Cozy horror, romantasy, viral BookToks. Publishing trends might be hard to keep up with, but one I don’t think will go away anytime soon is the way genre isn’t staying in its convenient pigeonholes. We’re seeing mystery bleed into literary, fantasy meeting detective story and horror alongside humor.
I’m a bookseller at Roundabout Books in Northwest Crossing and a genre reader. I love fantasy, science fiction, romance, mystery and thrillers. Give me magic or murder and I’m happy. Give me both?! I’m your girl.
Genre fiction gets a bad rap as not serious. Sometimes true, but amongst the dross is some incredibly sophisticated and well-crafted work. Becky Chambers is quietly solving all our problems with breathtaking insight about humanity in her “Monk and Robot” science fiction series. Richard Osman’s “The Thursday Murder Club” mysteries go down easy, but their exploration of end-of-life themes and human relationships is at times laugh-out-loud funny and sob-into-your-pillow poignant.
Aren’t we all just looking for a great story in the end? Who cares how it’s marketed, which bookshelf we find it on at the bookshop? Genres are just guideposts to find what we like. Kudos to authors brave enough to break the category cages and publishers willing to market books that don’t fit perfectly into a bookstore layout. Here are a few I’d recommend.
A recent favorite and Roundabout bestseller is “Ninth House” by Leigh Bardugo: dark academia meets contemporary and urban fantasy meets murder mystery. Stephen King called it “the best fantasy novel I’ve read in years.” Set at Yale, Bardugo casts the university’s real-life secret societies as strongholds of arcane magic for the blue-blooded elite. (Bardugo herself was a member of Wolf’s Head as a Yale undergrad). Tasked with overseeing the societies’ occult activities, underprivileged but paranormally gifted Yale freshman, Alex Stern, gets more than she bargained for when a campus murder evidences supernatural influence. There are gory and gritty scenes fit for horror and an intriguing, magical mystery to unravel, but at its heart, this book is a dark academic fantasy — and it’s delicious.
Prolific author T. Kingfisher loves to play with genre, and her horror fairy tale “A Sorceress Comes to Call” is my favorite. Inspired by Grimm’s “The Goose Girl,” Kingfisher takes the fairy tale elements of a ruthless, magic-wielding mother, a misused and precocious teenager and a clever middle-aged heroine and blends them with dark humor and folk horror. Cue the undead headless horse that terrorizes the protagonists. Fairy tales already tend toward the horrific (this is where we get the word “grim,” after all), but this tale is cleverly crafted for modern readers.
For something lighter, I heartily recommend the “Emily Wilde” series by Heather Fawcett. It combines romance and fantasy with a historical setting and cozy aesthetic. Cozy originated as a mystery subgenre to denote less-violent tales, often set in a cozy English village. It’s trended recently in romance, fantasy/sci-fi and even horror, with aesthetic themes of found family, an emphasis on everyday moments and (generally but not always) low stakes. “Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries” is set in turn-of-the-20th-century Norway with a Cambridge scholar of the fae (the dangerous kind, who makes humans dance until they die) doing field work. Emily coolly handles fae perils with the courage of a monster hunter and the academic detachment of an intellectual. The romantic plot with her charming foil and (perhaps secretly High Fae?) colleague, Wendell Bambleby, develops more fully in books two and three, and the novels are at turns adventurous, comforting, funny and thrilling.
This year’s A Novel Idea choice, “Murder by Degrees” by Ritu Mukerji, is as much an atmospheric historical novel about 19th-century women in medicine as a well-crafted whodunnit.
And there are so many other excellent genre benders on our shelves at Roundabout: the literary fantasy genius of “The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue;” the classic manor house mystery with a sci-fi premise of “The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle;” the classical voice à la Jane Austen meets magical rivalry of “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell;” the missing person mystery meets serial killer thriller meets literary love story of “All the Colors of the Dark.” These books can be found at Roundabout anywhere from fantasy/sci-fi to mystery/thriller to fiction.
Next time you’re in, consider challenging yourself to check out a section you don’t usually browse. Ask a bookseller to help you select something that bridges your typical read. Getting out of our taste silos and exposing ourselves to something new might be surprising, enriching or just entertaining. And, ultimately, isn’t that the whole point of reading?
—Joanna (Joey) Roddy has been a bookseller at Roundabout Books for three years. She writes fantasy novels, narrates audiobooks and generally lives and breathes books. Come visit her sometime for a fantasy or mystery recommendation.
This article appears in The Source Weekly March 27, 2025.
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