mythic, magical, realism, horror, urban, fantasy, scifi... or what? So, over to you Michael...

All kinds of genres

It seems to be the fate of academics to explain jokes and create categories.

You asked an interesting question, though: Mythic, magical, realism, horror, urban, fantasy, scifi…how do they all fit together? I’ll try a version of an answer, though it’s incomplete and a little indirect.

I guess it comes down to the places where these definitions are needed or convenient. American booksellers like the categories—all kinds of genres—as a device for marketing, and academics like them to help focus students on the qualities of non-realist fiction, to clarify its nature and how it contributes to our culture.

That being said, I’m not so sure that writers observe the rules. Most writers I know bend and break genre in practice, then scramble once the piece is done to characterize it for audience and marketers. You hear things like, “It’s an urban fantasy/romance/procedural mystery in a post-apocalyptic dystopia,” which probably leaves you with more wrong impressions than if the writer simply said, “It’s a novel and I hope it’s a good one,” letting you read a little into it and decide for yourself.

That being said, I can play the academic and speak a little to several of the genres you asked about. A prominent scholar in the aesthetics of contemporary literature, Kathryn Hume, speaks of speculative fiction in terms of its “departure from consensus reality,” and I’ve always liked that description as a starting point. It leads to the more predictable and the oldest of the distinctions booksellers and academics make when it comes to speculative fiction: scifi departs from consensus reality in ways that just might be physically possible, while fantasy’s departure goes to places of emotional and metaphorical truths, rather than scientifically feasible. In light of this simple (and maybe simplistic) distinction, urban fantasy and horror fall into place readily: both are fantasy characterized by setting. Horror’s intent to frighten is usually defined by events the story recounts, but I see its place as more atmospheric—at least that’s how I’ve used it in my writing, though I know that other writers lean on description of action. And urban fantasy used to mean something a little different than it seems to now: gone are the days when the form was distinctly urban, the Emma Bull/Charles de Lint/John Crowley school of stories having given way to something more akin to romance with a bit of supernatural coloring (which is OK if you want to write or read it, but isn’t the urban fantasy I remember and like).

Magical realism to me is a form of storytelling where the fantastic and consensus reality exist side by side—paralleled or commingled, it doesn’t matter, because the trick is to value both the fantastic and the realistic equally, to give neither priority.

And then there is mythical realism. I don’t think I was first to use the term, but it came to me with that kind of discovery that feels like remembrance or recognition: that it had been there all along, waiting for me to notice. I’ve always liked the stories that feel like myth: Hermann Hesse’s and Garcia Marquez’s and (more “realistically”) Robertson Davies’ and Umberto Eco’s novels; Angela Carter’s and Julio Cortazar’s short stories, and the films of Guillermo del Toro and Jean Cocteau. It’s the stuff I like reading and watching the most—a kind of magical realism that feels and unfolds like myth, a fictional world with a modern (or reasonably modern) setting, infused with that kind of fantasy that feels primal, inherited rather than invented, brushing against communal and collective and profoundly primal issues. It’s mythical realism that I want to and try to write, the idea being paying attention to the old stories that still lurk near the back of our newer ones, that rise to the surface if the writer is lucky and the reader is looking at the tale just right.

It’s these stories that remind us how there is meaning and wonder in the world, and how it’s been there all along, if you simply take the opportunity to notice.

Wow! Thank you Michael. You didn't just answer my question - you enticed me to want more! I hope you might have enticed readers to want more too.

About the author: Over the past 25 years, Michael Williams has written a number of strange novels, from the early “Weasel’s Luck” and “Galen Beknighted” in the best-selling DRAGONLANCE series to the more recent lyrical and experimental “Arcady”, singled out for praise by Locus and Asimov’s magazines.

Williams’ highly anticipated City Quartet was completed by the publication of Tattered Men in October 2019. The four volumes may be read in any order–four stories that intertwine, centered in the same city, where minor characters in one novel become central in another:

“Vine: An Urban Legend” is the story of an amateur stage production In Louisville’s Central Park, gone darkly and divinely wrong.

“Dominic’s Ghosts” takes up the story of a son in search of his father in the midst of a murky conspiracy involving a suspicious scholar, a Himalayan legend, and subliminal clues from a silent film festival.

“Tattered Men” is the account of a disheveled biographer, writing the life story of a homeless man who may have been more than he ever seemed.

And “Trajan’s Arch” is a coming-of-age story replete with ghosts, a testimony to hauntings both natural and supernatural.

Williams was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and spent much of his childhood in the south central part of the state, the red-dirt gothic home of Appalachian foothills and stories of Confederate guerrillas. Through good luck and a roundabout journey, he made his way through New England, New York, Wisconsin, Britain and Ireland, and has ended up less than thirty miles from where he began. He has a Ph.D. in Humanities, and teaches at the University of Louisville, where he focuses on the Modern Fantastic in fiction and film. He is married and has two grown sons.

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And About the books...

Book Synopsis for Dominic’s Ghosts: Dominic’s Ghosts is a mythic novel set in the contemporary Midwest. Returning to the hometown of his missing father on a search for his own origins, Dominic Rackett is swept up in a murky conspiracy involving a suspicious scholar, a Himalayan legend, and subliminal clues from a silent film festival. As those around him fall prey to rising fear and shrill fanaticism, he follows the branching trails of cinema monsters and figures from a very real past, as phantoms invade the streets of his once-familiar city and one of them, glimpsed in distorted shadows of alleys and urban parks, begins to look uncannily familiar.

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Synopsis of Vine – An Urban Legend: Amateur theatre director Stephen Thorne plots a sensational production of a Greek tragedy in order to ruffle feathers in the small city where he lives. Accompanied by an eccentric and fly-by-night cast and crew, he prepares for opening night, unaware that as he unleashes the play, he has drawn the attention of ancient and powerful forces.

Michael Williams’ VINE: AN URBAN LEGEND weds Greek Tragedy and urban legend with dangerous intoxication, as the drama rushes to its dark and inevitable conclusion.

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Synopsis of Trajan’s Arch: Gabriel Rackett stands at the threshold of middle age. He lives north of Chicago and teaches at a small community college. He has written one novel and has no prospects of writing another, his powers stagnated by drink and loss. Into his possession comes a manuscript, written by a childhood friend and neighbor, which ignites his memory and takes him back to his mysterious mentor and the ghosts that haunted his own coming of age. Now, at the ebb of his resources, Gabriel returns to his old haunts through a series of fantastic stories spilling dangerously off the page–tales that will preoccupy and pursue him back to their dark and secret sources.

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Synopsis of Tattered Men: When a body washes ashore downstream from the city, the discovery saddens the small neighborhood south of Broadway. A homeless man, T. Tommy Briscoe, whose life had intertwined with a bookstore, a bar, and the city’s outdoor theater had touched many lives at an angle. One was that of Mickey Walsh, a fly-by-night academic and historian, who becomes fascinated with the circumstances surrounding the drowning.

From the beginning there seems to be foul play regarding Briscoe’s death, and, goaded on by his own curiosity and the urging of two old friends, Walsh begins to examine the case when the police give it up. His journey will take him into the long biography of a man who might have turned out otherwise and glorious, but instead fell into and through the underside of history, finding harsh magic and an even harsher world. Despite the story of Tommy’s sad and shortened life, Walsh begins to discover curious patterns, ancient and mythic, in its events—patterns that lead him to secrets surrounding the life and death of Tommy Briscoe and reveal his own mysteries in the searching.

Tattered Men is one of the novels of the City Quartet, an interrelated group of novels that can be read in any order that also includes Dominic’s Ghosts, Trajan’s Arch, and Vine: An Urban Legend.

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Author Links:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Mythical-Realism-The-Michael-Williams-Page-128713900543978/

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Find out more: Follow the Tour!

4/29 Marian Allen, Author Lady https:/MarianAllen.com Review

4/29 The Literary Underworld http://www.literaryunderworld.com Guest Post

4/29 Armed With a Book http://www.armedwithabook.com Guest Post

4/30 The Book Junkie Reads . . . https://thebookjunkiereadspromos.blogspot.com/ Author Interview

5/1 MyLifeMyBooksMyEscape http://mylifemybooksmyescape.wordpress.com Author Interview

5/2 Joel Harris GoodReads.com Review

5/3 The Book Lover's Boudoir https://thebookloversboudoir.wordpress.com/ Review