Thanks to that Cthulhu guy and his buddies, we’ve got a wealth of horror books from the last century set in the 1920s and ’30s. Just as with fantasy horror above, none of what I’m about to say should be taken to mean that historical horror isn’t already an established genre blend. Prop up our nightstands with cozy everything, because it looks like we’re in for a bumpy ride. Let me see your romances without the third-act breakup - looking at you, Morning Glory Milking Farm and The Duke Who Didn’t! And yes, give me cozy horror, because We Have Always Lived in the Castle walked so The Undead Truth of Us could run. Bring on the cozy fantasy, à la Legends & Lattes and Witchmark. So give us more cozy sci-fi books like A Psalm for the Wild-Built and The Tea Master and the Detective. Now, they’re finally starting to get the attention they deserve.

Cozies have long been a quiet staple of both genre - Howl’s Moving Castle - and literary - Tales of the City - fiction. It’s no surprise, then, that we’ve seen cozies appear in genres beyond the usual mystery recently. Either they read horror novels to prove they can survive the Truly Awful Things, or they turn to feel-good books to cushion themselves against a terribly sharp and unforgiving world. When the news feed looks something like Truly Awful Thing following Truly Awful Thing, readers tend to turn in one of two directions. It still is, but that hasn’t stopped the discourse from popping up on Twitter now and again.īut what about genres that are supposedly polar opposites? Can you really blend sci-fi and fantasy, or romance and horror? What would a cozy horror novel even look like? During that time, we just accepted that books could be both literary and genre, and that was okay. So many so-called high-brow speculative titles came out in the 2010s that we stopped talking about the difference between genre and literary fiction for a little while. The thing I love about a well-done genre blend is how malleable it proves the borders of our literary genres to be.

I’ve picked out seven to talk about here, but trust me - there are as many possibilities as you can imagine, waiting for someone to write them. There are so many overlooked genre blends we need more of on our shelves and nightstands. Genre-blending is a time-honored tradition, but we often see the same few blends - the paranormal romance, the sci-fi horror, the historical mystery - regurgitated again and again for years at a time.

Ice Planet Barbarians by Ruby Dixon