By Daco S. Auffenorde
Today, the bestseller charts are filled with novels that blend genres, and thriller writers are paying attention. For example, novels blending fantasy and romance—romantasy—have become highly popular. Once, authors stayed in their lanes; now mysteries, thrillers, and suspense novels swerve across genre lines.
In the crime-fiction “family,” mystery, suspense, and thriller are siblings. Knowing which subgenre your story favors helps with pitching, shelving, and marketing, along with guiding readers to their next reading fix. But when those lines blur—say, a police procedural featuring ghosts—where does the book fit? Well-executed genre blending often feels fresh, unpredictable, and exciting, and the best blended books fit within multiple genres.
Genre blending is a bit like cooking. Throw in a few ingredients, take some out, and the dish is something altogether new. Take a classic pesto sauce. Pesto alla Genovese blends basil, pine nuts, Parmigiano-Reggiano and Pecorino, along with garlic and EVOO. It’s vivid green and herbaceous. If we swap almonds for pine nuts and fold in peeled cherry tomatoes, we get Pesto alla Trapaneses, a sunset-orange dish that tastes sweet-acidic and slightly fruity.
Now, consider HBO/Max’s True Detective: Night Country and my novel The Medici Curse. Both start as crime tales—one procedural, one suspense—then veer into the Gothic and supernatural. A successful blend of Gothic and supernatural “ingredients” in these works relies on psychological ambiguity, eerie settings, and symbolic objects. Guilt, fear, and instability deepen the character profiles. Physical setting, often depicted as crumbling structures, abandoned buildings, foreboding mansions, becomes a character. Hidden rooms and secret passageways heighten dread. In Medici, the ancestral estate gleams on the surface but festers decrepit underneath; in Night, the endless Arctic night breeds fear and uncertainty. Without these added flavors, we lose the Gothic-supernatural feel.
A striking characteristic of each work is the discovery of caves. Night uses ice caves; Medici subterranean ones. Both feel otherworldly, reflecting the main characters’ unresolved internal conflicts. Resolution demands that the characters must venture into caves to confront demons, real or imagined. The caves represent the psychological struggle buried inside them. Anna must confront her mother’s death in Medici; Liz Danvers grapples with her son’s loss in Night.
Symbolic objects further deepen suspense: strange toys, unsettling sounds, cursed heirlooms (the Medici Falchion necklace), mysterious carvings (spirals in Night). Animals and plants carry dark meanings—a one-eyed polar bear of Night, a suicidal crow in Medici. Haunted portraits, cracked windows, ghostly figures, and chilling dreams blur reality.
Whether the supernatural is explicit or suggestive, adding such an element in a thriller taps into the protagonists’ unresolved grief and self-doubt. Meanwhile, the reader asks: what is real, and what is imagined? Successfully spiking supernatural and Gothic with crime fiction means creating a dark atmosphere without sacrificing thriller pace, layering mystery by challenging reality, seeding doubt with unreliable narrators, mirroring external fears with inner turmoil, delivering an ending that satisfies every genre strand, and using prologues, epilogues, flashbacks, and frightening dreams.
Part One of this article noted how years ago, my employer, a Circuit Court judge, said I looked like Jodie Foster. In hindsight, I’d like to think there was more than a physical resemblance. Perhaps the judge foresaw my love of crime fiction and Gothic novels, a love that would lead me years later to write The Medici Curse and enjoy watching the hit series True Detective: Night Country, in which Ms. Foster gave a superb performance.
