Genre Mashups: A horrifying history

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. This month, as you know if you stopped by last week (which I’m sure you did!), we’re talking about genre. We’re looking at some genre pairs that we don’t often or always see together, and discussing how we can do a mashup with them, to get our creative juices flowing and teach ourselves a little more on how to write outside the box.

Last week, we talked about mashing fantasy and mystery together, and paired historical with science fiction—and I’ve personally been having a lot of fun with the writing prompts I came up with. I hope you have been, too!

Today, let’s talk something that’s probably a little more common, but one that I want to take a different spin on.

Genre Mashups: A horrifying history

We’re talking horror, and we’re talking historical fiction. Not genres I generally dabble with, but ones that I do read from time to time, and that I think are really a lot of fun to play with, when it comes to writing.

Let’s define, shall we?

Historical fiction is just that: it’s fiction that takes place in the past, often focusing on a specific event, person, or place in the past and using it to form a story about an (often unlikely) hero. I’m not sure why historical fiction leans toward unlikely heroes, but from what I’ve read of this genre, it does. And it is, really, a category. Because historical fiction is just fiction that takes place within a specific timeline, in the past—and that’s it. It’s a genre that’s happy to include other genres, because history is more of a category, and other genres (like mystery, or even horror) are slightly more specific as a genre.

Horror, on the other hand, is what you might expect—though I find that it often crosses lines with thrillers, which I won’t be discussing in this series. Horror fiction leans toward exactly that: the horrifying. Sometimes it’s paranormal, sometimes it’s alien, sometimes it’s a serial killer… point is, in horror fiction, there are plenty of scares, lots of thrills, and often (but not always) a fair amount of gore. Unlike historical fiction, which I call a more category-based genre, horror is more thematic. It plays well with others because it’s all about a specific theme, which is why I think it’s one of the most fun genres to mashup.

So what are we waiting for? Let’s get mashing!

The thing I love about pairing these two is that there are so many millions of ways to go about doing it. We could focus on a serial killer from history (Jack the Ripper, anyone?), we could place our story among the horrors of war, or we could invent a story of our own, a horror of our own, and set it in a real-world historical place.

And that’s what I want you to do.

Pick your favorite time in history. I know you have one. So use that, because it’ll probably be a bit easier to write and you won’t have to do quite as much research before you can start writing. Take that setting, and put into it your worst nightmare. You know the one. That dream you used to have as a kid. Throw that into a story, and make your characters deal with it.

Bonus: I’ve actually heard of writers using this method to move past things that happened to them in their childhood, so you might even be doing yourself a favor by writing this one.

As to how the story ends? Well that’s up to you. Do your characters survive the horror? Do they come out on the other end, stronger than ever before? Or do they perish, not knowing what was really going on around them? Depending on your horror of choice, the answer could be anything.

Happy writing!

[love]

{Rani Divine}