Well, Laurell K. Hamilton has done it again. She’s written a pretty decent police procedural and then tacked on about 300 pages of relationship angst. Yes, that’s right, it’s time for me to review Crimson Death, the latest Anita Blake novel.
Is the act of writing a book where you subvert genre tropes itself a trope? Because that seems to be happening a lot lately, in both short fiction and longer works.
I guess a lot of authors are doing it because it works, and because it can be funny. But there’s a lot to be said for putting your own spin on the tropes themselves — not quite subverting them, but being aware of their power and using them for good, instead of evil. That’s what author KT Katzmann has done in his debut novel, Murder with Monsters.