Do Horror and Crime Go Together?

 Only a couple of decades ago, American crime author Bill Crider, writing in the Mystery Readers’ Journal, described cross-genre writing as “something it’s OK to do in the privacy of your own home, but you wouldn’t want the neighbors to know about it.” He meant it as a joke, acknowledging a prejudice that was already dying, but he was old enough to have lived through an era when straddling genres was a risky strategy—something that made it harder to market a writer’s work, and therefore justified leaving said writer in the desolate limbo of the slush pile.

Today, all genres are promiscuous, and none more so than the mystery thriller. Crider himself wrote a number of mysteries set in the old west, which is how we know he was joking with that comment. Elsewhere, historical mysteries (Roman, medieval, ancient Egyptian, Byzantine, Regency, Victorian et al.) have become an industry in themselves. Mysteries have happily swapped DNA with science fiction, horror, comedy, romance and (of course) literary fiction. And the Harry Potter novels, which rank very high among the bestselling fiction titles of all time, are mystery novels every bit as much as they are fantasies.

But some crossovers are an easier fit than others. There’s a good reason why historical mysteries have been so very successful and so very ubiquitous. The historical setting provides a whole range of real-world events to be used as enthralling backdrop. It allows writers to re-invent the role of detective, giving their protagonists a background in surgery, herbalism, psychology, the priesthood or the civil service that turns out to be unexpectedly useful in solving crimes. And by rolling back technology it makes room for mysteries that would be solved in a second if the detective had access to modern methods. So the historical detective very quickly became a genre staple. William of Baskerville led the charge, in Umberto Eco’s wonderful The Name of the Rose, but he was soon joined by Marcus Didius Falco, Judge Dee, Brother Cadfael and a small army of lesser luminaries.

In other cases, though, the genre crossover creates as many problems as it does opportunities. I’m thinking of horror and supernatural fiction, in particular. Having such a strong flavor and inflexible set of conventions of its own, horror isn’t known for playing well with other genres. The horror formula calls for last-act reversals, defeat snatched from the jaws of victory, where almost every other genre formula ends with the protagonists living some version of happily ever after. In fact, in horror, the very notion of a protagonist can become fluid, the baton passing from one character to another as their individual arcs are violently truncated.

And when horror is paired with mystery, it sometimes seems as though the two genre strands are pulling in precisely opposite directions.

For readers of mystery, a large part of the pleasure they derive from a story comes from the moment or moments when the mystery is explained and a solution presents itself. This means there’s an implicit bargain between writer and reader: the reader suspends disbelief and engages with the story, while the writer guarantees that an explanation will eventually be given, using information already made available and staying within the rules that have been established.

Horror and supernatural texts offer different pleasures, many of which absolutely depend on the reader not knowing for sure what’s happening or how it’s happening. Often, horror stories don’t stay within the rules because they’re careful not to establish any in the first place. Instead, they create a sense of the numinous and strange, the inexplicable and seemingly impossible. They can actually gain in dramatic power and emotional resonance by not defining their terms—as, say, in the movie A Quiet Place or Josh Malerman’s Bird Box, both of which outline a nightmarish situation without explaining it or telling the audience how it arose.

So how can a horror/mystery mash-up combine its ingredients in a satisfying way?

The first time I addressed that problem myself was back in 2005, when I wrote the first of the Felix Castor novels. Castor, an exorcist for hire in a London brim-full of ghosts and demons, often found himself called upon to investigate a crime, with the mystery elements sitting front and centre in the narrative. But at first, I kept the crime and supernatural components separate —as though they were the positive and negative wires in a circuit. The solution to the crime involved straightforward forensic science and logical inferences. The supernatural stuff was what dragged Castor into the mystery in the first place and complicated the steps he took to solve it.

Later on in the series, I became more confident in letting the two genre strands touch each other and merge. In the second book, the missing girl is quickly revealed to be a ghost. It’s the ghost that has apparently been kidnapped, taken from her parents’ house which she had been haunting. In the third book, both the mystery and its eventual solution involve reincarnation, and in the fourth a routine murder leads Castor to investigate the name and nature of a demon haunting a London housing estate.

I was aware that I was treading a fine line with these stories. What was important, I think, was to set up and resolve each of the story’s questions and conundrums in the same key. If your mystery rests on a physical impossibility, then you don’t invoke magic to make it possible. You shift perspective to reveal the mistaken assumption, inviting the response “oh, yes, of course!” What was baffling becomes obvious, but only in retrospect.

And conversely, if you’re playing on a supernatural theme, you keep the reveal within the same domain. It’s not a logical explanation that’s required but a connection between the story’s moving parts that allows the reader to reinterpret them and understand them in a new way. In The Loney, for example, the narrator is faced with a series of sinister events, including inexplicable physical changes in some of the people he encounters. The novel allows us, through the skillful use of point of view, to glimpse the connection between these things—the solution space—without defining the nature or rules that underpin it. An explicit definition would be banal, and would undercut the story’s power.

In my latest novel, Someone Like Me, the protagonist (Liz) experiences a kind of possession. In the course of being physically attacked by her ex-husband, she is suddenly taken over by what feels to her like an outside force—an alternate self that has the strength and willpower to resist and fight back. The intervention saves her life, but terrifies her. She sets out to try to understand what it was that happened to her and what that other self might be.

There’s nothing in this situation to indicate what genre territory we’re in. If Someone Like Me is a psychological thriller, then the answer will have a rational explanation drawn from the domain of mental health. Liz’s experience will turn out to be an extreme response to extreme stress. If the story is a supernatural one, then the answer will probably invoke demons or other entities that can override human will and turn people into puppets.

In fact, though, it isn’t either of those things. The mystery resolves in a different key entirely—a more satisfying one, I think, that’s fair both to the reader and to the genre foundations on which the novel rests.

But I’m not saying what genre it belongs to. If you decide to read it, you’ll find that out for yourself.